textfiles/magazines/EUTHANASIA/e-sermon.8

IF YOU WISH TO REMOVE YOURSELF FROM THIS LIST FOR ANY REASON
just send an email to listserv@netcom.com containing only the line:

unsubscribe snuffit-l

DO NOT WHINE TO THE POSTMASTER.  DO NOT SEND UNSUBSCRIBE MESSAGES TO:
snuffit-l@netcom.com, listserver@netcom.com, coe@netcom.com

-------------------------------------------------------------------

November 27, 1994                                Sunday e-sermon #8

Greetings, and welcome once again.  Now before we get started today, I would
like to read aloud a letter we received from the Cloister of the Recluse:

>>>>
Dear Church of Euthanasia,

I saw your zine, Snuff It, on the Internet and needed to comment on some of the
material in there.

I like your slant on taking personal responsibility for the things we have done
to this planet through our sheer numbers and our anthrocentric view of the
world...where everything on this planet is meant to be exploited for the
comfort and utility of human beings.  If anything, human beings represent the
least important components of the ecosystem, in a planetary sense.  Human
beings simply do not, as far as I know, contribute anything to the maintenance
of planetary systems.  On this account, trees are infinitely more important
than people because trees capture electromagnetic energy from the sun and
convert it into chemical energy which is the currency of this world.  Tree
roots can crack rocks and help create soils.  Trees fix soils with their root
systems and improve soils through shedding of leaves, which rot to become
humus.  This humus retains water and helps keep soils rich, light and
nourishing.  The trees, themselves, also lift water out of underground water
sources through transpiration....and this transpired water enters the
atmosphere to fall again as rain somewhere else.  Trees provide food and
habitat for a wide variety of animals.  Trees and forests are an infinitely
more valuable resource than a source of wood.  If you want to read about the
impact of deforestation on environment and human economy since Babylonian
times, read _A Forest Journey_ by John Perlin.  It shows how forests were first
a source of wealth in terms of richness of the land and wood resources for
industry....then with over-use, wood became a scarce commodity.  The land,
itself, became impoverished and would no longer support the high populations of
the great cities of Mesopotamia, Greece and Rome.  The book illustrates, too,
that humans learn nothing from history.  One civilization after another cut
down their great forests....and they all paid the price.

Humans can never compete with plants, in terms of giving benefit to the
planetary ecosystem.  Humans are consumers of some one, or some thing, else's
stored energy.  This doesn't make humans bad....it just means we are useless to
the planet in anything except a stewardship capacity....which we muffed badly
due to our particular perspective.

I also agree that reduction of the human population to a more ecologically
stable level would be the best solution...but I must add that some of the
suggestions of your readers scared the hell out of me.  I'm thinking of the
individual running around in Idaho, castrating people.  I haven't been using
the Internet long, but it has been interesting to see how some people
think....and I've come to the conclusion that I've led a quiet, non-intrusive,
sheltered little life.  I think I'll keep it that way.

You can call me, Sister [omega] the Reclusive.
<<<<

A friend of mine still lives in the town he grew up in, not far from here.  He
is older than I am, with a wife, a child and a small business.  His house, and
most of the houses in the town, are adjacent to a large hill, containing
perhaps 20 acres of woodland.  The woods are relatively unspoiled, and a wide
variety of birds and mammals find refuge there.  The woods are also well-known
to the locals, who go there to relax and party, away from the omnipresent strip
malls and the prying eyes of the police.  For several years now, the individual
who owns the land has been trying to get permission to develop the land.  He
wants to level the hill, subdivide it into 1/2 acre lots, and build townhouses
on the lots.  The residents are united in their opposition to the developer's
plan.  The mayor has privately promised that he will never approve the plan,
but his public actions suggest that he is under intense political and financial
pressure and that his resolve is weakening.  Ten housing units were recently
approved by the local zoning board, supposedly against the mayor's orders.
More recently, the developer sent some of his workers into the woods to survey
the land.  Instead of simply walking into the woods, they drove in with a
bulldozer.  This infuriated my friend, who went in the next night, tore up over
a hundred surveying stakes, and threw them down a cliff.  He tells me he'll put
sugar in the bulldozers' gas tanks before he lets them level the hill.

My friend has attended a number of public meetings on the subject, including
one where the developer, who is from out of town, was seen snickering at the
residents.  Apparently these meetings get very tense, with people shouting each
other down and so forth.  And who attends these meetings, I asked.  Well,
almost all of the residents, the developer, the developer's attorneys, various
experts, and some town officials, including the mayor of course.  On the
surface, it seemed fair enough.  The officials get to lecture about zoning law
and other official things, the mayor gets to make passionate speeches, the
residents get to argue back and forth about the pros and cons of real estate
value versus the environment, even the developer gets to tell his side of the
story.  Then it hit me: everyone gets to have their say, except for the ones
who will be affected the most!  Who speaks for the trees and animals?  Why are
they not represented at this meeting?  My friend had never thought of it
exactly this way before.  Are there children at these meetings, I asked him?
Yes, he said, many.  Well then, at the next meeting, I told him, your son, and
all your neighbors' children, should be dressed as trees and animals.  They'll
love it, it'll be just like Halloween.  Let the children speak for the woods!

All of this brings me to my point, which is that in all of the debate about the
"environment" and the use of land, very rarely does anyone speak for the woods,
or for the land.  This allows people to continue thinking about land as
someTHING, rather than someONE.  The best example of this misunderstanding is
the famous reaction of the Shawnee chief Tecumseh who, when asked if he would
sell his people's land, replied that the land "was never divided, but belongs
to all for the use of each.  That no part has a right to sell, even to each
other, much less to strangers; those who want all and will not settle for
less."  He continued: "Sell a country!  Why not sell the air, the clouds and
the great sea, as well as the earth?  Did not the Great Spirit make them all
for the use of his children?"

A more recent and humorous example comes from the Mohawk paper, _Akwesane
Notes_:

>>>>
Every now and then I am impressed with the thinking of the non-Indian.  I was
in Cleveland last year and got to talking with a non-Indian about American
history.  He said that he was really sorry about what had happened to Indians,
but that there was a good reason for it.  The continent had to be developed and
he felt that Indians had stood in the way, and thus had to be removed.  "after
all," he remarked, "what did you do with the land when you had it?"  I didn't
understand him until later when I discovered that the Cuyahoga River running
through Cleveland is inflammable.  So many combustible pollutants are dumped
into the river that the inhabitants have to take special precautions during the
summer to avoid setting it on fire.  After reviewing the argument of my
non-Indian friend I decided that he was probably correct.  Whites had made
better use of the land.  How many Indians could have thought of creating an
inflammable river?
<<<<

There's a small power struggle going within the leadership of The Church of
Euthanasia right now over whether to change the name of the church to The Order
of Useless Vermin.  Though I'm out-voted so far, I personally side with the
vermin.  According to the best information we have, the time of the "calling"
is almost at hand, three or four years away at the most.  Those who can hear
the "calling" will leave the cities and towns for the deep wilderness and
prepare for the death of what we call the Spectacle.  Those who either do not
hear the calling, or choose to ignore it, will perish.  The useless vermin must
perish, so that the Earth can cleanse herself.  The question, of course, is are
you vermin, and if so, why wait?  I know that I am vermin, despite my role as
the Reverend of this church, and I fully intend to step off the plank before
I'm pushed off.  It's merely a question of timing.  Obviously I would like to
see as much as possible of this imminent and dramatic leap in human evolution,
but I have to balance that desire against the amount of pain I will experience
by overstaying my welcome.

I suspect that most if not all of you are also vermin, and that like me, you
are choosing to die with the Spectacle, because deep down inside, you prefer
death to life.  Death worship is the essence of the Spectacle.  The Spectacle
IS death, and death is beautiful, in the same way that Bauhaus is beautiful.
Death is an endless, glittering corridor full of mirrors, leading you faster
and faster, higher and higher, until your body finally bursts into a ball of
beautiful flame, and disintegrates, leaving only ashes.  Which one of you would
truly choose life over death?

Life is messy, violent, and complex, where death is clean, painless, and
simple.  Life is interconnected, full of battles and relationships and paradox,
where death is letting go, surrender, falling into the abyss of pure
rationality, where everything is known, explainable, reasonable.  Only in the
death embrace of the Spectacle can we find true peace, each one of us
completely alone, isolated from the cares and worries of responsibilities and
connections, drifting through a world of fantastic dreams and whispering
voices.  Every need is fulfilled, every urge is satisfied, every individual is
exalted in the Spectacle.  In the final triumph of the Spectacle, we become
pure mind, and achieve eternal death.

Each one of you who chooses cyberspace chooses death.  Each one of you who
stands in line to buy food wrapped in plastic, chooses death.  Each day that
you choose to go to work, pay your taxes, order a pizza, buy a six-pack, turn
on the television, and wait for the weekend, you choose death.  There is no
need to kill yourself.  You are killing yourself by default.  You are choosing
to de-evolve, to become an eyeball with fingers, and so be it.  There is no
need to be ashamed.  You are surrounded by other useless vermin, also choosing
death.  We will all die together, in a glorious blaze of over-stimulation.
There will be no pain, only the warm, wet, pulsating dissolution you have
always secretly yearned for.  You are finally coming home, returning to the
womb.  You have always know this.

Let us read aloud the words of Robert Pirsig:

>>>>
If it was all bricks and concrete, pure forms of substance, clearly and openly,
he might survive.  It is the little, pathetic attempts at Quality that kill.
The plaster false fireplace in the apartment, shaped and waiting to contain a
flame that can never exist.  Or the hedge in front of the apartment building
with a few square meters of grass...If they just left out the hedge and grass
it would be all right.  Now it serves only to draw attention to what has been
lost.

Along the streets that lead away from the apartment he can never see anything
through the concrete and brick and neon but he knows that buried within it are
grotesque, twisted souls forever trying the manners that will convince
themselves they possess Quality, learning strange poses of style and glamour
vended by dream magazines and other mass media, and paid for by the vendors of
substance.  He thinks of them at night alone with their advertised glamorous
shoes and stockings and underclothes off, staring through the sooty windows at
the grotesque shells revealed beyond them, when the poses weaken and the truth
creeps in, the only truth that exists here, crying to heaven, God, there is
nothing here but dead neon and cement and brick.
<<<<

-------------------------------------------------------------------
Rev. Chris Korda                           The Church of Euthanasia

        ftp:      ftp.etext.org           /pub/Zines/Snuffit
        gopher:   gopher.etext.org        Zines/Snuffit
                  gopher.well.sf.ca.us    Zines/On-line Zines/Snuffit
        www:      http://paranoia.com/other/

        To receive the printed version of _Snuff It_, send $2 to:

        C.O.E., Box 261, Somerville, MA 02143

        SAVE THE PLANET!  KILL YOUR *SELF*!