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To Flimflam God:
My first really important experience occurred when I realized
that I was completely ignorant, that none of the things I thought
I knew were really important in any cosmic sense. Indeed, all
my wonderful knowledge was relative, not absolute. It was all
based on a very iffy view of the universe. A premise, no more
or less, with an infinite number of other premises being possible.
My second, and even more distressing, important moment came with the realization that my ignorance was not likely to change barring some cosmic event or revelation. Other thoughts came to me. I began to realize how easy I was to flimflam when I thought I was knowledgeable and clever. That was followed by the realization of a sort-of law of the con-artist. Flimflam vulnerability is proportional to the victim's delusions of knowledge.
This, delusions of knowledge concept is based on a premise, nothing more, that any true knowledge resides only with God. If this is not true, then God should be the easiest to con of all. Could it be that this is what Jerry and Jimmy and Tammy think: That the Big Guy in the Sky is really rather easy to flimflam?
With that, I thought, why not start a church and see if I could con God? I contacted my good friend, Felonious A. Sault and invited his participation. He was not too keen on trying to trick the big guy, but he was willing to try to trick other people. He loves to con true believers anyway. So we began to plan.
Of course, I insisted that Felonious be the Religious Leader. He is clearly the better actor. This left the position of treasurer open and I offered to fill it. Did I mention that con men are just as easy to con as true believers. From there, our rather simple plan took shape.
We are planning to go out to Arizona, or some other desolate place and buy a large piece of useless real estate. Then we will get one of those small sloppy religious radio stations. Those are the ones which are always overflowing their sidebands and interfering with commercial stations. Apparently, the government is afraid to regulate them. Government regulators seem to have an abnormal fear of religious wrath.
After getting a radio station we will complete our public forum by putting up a website. Felonious already has some experience in this. Websites are great for conning people. There is no way by looking at a website of knowing who, or how much, is behind it. As I have said before. A very impressive website can be activated for a couple of hundred dollars for design and 50 bucks per month for server rent. That's pocket change for a real con man.
Once the preliminary work is done, we start our campaign. I start writing the sermons and create a history of the miraculous conversion, by revelation, of Felonious from heathen to the selected Messenger of God. Felonious will change his name to Prince of Luminance. He will preach and tell his story over the airwaves and over the website, over and over again.
In telling his story, he will continuously ask for small donations to build his chapel in the desert. He would set a goal of several millions of dollars for this magnificent shrine to the glory of God. If we discover that the money is not coming in fast enough, Felonious will go on a fast and vow to not eat until the goal is reached.
This is a tricky part, because Felonious has refused to stop eating for real. He is willing to pretend he is not eating. This means we will have to get someone who is very good with photograph to make it appear that Felonious is wasting away. That is just a detail which I'm sure we could handle.
With this plan, we expect to quickly reach a point where we could finance a major television effort. We would start creating infomercials to get converts to the church of the Prince of Luminance. What we will eventually do is to have a huge flock of true believers who will do almost anything Felonious tells them to. With this flock, we can sell them a new bible, which I will write, and all kinds of religious paraphernalia. By this time, the money will really be rolling in.
Right now, we are on hold. We are trying to save up enough
money to set up this con. This is very slow because Felonious
refuses to work and I am too old to do anything useful. Felonious
is bringing in some money by running simple, no cost, cons on
local greedy people. Later on, I'll tell you about some of them.
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