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While most Webkinz are perfectly content with a life that revolves around nothing more than food, video games and outlandish interior decorating, a few develop strange existential anxieties. They start to ask questions like, "What if we're all just images in a machine, and what if someone unplugs the machine... will we cease to exist?" To assuage their fears, these Webkinz often gravitate towards religion. The most popular faith is Ganzism, which postulates that a deity known as The Ganz has made a covenant with all Webkinz, to preserve and protect them so long as they remain "marketable." (The best Ganzist theologians have argued at length, and to no consensus, as to what exactly constitutes marketability.)
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There are, however, many alternative beliefs. One on the rise is the Ketchup Cult. Claiming to be descended from the primal faith of prehistoric Webkinz, the Ketchup Cult explores the spiritual dimensions of that most fundamentally Webkinz activity: chowing down. Adherents talk about the manitou, or spirits, which inhabit various foods, believing the Secret Recipe Manitou to be of exceptional power. (They also consider the popular TV show, The Secret Chef, a terrible blasphemy.)
In order to be indoctrinated into the higher mysteries of the Ketchup Cult, one must first undergo the ceremonial Ketchup Bath. To an outsider, the Ketchup Bath is nothing more than its name suggests -- you get dunked in a big vat of ketchup. But to the faithful, the Ketchup Bath is full of profound spiritual significance (and also full of the powerful anti-oxidant lycopene)!
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