This is fascinating, but it also makes a brief argument I hate, which is that any irrational form of attachment to the obviously fictional is indistinguishable from religion: https://jezebel.com/consider-the-snapewife-1845247730

"And when one considers the far-fetched dogma of organized religion, is Snapeism considerably stranger than anything in the Bible?" Yes. Yes it is. It is vastly stranger than literally every single thing in the Bible.

You see this a lot in New Atheist and even mainstream liberal dismissals of religion, but it's dumb. One, it's obviously reductionist to the point of absurdity, and two, it betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of what religion is and how it operates in a community.

These phenomenon are obviously influenced by religion and take familiar shapes, but you're getting it backwards when you say, "Well, is this any different from religion?" because you're ignoring how obviously the "Snapeists" model themselves explicitly on religion.

More damning, it's the common error of understanding religion as 100% contiguous with the belief structure of mainstream American Christianity.

Even if you want to zero in on Christianity, you cannot boil 2,000 years of widespread religious belief, theology, philosophy, art, and influence down to, "lol snapewives."

It is, in fact, very simple. From a psychological perspective, Yes, it is 100% weirder to worship Severus Snape, who was created by a living author in a children's book series, than it is to worship Jesus Christ, who has been worshipped for 2,000 years by billions of people.

It is certainly correct to read "Snapeism" through the lens of Christian belief since that is clearly the soil from which is grew, but it is very bad thinking to then say Snapeism is indistinguishable from Christianity. Your twisted little garden is not the earth.

"Jesus Christ is also fictional" is, in fact, not true. Religious figures, even if you believe they do not exist in any way shape or form, are not fictional characters. Severus Snape is. He's a character in a book expressly written and read as fiction.

It's bad writing and bad thinking. Stop it.