The Priest

I should have been a priest. I have pretty much all of the characteristics that a person needs to head a local religious organization. I am competent with administration, I am good at leading small groups, I have an excellent speaking voice, I can expound for a long time on a practical or moral issue, I'm inclined towards mysticism, I speak in metaphor, I like to help people, I am good at keeping far away overseers happy, I can justify anything, I enter occasional dissociative states, I and a fluid liar, and I am prone to fits of passionate temper.

Unfortunately priest is a bit of a difficult career for me to enter. I don't think anyone pays priests the big bucks, but if you want to take home a salary as a priest it seems like the monotheists are the ones who pay. A stumbling block towards that end is that I'm in on the fact that there is no God. One might even regard this as a fair fatal flaw.

I'm not really sure it's all that bad. I'm sure history is full of priests who were essentially conmen, and I don't think I would be anything more than that. Still, there would be hoops to jump through, and I think they two biggest paying religions would be right out for me. Judaism is actually pretty careful about who they allow to convert, and Catholicism would not only require me to hide being an atheist, but hide that I was married with children as well. The United church is probably my best bet since I'm kind of Christian already, and they are probably a better philosophical fit for me, but I still think the climb from totally non-religious to yeah-you-can-be-a-priest would be a long one.

There are options for being a priest as an avocational interest, but right now I don't have a lot of spare time, and frankly if I am going to have to con people to get there then I feel like I need to get paid.

So that leaves me with cult leader. Cult leader seems like a really attractive career option, but I think it's awfully hard to get established. I do have a lot of zany ideas that might make me sexually attractive to confused and vulnerable people, so I'm probably pretty qualified, but having spent my life trying to avoid manipulating vulnerable people instead of practicing it, I don't know if I will have the edge I need over other would-be cult leaders.

I guess I tried to be a priest once, but my religion kind of fell flat even with the most receptive audience I could have hoped for. Maybe the first thing to do is to make a website to try to spread the word about my crazy thoughts. Maybe a podcast. I guess if you actually are very successful at podcasting and writing crazy things on the web then you don't even have to form a cult.

It seems like it's at least as good a bet as becoming a professional author.