The Church of Euthanasia
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 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 known 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.
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