Religious Flowchart

I am not a religious guy.  I grew up Catholic and my late Mother worked for the Catholic Church.   However, I had some bad experience with this religion and the history of the church is bad…really bad.  No, my bad experience doesn’t involve a Priest.  I am a big fan of their buildings and I never miss a chance to see a nice cathedral when I tour a country controlled helped by the Catholic Church.

I am a structured guy.  I also like to understand the history of religions.  I began to think about the process someone may go through to choose a religion, if they didn’t already have one forced on them by their parents or culture.  A flowchart with a logical decision tree is the way a structured person could make a choice.  I began the process of developing the various decision points, and planned to create the flowchart to help all of the people in the world choosing a religion for the first time, or possibly changing their religion.  If it was successful in English, I would have it translated to a number of languages.  I am a structured guy and I want to be a helpful guy.

Religions are very diverse and there are many to choose from.  Religions help shape many of the people in the world, though I would argue they are not shaped in a beneficial way.  I began to list the various decisions someone would make as they tried to pick a religion:

1)      Do you want one God or many?

2)      Does the religion’s God send a prophet to Earth to mingle with humans?

3)      Are you allowed to see a picture of the prophet?

4)      Does the religion require that you die for it?

5)      If you have to die for it, does it involve explosives strapped to your body?

6)      Does the religion go door to door and obnoxiously try to make you join?

7)      Can you have multiple wives?

8)      Is gay sex allowed?

9)      Can you eat beef?

10)  Do the leaders of the church rape young boys and tell you that gay sex is not allowed?

11)  Does the church discriminate against women?

12)  Does the religion make you feel guilty?

13)  If you sin, can you buy your way back to the God’s favor?

14)  Are you required to give the church a lot of money that you can’t afford?

15)  If you decide five children are plenty, and begin to use contraceptives, will the church kick you out?

16)  If you pretend you’re crazy and believe in aliens, can you meet a religion’s movie stars?

17)  Do the movie stars of this religion have gay sex?

18)  If you draw a picture of the prophet, will you be killed?

19)  Is it true one religion’s prophet was actually a thief?

20)  Are thieves worse than rapists?

21)  If you draw a picture of a prophet having gay sex with another prophet, will you be killed?

My list goes on and on, and I knew I had to scale it back to fit into an easy to use flowchart, that is translatable to many languages.  I went to the internet to obtain a flowchart template and found out that someone already created the religious flowchart.