In Norway, to compensate for having a state (and taxpayer) funded Lutheran State Church, every other registered religion, too, receives state funding depending on its membership rolls. That is, obviously, a great incentive for forging membership numbers, but more interestingly, it encourages people to make up new crazy and funny religions, as if this planet didn't have enough of them already.
One quite likely example of this is The Fellowship of Pi-ism, a sect (or some fun-loving jokers) who worships the number pi (p aka 3.14...).
The Pi-ism acknowledges that absolutely everything can be expressed by and with numbers. This does not limit itself to man-made phenomena or constructs, but includes all absolute truths, laws of nature and higher universal laws. Furthermore in Pi-ism, it is, as it also is in the mathematical and scientific spheres, obvious that pi is an endless number. It is therefore clear that everything can be expressed within this infinite number. Everything is immanent in PI.
Well, I have no idea if that actually means anything, but there you go.
Instead of paying a tithe, they pay 3,141592% of the weekly income to the sect (if they want to).
This religion has, according to Bergens Tidende, been founded in the Grenland region of eastern Norway, and receives 11 174 kroner (US$ 1 809) in state support every year. Hey, it's a start!
Like religious historian Asbjørn Dyrendal I have a hard time deciding whether this is a joke or a real religion, considering all the examples of both that exist. If we should take it seriously and classify the belief, we could note some similarities, perhaps, with the more mystical forms of Pythagoreanism. Today we know Pythagoras mostly for his theorem, but he was just as much a mystic and founder of a religious movement as a mathematician.
I think the Pi-ists got a lot right, but it would be funnier if they called themselves pi-etists (that would work in Norwegian, too).
Hat tip to Goldie for link.
12:40:39 AM 
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