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INTERVIEW WITH REV. CHRIS KORDA OF THE CHURCH OF EUTHANASIA BY $AINT @NDREW
TO BE PRINTED IN OGYR NETWORK SERIES 4, ISSUE #3 (C)1995 OGYR NETWORK
Transmission, copying, or any other use of this article is allowed if done
in whole.  For the latest issue of OGYR NETWORK, send $2 US cash to:
OGYR NETWORK, PO BOX 53, PLAINFIELD, IL.  60544

$@:  $aint @ndrew, KSC - 23rd SubGenius / Discordian Church of Euthanasia -
Ogyr Network

CK:  Rev. Chris Korda, The Church of Euthanasia

$@:  Starting right out, anybody who's familiar with anything that you've put
out, the main question that's going to be on their mind is, "Is this for real?"
This whole "Church of Euthanasia", one commandment:  Thou Shalt Not Procreate,
four pillars:  Suicide, Abortion, Cannibalism, and Sodomy, are you serious
about this?  

CK:  Absolutely!  We are for real.  It's as simple as that.  We are a
registered not-for-profit corporation in the state of Delaware, our status for
tax-exempt status is pending, and yes, we above the board!  We are a real
church.  We have members.  We believe in what we preach.  

$@:  Do you have a place for people to go for 'worship'?  

CK:  Yes.  The Internet.  We are an E-Church right now.  That means we don't
physically own any real estate, which is sensible since we don't believe in
property rights anyway.  The closest thing we have to an actual chapel or
temple is the Internet.  The Internet is my pulpit, baby!  

$@:  Are there any deities to the Church of Euthanasia?  Gods or goddesses...  

CK:  Deities...  

$@:  You mention this creature called "The Being".  

CK:  I wouldn't say that I ever worshipped The Being.  I merely channeled The
Being.  I would say that we're a pretty pantheistic bunch.  If we have a deity,
it's the Earth.  I mean that in the Native American sense.  

$@:  "Save The Planet, Kill Yourself." How did you first come up with this
slogan?  You can see it on cars all across the nation now that the bumper
sticker is available both through you and at novelty gift shops.  What sparked
this onslaught of catchy phrases?  

CK:  Straight from The Being.  "Save The Planet, Kill Yourself" is a line from
a communication that I received from The Being.  The entire communication forms
the lyrics of the dance single.  The full text of what The Being said, but what
the final line said was "Save The Planet, Kill Yourself." I think we have to
view it in its context, what it really meant by that was "*Save* the planet,
kill your *self*".  

$@:  So stress on the "self"...  

CK:  What I think it's saying, and this is all interpretation, is that if
you're going to kill something, kill yourself.  It's not saying that you *have*
to kill something, but if you're going to kill something, don't kill the
planet.  It's much easier to understand if you reverse the whole thing and make
it into a tautology.  "Kill the planet, save yourself." Hmm.  That's catchy. 
There you go.  Now it starts to become a little more clear.  

$@:  We now come to the only commandment of the Church, "Thou Shalt Not
Procreate." Pretty straightforward.  

CK:  What else can I say?  

$@:  So the main idea here is lowering the population of humans on the Earth to
a comfortable level.  

CK:  Well, it's best to get a framework here.  The human population is now
increasing by a million people every four days.  Good trivia thing to know. 
That's equivalent to 95 million people a year.  That's the current population
of Mexico.  Mexico's a big place.  There's a lot of people in Mexico.  That's
how much the population is increasing by.  At that rate, and, keep in mind, the
rate has been increasing steadily for the last couple hundred years, at that
rate, the population will reach 8 billion by 2020 at the latest, and that's a
conservative estimate.  That's certainly well within both your and my lifetime,
so it's just a matter of common sense.  The earth is not going to sustain that
level of population and it's not able to really sustain the level of population
that we already have.  The question is no longer whether or not there's going
to be some kind of environmental catastrophe, there already is an environmental
catastrophe going on all around us.  The question is now, how bad do we want
it?  How much suffering do we want?  You've got the suffering meter:  you can
have medium, you can have mild, you can have hot, you can have off the scale. 
You can have as much suffering as you want.  It's really, at this point, just a
question of how much.  How quickly do we want to incinerate ourselves.  That's
really all we're talking about, and the Church of Euthanasia, contrary to
popular belief is *opposed* to suffering.  We are trying to slow down the rate
of increase.  We're trying to slow down the rate of entropy and alleviate
suffering by getting people to reduce their demands on the ecosystem.  And, of
course, the simplest way they can reduce their demands on the ecosystem is to
simply not procreate.  

$@:  What about the person who says:  "Your slogan is 'Save The Planet, Kill
Yourself'.  Do you really expect me to kill myself?" 

CK:  Expect would be too strong of a word.  The best way I can explain it would
be to say that if we continue on our current course for X number of more years,
people will be wishing that they'd listened to us.  The suffering will be so
high that people will be *lining up* to kill themselves.  The alternatives will
be miserable.  Ghastly.  Beyond belief.  Hard to imagine.  Well, not too hard
to imagine, because if you were able to remove your detachment, your
rose-colored glasses, and actually look at what you see on the television now
coming from the rest of the world, outside the United States, or actually
understand what's being said in the newspapers, you'd start to get a hint of
what life is going to be like.  It's not going to be fun.  It's not going to be
pretty.  It's not going to be a happy time for folks.  What we're saying is,
you've got your choice.  You can try to change your world-view now, or later
you'll be busy drowning.  That's kind of the situation.  One way of reading
"Save The Planet, Kill Yourself" is that it has come to this.  If someone kills
themselves at this point, I'm going to clap for them.  I'm going to be glad for
them.  I'm going to make them a saint.  Particularly if they mention the Church
of Euthanasia in their suicide note, and / or leave all their money to the
Church.  

$@:  [laughter] 

CK:  You may laugh but it's true!  We are the only church that offers
immediate, automatic sainthood without any additional paperwork for anyone who
kills themself, providing they simply leave a note thanking the Church of
Euthanasia for the inspiration.  Or even attacking the Church of Euthanasia! 
Just mentioning us will do.  

$@:  The four pillars of the Church, being suicide, abortion, cannibalism, and
sodomy.  The way it's sounding here is you're stressing the non-procreation. 
It's not asking you to go out and kill yourself, but if you are going to, then
fine, please do.  We're not going to hold you back.  Two, abortion and sodomy,
are stressing the beginning of life part of it.  

CK:  Well, if we just want to do the run-down here.  Abortion will be required
for members of the Church to avoid excommunication.  Any member of the Church
who willingly or knowingly or unknowingly causes a pregnancy or allows
themselves to become pregnant is faced with the choice between abortion and
excommunication.  It's as simple as that.  We're pretty strict about it.  We
only have one commandment, we feel it's our right to be strict about it. 
That's the bottom line.  It's just ridiculous.  The same kind of people who are
arrayed against abortion are the same people who are arrayed against
euthanasia.  They're the same people who are for laws against committing
suicide which are still on the books in most places in the world...  These are
the people we're after.  We can't have that.  It's beyond whether or not
abortion should be made legal.  Abortion should be free.  It should be readily
available.  There's no reason why not.  One of the best-kept secrets in America
right now is the fact that in every city it is possible to obtain "morning
after" pills and have a self-induced "morning after" abortion.  This is a fact.
It has been completely blocked out of the mainstream media.  Most people are
completely unaware that this is the case.  That's the kind of stuff we're
talking about:  making abortion a household word.  

$@:  Moving on, cannibalism.  

CK:  Cannibalism is probably the most difficult of the four pillars to
understand.  To reduce it to a sentence, if you must eat flesh, make it human
flesh because that's just about what it's come down to.  The human species has
been responsible for the largest reduction of bio-diversity in recorded
history.  We are now losing a species every 60 minutes and a species every 15
minutes in the tropical rain forest.  That's bizarre.  It's an unimaginable
horror.  I always get a big laugh when I troll around on the Internet and see
all the raging debates still going on about whether the Holocaust happened, and
all these kinds of things.  It's really hypocritical.  For humans to go around
shedding salt tears over their fallen comrades and not even notice that we're
losing a species every sixty minutes, that's revolting.  People have got to
understand that we really aren't too interested in whether or not the human
species survives.  That's the bottom line.  If you're going to be eating flesh,
it should be your own flesh.  

$@:  There was an argument that that was not possible due to disease
transmission...  

CK:  [*heavy sarcasm in voice*] Geez!  My heart bleeds!  I'm *so* sorry that
humans have toxified their environment so much that if they eat their own
flesh, they're going to get sick.  I am really upset by that.  Gosh!  Doesn't
that make you upset, $aint @ndrew?  It really makes me upset...  

$@:  I would argue that technology has advanced.  We used to not be able to eat
pork because of sanitary measures.  Well, why can't we boost up the technology
to make it sterilized?  At least break it down into its components and
reconstruct it into viable food-stuffs...  Or, at the very least, let's not
preserve the bodies full of chemicals!  Go dump Grandma on the compost heap!  

CK:  Oh, I'm down with that.  It's absolutely wasteful to incinerate them. 
Burying them in the ground doesn't do much good either, especially when you put
them in a wooden box...  It seems to me that the best use for those bodies is
to carve them up.  And, I know it's true that in the case of the older people,
the meat's not going to be that tasty or good to eat.  Well, again, my heart
bleeds for all you carnivores out there.  Frankly, there's a lot of young
people dying too, there's no shortage of young stiffs.  So there will be a
little demand, you'll have to pay a little extra if you want these tasty cuts.
There's what, 60,000 automobile fatalities in the United States alone every
year.  Right there, that's a substantial portion of meat.  That should be going
straight to McDonald's.  The bottom line is that I have no sympathy for this
argument, really.  It's a well-known and well-established fact that it takes
eight pounds of grain to create one pound of feed-lot meat.  Never mind how
many pounds of meat it takes to create one pound of human flesh!  The whole
thing is outrageous.  There is no reason why rich people in the United States
should be able to rape the entire rest of the world so they can dine on steak
or live at McDonald's.  

$@:  And, finally...  sodomy.  

CK:  I've said it before and I'll say it again:  no one ever got pregnant from
sodomy.  And we should point out that sodomy is a widely misunderstood word. 
Most people think that sodomy means, ahem, "ass-fucking".  That is simply not
the case.  If you consult a legal dictionary, you will discover that sodomy, in
fact, is defined as *any* sexual act that is not intended for procreation.  

$@:  So, safe sex is considered sodomy.  

CK:  Technically.  But a more obvious example, there are still laws on the
books in several states against what is called "oral sodomy".  There's oral
sodomy, anal sodomy, bestiality is considered a form of sodomy...  technically
masturbation is a form of sodomy.  These are all sexual practices in which
sperm is wasted.  Sperm is not delivered to its appropriate target.  The whole
kind of legal framework of sodomy is built around women as chalices and men as
providers of the great sacred seed.  Most of our history is grounded in
patriarchy.  It goes back to the Bible, which is certainly one of the most
patriarchal documents in our history.  You may or may not subscribe to all
that, but the bottom line is that we're in favor of spilling sperm.  One of our
great slogans is, "prevent AIDS - aim for the chin." Simple enough.  If you
shoot the stuff somewhere else, the woman doesn't get pregnant.  How about
that?  It's amazing.  It works *every time*.  You shoot the stuff somewhere
else and it just doesn't happen.  It's very difficult to get a woman pregnant
through her belly-button.  I suppose it could happen, but the odds are against
it.  

$@:  What about your average American kid who comes across this and says:  "Oh,
this is just some queer church trying to justify their homosexual activities."
The Rush Limbaugh, conservative, right-wing, middle America...  living off of
Big Macs for most of his life.  He sees no reason to change because life for
him is really good.  What would you tell him?  How would you go about
converting someone like this?  

CK:  I don't know what I would say to this hypothetical young folk.  Part of
running a church is being able to gauge who you can convert and who you can't,
and concentrating on those you have some hope for.  You have to draw the line
somewhere.  There are several people that I have to draw the line with and
realize that I can't help.  I'm a very compassionate and open-minded person. 
I've spent a vast amount of my life energy trying to help the earth, but I have
to draw the line somewhere.  No one has infinite energy, and you have to say,
"alright, this person is not listening to what I have to say." 

$@:  What about the other side of the spectrum, the person who comes across the
Church of Euthanasia's material and thinks:  "Oh this has got to be a Dada
action.  This has got to be a joke." 

CK:  Yeah, we get a lot of that.  We got one today on the talk group who had
read something and thought it was the biggest joke he'd ever seen.  We'll I'd
rather see that because I'm all for laughter.  I think laughter's healthy.  I
think that someone who can laugh is someone who is not totally crazy yet. 
Someone who can laugh at the ludicrous situation we're all in.  That's a good
thing, so I'm not opposed to that.  I think the next step from laughter is
understanding the truth, so I would devote some energy to someone like that.  I
would laugh with them for a while and then I would really slap them in the face
with a big fish.  

$@:  Finally, the third kind of person I was trying to think of who I thought
would look at this is the kind of person who is a vegetarian, into the
macrobiotic trip.  They don't consciously litter.  They say:  "I recycle.  I do
enough for the earth.  What does it matter if I want to raise a kid?  If I only
raise one or two children, it's not going to be increasing the population." 

CK:  Now you're talking about the majority of the people I concentrate my
energy on.  These are the guys who are lined up in our cross-hairs.  We do a
lot of work with those kind of folks.  We've had some good results.  Those
kinds of people are half the way there.  That's the real point.  They may not
realize it, but they're half the way there.  A lot of the time it's ignorance,
the rest of the time it's hypocrisy.  They're simply at some level in denial. 
They're allowing themselves to believe in a fantasy world that suits them in
which their little sacrifices are good enough and they can continue to have
whatever they want.  That's a pretty workable situation.  At that point we
really whip out the heavy guns.  We indoctrinate them thoroughly.  

$@:  Do you seriously think that you're going to be able to turn people's
mind-sets around in time?  You have 5.5 billion people to shake up and convince
that if they don't want to be sliding around in their own shit, that they'd
better change.  Do you think five years is enough time?  In other words, do you
have hope?  

CK:  Absolutely.  If I didn't, I would have killed myself already.  The only
reason I haven't killed myself yet, and I'm not saying I won't, is because I
have hope that by continuing to do the work that I'm doing, I could make the
difference.  My church could be the one to make the difference.  There's no way
to know that it couldn't, so we're staying the course.  I'm steady at the helm,
we're going to continue on.  We're going to try to get more and more media
attention to reach larger numbers of people.  Forget about "Save The Planet,
Kill Yourself" bumper stickers.  So we sold 50,000 bumper stickers.  Big deal.
That's nothing.  I won't rest until there are billboards all over the United
States that say, "Thank You For Not Breeding." And that's just the beginning. 
We've got to get it on the nightly news.  We've got to get it on the radio. 
We've got to get it on every channel.  If I could, today, push a button and cut
into the three major networks all over the world at once, you bet I'd do it. 
I'd push that button, because it's going to take that kind of effort.  We've
got to really cut through the bullshit and really make people clear on the
concept.  Most people are living in fantasy worlds.  

$@:  So you do see a utopia at the end of the tunnel...  

CK:  That's a much deeper thing.  That's further away.  We're so far from where
we should be that I don't think we can honestly talk about a utopia.  I think
the only thing we can talk about at this point is preventing complete
annihilation.  The clock is so close to midnight that we can't really talk
about that.  All we can talk about is stepping back from the abyss.  


-- 

$aint @ndrew, KSC.  Campus Chaplain of Miskatonic University.  Ogyr Network.
contact:  snail-mail = PO BOX 53, PLAINFIELD, IL.  60544 
email:    saint@firefly.prairienet.org or saint_andrew@anl.gov 
www:      http://www.paranoia.com/coe/resources/saint.html 


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