Religion in Futurama


The animated science fiction television program Futurama makes a number of satirical and humorous references to religion, including inventing several fictional religions which are explored in certain episodes of the series.

Fictional religions

Robotology

The episode "Hell Is Other Robots" centers around Bender's becoming addicted to high-voltage electricity, then discovering the religion of Robotology to help him break the habit. Sermons are conducted at the Temple of Robotology by the Reverend Preacherbot, a character whose mannerisms draw heavily on black church preacher stereotypes. Robotology is a play on the name Scientology, and series creator Matt Groening has said that he received a call from the Church of Scientology concerned about the use of a similar name.
for a resistor used in electrical circuit diagrams.
Robotology has a holy text, The Good Book 3.0 which is stored on a 3.5" floppy disk. Two symbols of the religion are shown in the episode. The first is a zig-zag line with a circle at either end, based on the electronic symbol used for resistors on circuit diagrams.
Robots who accept Robotology are expected to abstain from behavior such as smoking, pornography, stealing, abusing electricity, and drinking alcohol. Consuming alcohol is usually necessary to power a robot's fuel cells, but this episode establishes that mineral oil is an acceptable substitute. Sinners are punished by condemnation to Robot Hell, located under an abandoned amusement park in Atlantic City, New Jersey. The punishments in Robot Hell are similar to the levels and rationale portrayed in Dante's Divine Comedy, specifically the Inferno.
Robot Hell is controlled by the Robot Devil. He is bound by the Fairness in Hell Act of 2275, allowing anyone to win their freedom by defeating him in a fiddle contest with a solid gold fiddle, a reference to the song "The Devil Went Down to Georgia". Should the individual lose the fiddle contest, they will only receive a smaller, silver fiddle and the Robot Devil may kill them at his discretion.
In "Ghost in the Machines", Bender's ghost is sent to an equivalent robot Heaven monitored by a Robot God whose streamlined design is reminiscent of EVE in the Pixar animated film WALL-E. This God appears to be distinct from the more ambiguous, universal 'God' character that appeared in "Godfellas" and "Bender's Big Score", who may or may not have been representative of the Gods of all religions, and/or a machine. Notably, the Robot God does not deny being God and treats Bender's ghost as his subject.

Robot Judaism

The episode "Future Stock" introduces Robot Judaism in a scene where Fry and Dr. Zoidberg, seeking free food, sneak into a "Bot Mitzvah" celebration. As a joke about Jewish dietary laws' proscriptions against shellfish, Zoidberg was not allowed in inasmuch as he was an anthropomorphic lobster. At the Bot Mitzvah, Fry asks a Jewish robot if they don't believe in Robot Jesus, to which the robot replies, "We believe he was built, and that he was a very well-programmed robot, but he wasn't our Messiah". A banner written in Hebrew reads "Today you are a robot", referencing the traditional Jewish belief that a boy becomes a man on his Bar Mitzvah. In the episode "The Bots and the Bees" Bender's son, Ben, has a Bot Mitzvah celebration of his own where he becomes a man after being born only a few days prior. This scene reinforces the quick rate at which robots mature in the Futurama world as well as alludes to the practice of robot circumcision.
References to a holiday called 'Robanukah' appear in several episodes, as well, though it is heavily implied that Bender makes up this holiday to avoid work. In the Futurama Holiday Spectacular, the Robanukah story involves a pair of fembots who must wrestle in petroleum oil for six and a half weeks. When the oil, which was predicted to last only four and a half weeks, lasts for 500 million years, Bender declares it a Robanukah miracle.

The First Amalgamated Church

The First Amalgamated Church is a syncretic denomination of several mainstream religions extant in the 21st century, and is referenced in several episodes. The church and one of its priests, Father Changstein el-Gamal, are introduced in the episode "Godfellas". Father Changstein el-Gamal reappears in "The Sting" at Fry's funeral service, and in Bender's Big Score at Lars' and Leela's wedding. The religion appears to be a mix of Buddhism, Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism, Islam and even agnosticism.

Other religions

Other religions are depicted or mentioned in passing in other episodes. In the episode "Hell Is Other Robots", Professor Farnsworth complains about Bender's devotion to Robotology, saying, "If only he had joined a mainstream religion, like Oprahism or Voodoo".
In the season 2 episode "I Second That Emotion", Fry, Leela, and Bender are shown around the sewer mutants' village. Fry notices a large gold-plated ICBM on the altar of the cathedral and exclaims "Wow! You guys worship an unexploded nuclear bomb?" to which one of the mutants responds "Yeah, but nobody is that observant. It's mostly a Christmas and Easter thing." The altar and the bomb are a reference to the film Beneath the Planet of the Apes, in which the religion worship of the subterranean is focused on a nuclear bomb.
The season 4 episode "Where No Fan Has Gone Before", presents the situation of a television show becoming elevated to the status of a religion in the form of the "Church of Trek", where devotees of worship the characters and attend services dressed as officers and aliens from the show.
In the second Futurama straight-to-DVD film, The Beast with a Billion Backs, Fry becomes the pope of a new religion which worships the interdimensional planet-sized tentacle monster named Yivo, who brainwashed the inhabitants of Earth by attaching shkler tentacles to their brains, before taking them onto shklim, which resembled heaven.
In the third film Bender's Game, Professor Farnsworth invokes the name of "the all-powerful Atheismo".
In the season 7 episode "Free Will Hunting", when Bender walks throughout Chapek 9 looking to discover his never-programmed free-will unit, he happens upon a religious monastery led by a monk named Ab-bot; the abbot takes him in and converts him into his religion called "Order of the Binary Singularity" believing in the promise "Creatrix" or Mom will give them free-will units.

Godfellas

The episode "Godfellas" explores several religious themes in a more earnest and thought-provoking way than any other episode, and without explicitly referencing or parodying any particular religion. Bender is accidentally cast adrift in space and unwittingly becomes a god figure to a race of tiny people living on an asteroid that impacts his body. Bender attempts to answer their prayers, but ends up harming the Shrimpkins. Meanwhile, the Shrimpkins who have migrated to Bender's backside, out of his sight, grow frustrated that their prayers go entirely unanswered. Eventually the two factions of Shrimpkins wipe one another out in a miniature nuclear war.
After Bender's unsuccessful attempt at godhood, he encounters a god-like entity in space. Bender first wonders if the entity is God, because of its awesome power or a computer because it thinks in binary. The entity responds "Possible, I do feel compassion towards all living things" and "Possible, I am user-friendly" respectively, adding "My good chum" to the end both times. Bender eventually theorizes that the entity may have, in fact, been the remains of a satellite that collided with God, to which the entity replies "Probable". The conversation between them touches on the ideas of predestination, prayer, and the nature of salvation, in what Mark Pinsky referred to as a theological turn to the episode which may cause the viewer to need "to be reminded that this is a cartoon and not a divinity school class". By the end of the conversation, Bender's questions still have not been fully answered, and he is left wanting more from the voice than it has given him. The character/entity returned, albeit briefly, in the first of the direct-to-DVD installments, Bender's Big Score.
The episode also sees Fry turning to religion to help locate Bender. Seeking guidance, he visits the First Amalgamated Church. When this fails to help him, Fry visits the "Monks of Dschubba" to use the radio telescope of a sect of monks who are attempting to find God in the universe. This subplot takes religion much more lightly, referring to the monks as a "crazy sect" and suggesting that prayer is usually unreliable.
The episode also makes reference to The Nine Billion Names of God by Arthur C. Clarke.
The book Toons That Teach, a text used by youth groups to teach teenagers about spirituality, recommends the episode "Godfellas" in a lesson teaching about "Faith, God's Will, Image of God".