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A few years ago, Making Light proposed a useful rule of thumb: "If, on appropriate occasions, the members tell, enjoy, trade, and/or devise transgressively funny jokes about their denomination, it’s a church. If such jokes reliably meet with stifling social disapproval, it’s a cult." The sorts of jokes made around my church are certainly esoteric (I once made a pun about omphaloskepsis and a convert who worked at the Naval Observatory, and other people got the joke), but that's part of the fun.

Still, the time I told a young Greek priest who visited me in the hospital that he was ten minutes too late, the Catholic guy had made a better case and I was off the Ortho roster? Probably not funny enough (in my defense, it had been an epically bad week). Certainly it didn't reach the guy, who turned out to be just out of seminary and therefore temporarily not in command of his sense of perspective. I think he recovered; word has it he's turned into a good guy to talk to.

That said, I'm still not going to forward him the Colbert Religion Randomizer, even though I can't stop pressing "CONVERT" and laughing. CONVERT! CONVERT!