The news has reached us that Tom Cruise is being talked about as the new Christ figure of Scientology.
I'm not one of those people who thinks his being the new messiah of L Ron Hubbard's organisation gives us permission to start planning his crucifixion. Scientology may seem odd, but, when it comes to following and indoctrinating children into religious movements with bonkers rules and bizarre practices, most of us can hardly talk.
Anyway, there will always be Scientology-type "cults" championed by cheesy actors, just as there will always be pop stars with red strings around their wrists who declare themselves followers of Kabbalah.
These spiritual identities are just another part of life's off-the-wall tapestry, which sees people searching for something to believe in other than their jobs or their houses or owning lots and lots of shoes.
Over the years I've had brow-furrowing arguments about religious clubs from Protestantism to David Ickeism. I've mostly argued about Catholicism, though, given the country we're in. My family could quote my objections to the rituals of baptism, communion, confirmation and marriage back to me verbatim. They no longer even stifle their yawns, which is a bit rude.
In recent, mellower times, though, I've started to see the funny side of people's need to be part of an organised spiritual community, however superficially, with all the idiosyncrasies and, in my view, barminess these communities tend to involve. Browsing through theatre listings before a new-year trip to New York, a low-budget off-Broadway production caught my eye: A Very Merry Unauthorized Children's Scientology Pageant. After that, Chicago, Wicked and even Mary Poppins lost their appeal. We booked a couple of tickets and grabbed a cab to East 4th Street, where in one of the smallest theatres anywhere I had one of the biggest laughs of my life.
Starring primary-age children and telling the story of Hubbard's life, the pageant was a trip through one of the most popular religious phenomena of modern times, set to an electro-pop soundtrack. A deadpan angel wearing robes and rainbow socks repeatedly introduced Hubbard as a "teacher, author, explorer, atomic physicist, nautical engineer, choreographer, horticulturalist and father of Scientology". Another child's uncanny impression of Cruise was a highlight, as was a girl who played Kirstie Alley, who is a convert. Scientology, she said, helped her conquer drug addiction, "enabling me to star in the fine television series Fat Actress".
We left the theatre humming the theme tune, and, a few days later, walking down Broadway, we happily - it must have been fate - accepted a leaflet urging us to attend a 10-minute film about the Scientology code of Dianetics.
Having seen the satire, we felt it was only polite to give the reality a go. Off we popped to a Scientology centre around the corner, where a creepy young guy put us in a room where we watched a rubbish DVD without daring to look around, in case someone was waiting to kidnap us. (See what all this talk of sinister "cults" can do to you?)
The DVD was all about how blah basically everything bad that has ever happened to us blah can be electrically cleared using special blah blah auditing equipment and how blah stuff you hear during a life-threatening car accident can blah make you break up with your girlfriend years blah later. Then we were asked to fill in a questionnaire, but we just wanted to leg it, scared in the way people who'd never heard of Catholicism might be if they wandered into Mass during the water-into-wine bit.
So I'm unlikely to become a poster girl for Scientology, but I do think the recent widespread and accepted slagging of it can be explained by the fact that it makes people feel better about their own, more traditional faiths - or, indeed, non-faiths. Fair enough: founding a religion, as Hubbard did in the 1950s, on the belief that terrible things happened 75 million years ago, when an alien ruler called Xenu trapped dead souls, also known as thetans, in a volcano, isn't going to endear you to many. On the other hand, the notions of virgin birth, transubstantiation and some bloke in Rome being unable to put a moral foot wrong make me laugh just as much, if not more. Being longer established doesn't make it more credible.
But to each their own, I hear myself saying, although it's taken quite a bit of religion-related angst for me to feel so magnanimous. I've finally accepted that, for many people, the Greek god Georgios Kyriacos Panayiotou was right when he first spaketh, in the year nineteen hundred and eighty seven, the words "You got to have faith. Ah faith. Ah". Even I've got some, being a believer in Beatleism. (It's easy. All you need is love. And not the sentimental Hallmark kind, either.) roisiningle@irish-times.ie