There's an audacious fake-religion angle in Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?; Blade Runner contains scarcely a trace of it, apart from the curious motif of synthetically engineering animals that pervades the movie. In the novella, this business of synthetic animals is intimately mixed up with a synthetic religion which Phil Dick first wrote about in a short story called "The Little Black Box" from 1964: Mercerism.
Some background is necessary. Earth, by the time of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, is largely an irradiated wasteland. Human beings stubbornly maintain a foothold on Earth and some semblance of continuing civilization, but anyone who can afford it has run off to Mars and other space colonies, lured by promises of a world free from radioactive contamination where everyone gets to have their own personalized "servant", i.e. an android slave. ("Androids", in the Phil Dick story, are biological creations just like the replicants in Blade Runner, but there are electronic replicas of less complex organisms.) The similarity of this new life in the offworld colonies to Elon Musk's sparkly Martian future is noted in passing. Earth, by contrast, is regarded as a decaying ruin, dissolving inexorably into "kipple", which is like the visible embodiment of entropy; leave some "kipple" in a room—garbage, junk, broken-down furniture left to rot, whatever—and every day there'll be more and more of it, until the room itself crumbles into dust. (Curiously, a similar motif appears in Charles Williams's The Place of the Lion.) So few of Earth's creatures have survived this disaster that real living animals are status symbols and immensely valuable in commerce; if you found a single living spider, you could trade it in for a hundred bucks or more.
In these dire circumstances there supposedly appeared a human being named Wilbur Mercer, who had some kind of miraculous ability to bring dead animals back to life. (One suspects that Phil Dick had the apocryphal Gospel of Thomas in mind; there, young Jesus is said to have been able to turn toy animals into living ones.) The official story is that Mercer's ability was due to a miraculous tumor, but he's punished for his ability through (ironically) radiocobalt treatment of the tumor. This episode is like Mercer's Golgotha, his great suffering, and the authorities who grabbed Mercer and burned his miraculous ability out of him are simply known as "The Killers" in Mercerism. The punishment sends Mercer to a hellworld, a "tomb world" full of dead things, but Mercer is somehow able to struggle onward even here. The central image of Wilbur Mercer in this religion is of Mercer laboring up a hill in the tomb world, getting pelted by rocks, and Mercerist worshippers may experience this Purgatory directly through their "empathy boxes", devices which permit them to "fuse" with Mercer and experience his sufferings as if first-hand. If they perceive a rock hurled at them in this "fused" state, they'll come away with it with actual cuts and bruises.
The "empathy boxes" are maybe a giveaway that there's something fishy about the whole affair. Phil Dick describes them as having two handles which the Mercerists hold onto, and that sounds suspiciously like L. Ron Hubbard's Dianetic "E-Meters" with their two big metal cans. Dianetics and Scientology was a religious cult that began in Phil Dick's backyard practically—"dianetic therapy" was heavily promoted and marketed by prominent science-fiction writers, not to mention editor John W. Campbell—so it seems plausible that Mercerism was inspired by Hubbard, especially because Mercerism is eventually revealed to be fraud. "Mercer" is an alcoholic actor hired to record some TV footage that gets incorporated into the Mercerist experience via the empathy boxes. There's a big TV expose of Mercer, which itself seems sketchy and sensationalized, but the text of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? leaves no doubt: Wilbur Mercer was fabricated.
And...it doesn't matter one bit. The spiritual experiences that various people have, under the influence of their belief in the shared hallucination of Wilbur Mercer, are all unambiguously genuine. "Mercer" may be fake, something foisted on the survivors of Earth in a desperate bid to foster some sense of shared purpose, and yet the Mercer hallucination saves people's lives. Two of his believers, including the story's protagonist Rick Deckard, experience Mercer's reality without the help of the empathy box. Mercer even seems to have some ability to restore dead animals to life, as promised, though Dick cheekily suggests that the replacements are synthetic replicas. Does that really matter, though, for the purposes of empathy? Surely one of the lessons of the story is that one may learn to empathize with a robotic animal as well as a flesh-and-blood one.
The implications for Christianity—which Phil Dick had his own ideas about, needless to say, while still retaining a bizarre and idiosyncratic faith in it—are fascinating ones. "Mercerism" is explicitly a fraud, created for the purpose of social control after a disaster, and arguably that's most of what Christianity is about: a fringe religious cult engendered by Roman oppression of Judea eventually came to be the official religion of tyrants and kings and the inheritor of the authoritarian and bureaucratic traditions of imperial Rome. From Christianity's earliest days, the new religion's doctrines were partly shaped by desires involving purely secular power—Christian desires to accommodate and ingratiate Roman authority on the one hand, and on the other hand Roman imperial desires to meddle with and make use of Christianity. Hence, from a certain point of view, Christianity has never been anything but a humbug, a cynical political creation just as Mercerism was...
...so it's intriguing to see that Mercerism, fraudulent though it may be, also somehow works.
~Χαρά
