
The Church of Euthanasia
MITERS sermon
The following sermon was delivered by Rev. Korda at the MIT Electronic Research
Society on May 15, 1998. The sermon was preceded by a video presentation
on the declining parrot population, and a reading on male sexual non-performance.
The parrot decline was blamed on loss of habitat due to deforestation and
a pet parrot craze, while male ineptness was linked to widespread ignorance
about female genitals.
And I'd like to bring a few things together for you here. The bottom line
is, as we all know, people are having sex. More every day, and there's also
a lot less parrots... [What's your position on that, Reverend?] I was speaking
to Michael outside on the landing there, and he said we've already wiped
out 15 species of parrots, we didn't get into the numbers all that much,
but there's only about 300 species left. That sounds like a lot, but in
fact a parrot only, a parrot might live as much as a hundred years, so there's
really no way to tell how many parrots there are, because they might not
have anywhere to breed at this point, so they could all just vanish because
we're cutting down all the trees. Now what's the point? Well, the point
here is that the parrots are vanishing, people are having sex... Can somebody
spell out for me what the connection could be here? [Too many people!]
Thank you. Exactly, there's too many people and as proof of this, as you
know kind of uh, I hold up the smoking gun, I have here a flyer from the
Sierra Club, I don't know, some of you may be familiar with the environmental
movement, you may know that the Sierra Club are sworn enemies of the Church
of Euthanasia, they are the most, bar none, they are the most conservative
environmental organization I've ever heard of. They pretty much encouraged
the Forestry Department to go in and cut down most of the old growth forest
in the United States and haul it off and sell it as timber. That was cool,
that was no problem, that was what they call "wise use." So you know these
guys are real hard-core assholes mostly, worse than ZPG, worse that any of
the environmental groups I've ever dealt with, and they now have this nifty
flyer: "Defusing the Population Bomb." Now, this is big news, you won't
hear about this in the Boston Globe, but this is big news. What this means
is that even within the most conservative environmental circles in the United
States, it has become totally acceptable and mainstream to talk about limiting
population growth, even right here (gasp) in the United States. Yes, American
humans actually not having children. So what do they say? They say this,
I mean this is quite something, they say, "Human population growth undermines
both natural and man-made communities"--read "parrots"--"and contributes
to virtually all global environmental problems." Okay? "global warming,
deforestation, desertification, extinction of species" (extinction of parrots)
"can all be traced to the addition of"--get this, I hadn't thought of it
this way--"the addition of 4.5 billion people to the earth over the past
160 years." Okay? 160 years, that's, you know, that's not much longer ago
than the Civil War, that's really very recent history. We're talking about
having added basically two-thirds of all the people on the planet in the
last 150 years or so. But they say, well, you know the population of 5.8
billion will double in the next half century. They ask the big question,
"Will humans survive? The loss of natural ecosystems and uncontrolled population
growth drives them to the very edge of the last wilderness in search of precious
natural resources..." I DON'T GIVE A FUCK ABOUT THAT! Come on! I mean
does any of this make sense? The question is not will humans survive, the
question is will parrots survive. Right? I mean that's what nobody associates...
even no matter how, you know, "good" this is, I mean I applaud the Sierra
Club, even though their membership voted down any efforts to suppress human
population, this flyer was really, you know, before that happened, none the
less, they're still missing the point, no matter what, whether the Sierra
Club is in favor of or against population growth, they're missing the point.
The point is not whether humans will survive. We already know that humans
are like cockroaches, they're like rats, I mean they can survive anything,
they can survive in outer space, they can survive on the surface of the moon.
It's perfectly possible they could survive underground, like THX-1138 in
giant bunkers and there won't be anything left on the surface of the earth
except desert. Right? That's totally believable, that's what they're softening
you up for on those space age shows on TV. [chuckling from the audience]
You watch that Next Generation shit on TV, and you think you're watching
about outer space in 2000 years, you're watching about now, that's about
earth. That's what life is going to be like on earth after we make the surface
of the planet uninhabitable by spewing fossil fuels into the atmosphere,
okay. So the question has nothing to do with human survival. Humans are
going to survive one way or the other, although it's very possible that the
earth will take steps to reduce our population, we're very clever, we're
very smart... my money is on the humans, not the earth, okay? It always
has been. That's why I founded the Church of Euthanasia. The Church of
Euthanasia is about making people aware that it's humans that are the problem,
right? The humans get bigger, the other species get smaller. More humans,
less trees. Less trees, less fucking parrots. It's really that easy, okay?
So that's what all this has to do with sex. So you know it's cool, I'm
fine with female sex whatever, you know, vibrators, groovy. We like vibrators,
we like masturbation, we like it all, sexual pleasure is cool. The Church
of Euthanasia is not anti-sex by any stretch, this is a misunderstanding.
We're pro-sex, [one little yelp of glee from Marilyn] we're pro-sex-for-pleasure,
okay? That's what this is all about. So, the Church of Euthanasia, you
all should be lifetime members, it's that, I mean really, you all should
be, I'm preaching to the converted. Raise your hand if you're not going
to have children. Really. Come on, this is not a joke, raise your hand
if you're willing to do that much for the fucking planet. You should all
have your hands up. Be proud of it! It's something to be proud of, it's
something to be proud of! That's what membership in the Church of Euthanasia
is, it's taking a lifetime vow to not have children, to do at least that
much, if nothing else. Fuck recycling, you can drive your car, you can keep
your microwave, I don't care about that! [laughter] You can sit in front
of your computer until your little eyes pop out of your head, I don't care
about that either. It's okay, I can't expect you overcome all of your social
conditioning in one lifetime. You've been conditioned to work with machines
and... operate in a totally robotic society and that's okay, that's the way
things have worked out, you know, we used to like hang out and bang on rocks
with sticks and now we sit in front of computers all day and send each other
email. I can't change that, it's too big. Nobody can change that, okay?
But this much you can do, this much you can change. You can not have children.
It's not a big sacrifice, in fact it's not even a sacrifice. Look around
at your friends who've had children, what do they have? Headaches! Nothing
but headaches! Do you know how much it costs to raise a child to be an American
consumer? Jesus Christ! Think of all the plastic toys, baby clothes, fucking
play-pens with trendy shit, all that stuff... You go down to Memorial Drive
on the weekend and you will see breeder heaven. I mean you've never seen
so many breeders in your life! And they're all there on their fucking rollerblades,
right? And they've all got like strollers this wide, you know, not one,
not two, but three or even four wide. And they're like power strolling,
they're cruising down the road with these things, on their rollerblades.
It's like, where the fuck is all this stuff going to come from so that those
kids can go to Harvard? Where is it all going to come from? They're all
going to have cars, right? Everybody in China is going to have a car too...
it's not going to happen, it's not going to work like that. What's going
to happen is there's going to be massive deforestation, global war, disease,
famine, all kinds of horrible shit that's already happening to just about
everybody but us, right? We, we don't care, we don't give a shit because
we're still hanging out here sending each other email and having a good time,
but everywhere else in the world everything's fucked! I mean you think it's
a joke but it's not. It really is, read the papers! There's mudslides,
and the weather is insane and there's global warming, and there's, the rivers
are running black, and in China the river doesn't even run. I read in the
paper the other day there is no Yellow River. The Yellow River has stopped
running, because they sucked too much water out of it. They've got to get
their water from somewhere, right? All those people have got to have water.
They've got a billion people, that's a lot of fucking water they need, right?
So what? We make more water. No, we don't make more water, wrong! There
are limits to human ingenuity, right, there are limits. You can't make fresh
water, it's very difficult. The amount of energy you would require to make
fresh water makes it not a reasonable thing, you can't do it really. So,
in fact, humans are already way over the limits of what we can draw down
from the planet. We're way beyond our carrying capacity and nature has a
very important lesson for what happens to a species that exceeds the carrying
capacity of its environment. Generally speaking what happens, in fairly
short order is, extinction. (Chuckle) Bye-bye! It doesn't work, you know
you just, you can go for a little while and you think, wow, this is groovy,
we're exceeding our carrying capacity, we're exceeding our carrying capacity,
it's cool, and the cops haven't caught us, we're getting away with it, [more
laughter] yeah, we're really getting away with it, those ozone holes, don't
worry about that, don't worry about those ozone holes, FUCK THAT! I'm telling
you, I'm telling you, those ozone holes are real. That happened in your
lifetime. You saw it. You read it in the papers, you saw it on TV. It
wasn't some story, it wasn't science fiction, like all that bullshit we're
constantly being inundated with every day, fantasy, fantasy, fantasy. It
was REAL! The ozone really did get fucked up, and the water really did get
fucked up, and the species really did get wiped out... AND IT'S NOT FUNNY!
IT'S NOT FUCKING FUNNY! How can I get through to you?! It's happening.
It's happening in your lifetime and only you, only you the intelligent,
articulate, sensitive, educated humans who actually understand what I'm saying
can ever fucking do anything about it. Nobody else can do anything about
it. You think people in Ethiopia can change this? You think they can do
a fucking thing to change this? You, the brightest, the best, the smartest,
the educated, the people who went to MIT, who have learned everything there
is to fucking know about every technology in the world, you are the only
people who can stop it from getting worse. And the first fucking thing you
can do is make an example of yourself, to everybody who ever meets you, to
everybody who ever fucking KNOWS you, BY NOT HAVING ANY MORE OF YOURSELF.
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