The Matrix being a religion is far out there but the possibility of it being real is possible. I mean not in the same sense as the movie has it, but this could be some kind of illusion world controlled by something out there. What if someone realized the truth and decided to make a movie out of it to expose it to the whole world.
The Matrix is not a religion, but an argument, which is, you may wonder, not new. First, there's your great poet Edgar Allan Poe who mentioned it. It went on like, as I remember:
All that we see or seem
Is but a dream within a dream
And then I remember a guy who was a follower and preacher of a certain islamic fraction in 1980's, who talked about the real world being a dream. One day we'll wake up (when we die) and if we did'nt do what religion ordered us to do, we will regret it but it would be too late.
The plausible thing with this argument is, you can talk about it until morning, but there is no way you can verify it.
On the other hand, as much as this theory sounds ficticous, I find Gandalf's argument humane, when he states that the only thing we can decide is what to do with the time given to us. If anyone knows something about a Gandalf religion, please inform me, I'd like to found the Ankara monastery of it.
Ah, Jedi knights must have become a religion by now. I remember that in Australia they were collecting signatures to include Jedi knights in the list of officially approved religions, in 1997.
Sorry for this consecutive posting but, there are two things I must add:
1. The hypothesis of the world being a dream, of course, did not start with Poe. It was Plato, as far as I know, who introduced this genuine curse to humanity. He argued that beyond this world, there is some kind of a spiritual world where we cannot reach out. If he knew that for thousands of years, this would be one of the prime excuses behind the need for fractioning and hatred, I guess he would think a second time whether to theorize such thing or not.
2. In 1997, when I read about it, the Australian Jedi knights had collected 7,000 signatures.