On naming the religion I'm making


A critical issue I've now bumped up into for trying to form a new religion is coming up with a name for it. I think a name is pretty important, as it allows people to talk about it with others, say they are it, and for pragmatic purposes like having a search term on the internet.


The problem is that I find the ideology very hard to compress, because it has at least three faces: nature worship/community/technological skepticism, the marriage of these ideas with leftist political thought, and an atheistic philosophical basis for these things.


With two faces you can just smash two words together and get a name that is fully descriptive and immediately understandable! Like "anarcho-communism", or "electromechanical", or "ice cream". I feel like I can't use this descriptive naming convention, because a large amount of information is bound to be lost when using it. Mashing three words together would be nerd shit and so mustn't be done.


At the same time, I don't want it to sound hippy-dippy and annoying, nor do I want it to sound like the name of a hair-splitting offshoot of communist sectarianism, and thus also annoying. This rules out anything with 'commun-' or 'anarcho' in it, and rules out non-descriptive, vibes-based names like "Earthseed" (shoutouts to Octavia Butler).


Greek and latin words though are also out, because using them makes it sound like a white supremacist thing, and also nobody knows what the words mean so it's not evocative enough.


Most religions though are named after the founders, or named after the people who practice them! Buddhism and Christianity for the former, Judaism and Islam for the latter. Problem is, these only take on meaning for outsiders once the religion is widely known, so it'd be a bit of an uphill battle. I do think that this category of names is the best candidate though - it's just a matter of picking the right one.


And of course, growing it.



/gemlog/