I've gotten the impression from SOME PEOPLE that the Church of the

Subgenius is just a Western bastardization of the principles of Buddhism,

because us degraded Merkin d00ds can't grok the full purity of it.

I don't buy it. First off, I think every religion is essentially the

same religion. We're all the same kinds of whatsits, and we're all

heading after the same understanding, or whatever. Except that going

towards the whatever you call it isn't something that translates to

formal instititutionalization easily. So it turns out that most

religions merely reinforce the very same things they were designed to

help people to transcend. The CotSg tries (and I believe is doomed to

fail) to overcome this limitation by providing a framework that's self-

modifying and schismatic. See, most religions try to enforce a monopoly

on dogma within religion. The only conflict comes from between

competing brands, providing a fair analogy to the corporate oligopoly

that currently offers consumer goods to the United States. Religion

is considered by many to be roughly analogous to a mass-marketed consumer

good. By being the world's first "Industrial Religion" the CotSG tries

to provide a mechanism that, by acknowledging its debt to industrial

society tries to provide a framework for social control of that society.

Reform in ways of acting cannot be achieved without a corresponding

change in principles. Industrial society has not overcome the desire

for statis prevalent in agrarian society, still associating change with

uncertainty. The Church therefore attempts to inflate the ego to such

massive proportions that it can maintain internal certainty even while

carrying in long-lasting, perennial and profound processes of change

which are necessary to the survival of society in an industrial age.

The Church tries to reassure the contemporary worried man that a

stable society derives from a pantheon of reasonably competent entities

interacting on a more or less egalitarian level, which is at the same

time a level of infinite superiority on each person's own terms, instead

of a society based on a false instillation of "security" based on

few opportunistic fucks exploiting the need to be controlled inherent

in the human psyche without actually wishing to take control, as that

would entail too much personal responsibility. A society that actually

makes a word like "co-dependency" sound applicable. The constant emphasis

on "doing your own thing" in society is an outgrowth of their desire

not to be bound up in the lives of other entities, to be able to derive

gain from the faceless masses without actually having any power over them.

This is an impossible dream, of course, and what it results in is a legion

of confused, neurotic drones, occasionally breaking out of their stupor

for long enough to post rambling diatribes about the nature of reality

to Usenet.

OK, it was a load of crap. But I enjoyed writing it more than watching

"From Dusk Till Dawn", which was a big letdown to me; Tarantino's style

is starting to grate on me.

Dave

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GOD IS NOT MOCKED