Revelation #1

We thought of presenting our Ten Commandments.  Or maybe our Ten Strongly Worded Suggestions.  Or even our Ten Habits of Highly Successful People.  But all that is so passe, so ephemeral.  So instead, we hereby launch our religion with:

THE TEN CONTRADICTIONS

1. If you call our religion violent, we will clobber you.
2. Our founder was gentle as a lamb, but we find brute force to be generally preferable as a tool of policy.
3. All science is bunk, unless we find a study which helps us make our point, in which case you should respect science's irrefutable objectivity.
4. Our religion is the unique, exclusive pathway to truth, but we're most comfortable hanging around with people from outside our religion who share our political views.
5. Our faith is the only reasonable faith, but given that most people are not reasonable we will need to suppress free speech.
6. The contradictions in the scriptures of other religions prove their falsehood, but the contradictions in our scriptures can easily be ascribed to paradox, nuance and complexity.
7. You can be confident that our gods will never fail to protect you, unless they choose not to.
8. Faith in our gods will give you new life and a powerful assurance of eternal security, but don't squander the therapy fund on a new car just yet.
9. We condemn all lapses on the part of newer religions that we were guilty of when we were their age.
10. Our scriptures must be taken as a serious and unyielding moral code, except for all that complaining about materialism.