Tech pundits don't exalt Mark Zuckerberg as the boy-god they once did, but one San Francisco follower of all things Zuckerbergian is looking for a few fellow disciples to help him create a new startup religion based on the CEO of Facebook.
Naturally, the call for clergy in the Church of Zuckerberg (not it's real name) came from that decidedly old school font of Internet weirdness Craiglist. The manifesto reads something like Paul's First Letter To The San Mateans, sprinkled liberally with video game references and The Matrix fan fiction:
The exact nature of Mark Zuckerberg in this religion is that he is the Avatar of Jehova, the creator of our universe. In this religion our universe is a simulated matrix world almost like a computer game and humans are all like computer game characters compared to God. The Biblical Jehova is the creator of this simulatrix and while the actual Jehova is a white guy with a big beard just like Michaelangelo painted him, he controls Mark Zuckerberg as his "Avatar" or "character" in our world like you might control a video game character in a video game you were playing.
Zuckerberg is the main god of this new religion, but there are many other sub-deities, such as: "the Goddess of Skill and Strategy" Sheryl Sandberg and Ashley Arenson, "who is this girl that Mark Zuckerberg had a crush on in high school." In this new Facebook-era mythology, Mary Magdalene gets conflated with Venus and just some girl you knew from high school.
The goal is to create a whole mythology, "similar to that of Ancient Greek mythology and Japanese anime" with stories that are classically epic in scale, but with the pace of a comic book. In this religion, Hogwarts stands in for Zuckerberg's prep school, where Jesus and the Muslim Imam Mahdi and the future CEO of Facebook all go to school together. Also, the lead singer of Arcade Fire is the Fifth Buddha.
Anyhow, the purpose of this religion (unlike most others) is not to make money, the anonymous Craigslist prophet explains. "Really though I'm just doing this for fun because I don't even know if something like this is possible to do on a big level or if it could be popular, so it's just something I am interested in doing and looking for people who would like to take part without worrying about whether it goes anywhere or not."