As a genuine and authorized Discordian Pope, as well as an ordained minister of the Church of the SubGenius, and an early evangelist for Pastafarianism, I would be remiss if I did not share this thought-provoking paper by Laurel Narizny:
Satirical and parody religions developed in accord with what Agehananda Bharati calls the “pizza effect.” The original pizza was a hot baked bread exported to America, embellished, and returned to Italy, where it became a national dish; similarly, the first
joke religions cobbled together numerous aspects of popular culture, occulture, and counterculture; synthesized them with postmodern ideas about religion; and are now subtly transforming religion in the United States. Joke religions are, in effect, a synthesis of and a vernacular reaction to both institutional religions, such as Christianity, and the more loosely defined “institutional” occult and counterculture groups, such as neo-paganism.David Chidester -— the only scholar so far, as noted above, to publish anything more than a passing mention of joke religions -— calls joke religions “authentic fakes.” They are authentic because they negotiate the politics of being human in relation to the divine, which is essentially how I have defined religion, but are also explicit parodies of religion—“simultaneously simulations and the real thing.”
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Many people consider joke religions “fakes” because of their use of startling, even offensive, humor. As we have seen, however, religious humor is a form of “deep play” that works to renegotiate ideas about tradition, space, identity, community, and the body,
and uses paradox to further one’s progress toward enlightenment.