Dudeism – just be the Dude!
The Church of the Latter-Day Dude was founded by a journalist – Oliver Benjamin. It is insipired by the character from the Coen Brother’s film The Big Lebowski. The rules of it seem to be easy. First of all, you should ‘take it easy’ and secondly, you shouldn’t take a nap. What can be very surprising is that Dudeism comes from the 2,500-year-old Chinese philosophy – Taoism.
Lao Tzu – one of the biggest dudes in history
Lao Tzu was the creator of Taoism who lived in ancient China. According to Taoism, people should live in harmony with Tao which means a “way”, “path” or “principle”. Generally, the Tao is not eternal and it is the source and the driving force behind everything that exists. Otherwise, Dudeism also refers to Buddhism, Christianity, Sufism, John Lennonism and Fo’-Shizzle-my-Nizzlism. The group of the greatest dudes in history joined an inter alia and created the main characters: Greek Philosopher – Heraclitus, Snoopy, Jesus Christ who is introduce in official dudeism’s website as a bearded prophet of the meek and early archetype of the 1960s hippie, and of course the bigest dude ever – Jeffrey Lebowski. This movie character was based upon the real person – Jeff Dowd.
How can you be the Dude?
The dude can be anybody who is chill and likes chillaxing. Because life would be too complicated if we worried about other people, the dude just shouldn’t do it. Simple as that. Why do we need stress, obligations etc? Live is too short for that so lead a Dude’s lazy life and go to bowling or drive around without any thought-out reason. Be yourself and take it easy, man. That is how the short description of dudeism would look like.
If being the dude is not enough for you, remember that everyone can be a Dudiest Priest for free and there are no obligations of course. The priest of the Church of the Latter-Day Dude can minister over religious ceremonies in most U.S. States and even in some other countries. Thanks to the special Certificated of Ordination, the Dudiest Priest can preside over a wedding, a funeral, and other celebrations. Presently, more then 220,000 people are a Dudiest Priest.
Dudeism ubiquitous
The Church of the Latter-Day Dude has its own Dudenheim Museum, where we can find many caricatures of Jeffrey Lebowski and another film’s characters. There even exists a Dudiest library which contains a very humoristic position called The Dudespaper Duderonomy or in other words, Holy shit! On the official dudeism website you can find games and purchase strange certificates like Little Lebowski Urban Achievers Certificate of Achievement. There is also a Dude University, whose research focuses on Dudeist, Dudeitarian, Dudeological, and Dudeaphysical. Of course, dudeism has its place in social media as well.
The religion grows day by day because it is a kind of philosophy directed to everybody. And thanks to dudeism, we can finally stop for a while, sit down and have a lazy life in today’s crazy and fast world.