Santa and Jesus

[Pope George Ringo II]

25. I'd hate to try to sort out which religious group is the wackiest.

It's a crowded field, and qualitative measures get subjective in a hurry. But there's no denying that the size of a religion is almost certainly going to be a contributing factor in the sheer quantity of wackiness it produces.

Of course, there's also the Roy Moore and Mike Pence argument, that a larger religion has scope for damage through sheer numbers that a smaller sect committing suicide to hitch a ride on a comet will never manage. "Wacky" and "Wacky and dangerous to society as a whole" aren't the same thing. After all, voting for Roy Moore and Mike Pence was pretty wacky, but compared to the Hale-Bopp mass suicide? I'd hope we agree on which one is wackier, but it's not the one which I'd suggest poses the greatest threat to society as whole.

So, yes, the size of a religion does offer an explanation for how many genuinely wacky people it is associated with. I don't think that's necessarily a good thing, though. And it's still a good explanation for why the dominant religion, which does most of the silliness, gets most of the ridicule.