The "product" being sold is a doctrinal basis for group cohesion, the same basic constitutive role that the following ideas play: "property is theft", "LOTR is the best book ever written", "transwomen are women", etc. (<- this is not a comment on the truth of these, only their social function).

These ideas constitute groups around them, forming a bedrock of a social belief system.

Ironically, this is exactly how conspiracies function: "we never landed on the moon".

This does not apply to people with material goals, rather than social(/epistemic) ones. The goal, "let's poison everyone with 5G" isn't an essentially meaningless doctrine ie., whose only impact is on belief, not on the world.

Goals to change the world, rather than to regulate belief, require actual self-awareness, coordination and a desire to realise that end-goal. In this case, i'd require >1mil+ people absurdly committed to poisoning everyone around them (and not least, to have some magical ability to induce a virus with a wifi signal).

I take issue with your "quite". Did you try to establish a new religion? Star Wars had some success on that, but even them - with all modern might of persuasion - didn't get billions - or tens of millions - of followers, and those who they did are arguably at least partially follow in jest.

You can't apply "religion" argument that easily.

> Did you try to establish a new religion?

L. Ron Hubbard. Church of Latter Day Saints. There have been major religions established in the last 2 centuries in the USA alone.

Those are not major enough, not billions. 2 centuries are longer than Moon controversy, though not by much.

Adding a new qualification of "not major enough" is a no true scotsman argument, which is not compelling. They are religions by any measure but your arbitrary goalposting.

>> people have been selling an invisible product since thousands of years (religion), so it is quite possible to get billions of people to lie to themselves and to others.

The "billions" qualification comes from your specific interpretation of this statement to mean a single religion. This is not the assertion. Nor is the specific count relevant to the point, as billions can be read to mean all relgions combined. Large groups of people can deceive each other and themselves. Full stop.

> They are religions by any measure but your arbitrary goalposting.

The argument was "people are believing in imaginary things, in billions and for centuries". For billions - or so - and for centuries - or so - arguments to apply, the religion ought to be major.

> The "billions" qualification comes from your specific interpretation of this statement to mean a single religion.

Oh, so now goalposting mean not a single example, but a combined group :) in comparison to one specific - and rather located in time and geography - government program.

Frankly, at this point I don't see much sense in more hairsplitting. Points were made, anyone can think for oneself from these.

I think OP is being reductive, but at the same time, people do make new religions. We usually call them cults. Christianity didn't get a billion followers overnight, it took literally 2000 years of proselytizing. Who knows, the scientologists of today might be the mainstream religion of tomorrow

Cults are cheap, they come and go. Religion - a true one, that's what counts. Cults we've had in the high school, nobody remembers them after a while.

Survivorship bias? Or am i just missing the joke here?

The point was that there are illusions which hold lots of people for long time. Religions are a good example. However to keep really lots of people for a really long time, religion should survive itself - and outcompete others, and that's not easy. So the argument "religion" shouldn't be brought every time a government is suspected in doing something... conspirological.

How do you define 'a true one' when it comes to religion? For most people the true religion is just whatever religion you grew up on.

And cults turn into religions all the time. There's a fine line between a cult and a religion, and that line is ownership of real estate.

Parent comment said nothing to gain from.

Pascal's wager (at least) would suggest some kind of logic to it

Pascal's wager never made sense to me. There are infinitely many possible belief systems. The odds of picking the right one are infinitely small.

Picking the wrong one may even come with greater loss than picking none of them, because praying to false gods may bring upon me the wrath of the true gods more so than simply keeping an open mind.