6 Insane Cults (That Would Probably Be a Lot of Fun)

Politics, sex and religion are the three things you're not supposed to discuss in mixed company. Fortunately, if you're in a cult, odds are you get to discuss those topics as much as you want. In the right cults you probably get to discuss them while having group sex. If you're allowed to speak, that is.

Founded by a dude who appears to have stolen his clothes after a stint as an extra on Star Trek, the Raelians are one of the few cults that occasionally make the news down here on Earth.

Rael lets you know on his website that he's a Frenchman who used to be a cabaret singer and a race car driver, which realistically is slightly cooler than being a carpenter like Jesus or jolly fat man like Buddha. All of this was prior to meeting an alien named Yahweh, of course, who came to Rael to tell him about the origin of mankind as well as offering him the service of several futuristic sex robots.

Oh, hell yes. The Pope offers people holiday blessings and waves from behind bullet proof glass. Rael bangs sex robots from another galaxy. We're not saying one's cooler than the other, we're just saying sex robots are cooler than anything the Pope has probably even thought of doing.

www.rael.org

The movement is noted for such awesome things as claiming in 2002 to have cloned a human (which turned out to sort of being entirely untrue) and accusations of brainwashing via sex. Suavely balding leader Rael also has his own harem of women called the Order of Angels, who apparently exist just to bang the men and donate eggs to human cloning efforts.

Not content with all this amateur whoring, Rael also has an actual subgroup of real-life whores called Rael's Girls made up solely of woman who work in the sex industry. If this whole religion sounds like some insanely clever man's diabolical plan to wear pajamas all day and fuck really gullible women then, congratulations, you may qualify to enter the inner sanctum. Membership numbers indicate followers in the tens of thousands, most of whom were probably swayed in no way by the religion having its own skank squad.

The Cosmic People of Light Powers is a Czech cult that's more intense and has a better back story than the whole Matrix trilogy combined. The Cosmic People aren't your typical downer cult. You'll find no leaders with 100 wives who tell followers he must baptize them with his semen. But the Cosmic People do believe in an alien named Ashtar Sheran.

Ashtar has a fleet of 10 million spaceships that orbit the Earth. With that many spaceships, the odds of getting a primo suite when the time comes to leave Earth and head off for a picnic on Venus seem almost guaranteed. Score one for the true believers.

Membership numbers are a bit sketchy with the leader of the group claiming thousands to hundreds of thousands of sympathizers, while "government" sources say a couple hundred people, and hint that all of them may be mentally ill. Nonsense, we say! The Cosmos, as we like to imagine them calling themselves, are just more open to the task of understanding the truth about the infernal saurians chipping our hearts and how, as their website says, "95 percent of our physical bodies are controlled by forces of darkness." Which means many of us only control our wang, hand or some other appendage. The rest is under the control of evil lizard men. Hey, don't act like you didn't suspect this all along.

The website is full of useful information about these lizard men and various other aliens, all cleverly hidden by intense colors and rambling broken English.

angels-light.org is one of the few websites we've seen with an "Evacuation" option

It was their frequent images of flaming hearts and the terrifyingly awesome pictures of Nordic aliens which made our research team confident that space is populated by Swedish models who want nothing more than to help us destroy the lizard men, and then make sweet space love.

Understanding why your average Sunday service bores the hell out of most churchgoers, the Church of God with Signs Following turns every service into an insane orgy of pious madness and potential fatalities that puts even the UFC to shame.

You may know these people better as "snake handlers" and there could be anywhere from 1,000 to 5,000 of them just waiting to accidentally kill themselves for the Lord on any given Sunday.

Snake handlers engage in all the normal stuff you'd expect at a religious service: speaking in tongues, screaming, spasming, spinning in circles, occasionally drinking poison and, why the heck not, handling snakes. The faithful defend their extreme and sometimes deadly beliefs by saying everything they do comes directly from the Bible, specifically Mark 16:17-18, which if you add some words to it, says to bring a bunch of snakes into church.

Sure, basing an entire belief system around a single passage from the Bible is pretty out there, given that there are quite a few things in the Bible that would have your ass sent straight to prison if you were to attempt them in public. But at Cracked, we don't believe in doing anything half-assed and you can't help but admire the way the church just up and ran with the snake thing. There's even the odd death at these services. Our only suggested change would be adding the word "X-TREME" in their name somewhere.

For those in the know, of course, those deaths were just the result of people who lacked faith, faith being the universal method to prevent snake bites, followed closely by not dancing around like a drunkard at a hootenanny with a poisonous snake in your hands. And just because some people will point out the passage these churches hold as sacred, it's generally footnoted in most versions of the Bible as having most likely been edited in at a later date, it doesn't mean God doesn't want us to taunt poisonous creatures. It may mean that, but if people weren't willing to take risks for what they believe in, Jackass would have never existed. And we can all agree that God wouldn't have wanted that.