Let me know if you find a Discordian gathering space which represents "the entirety of Discordianism". Do the facebook groups with names like "The Discordian Society" seem like a fair representation, to you?
if you have this question then i don't think you understood. The point is that the principia itself can be interpreted in many ways and that said interpretations should be channeled into subgroups, aka sects/cabals, this website didn't do that and instead co-opted it to serve their own views, now you realize there's people with other views and a thread like this gets created where you start to worry about people not following your specific branch of discordianism.
Never used facebook, wouldn't know.
That sounds like a great idea for a website you should start.
It's also possible that you are misreading us as a unified sect -- we are in cabals and Episkoposes and have radically different interpretations of and relationships with the Chao.
That's how it happened here - I was a Discordian already, I discovered the forums, I hung out here. We argued for years, now the fight is (mostly) out of our systems. We also met up in person, formed cabals, wrote literature, had schisms. There used to be 3 or 4 discordian forums back, when forums were a thing. Now they're not and we're all that's left.
You react as if every chip on the table was placed there by a designer, but that's just where they fell. All of us doing our own Discordian thing resulted in this mess and HAIL ERIS for that.
But I think you might have missed what I was asking in the OP.... more on that in a sec
who claimed to speak for everybody?
I'd say naming your website after the book and forcing your interpretation on said book into said website is pretty fuckin defining of speaking for said book therefore misleading everybody. A small website with a rational explanation such as the likes of hyperdiscordia.church would be more defining.
Again, who is 'forcing an interpretation of the book into a website'? Look, you can read the
Principia. And you can react to it, and talk about your reaction here on the forum. You have that freedom too, if you think something is missing here. (And you might have a better time with that if you actually express something instead of just telling everybody their Episkipos is bad PR or whatever.)
Eventually, someone will come along and tell you that you should be reacting differently, that a really real discordian should come off like XYZ. (for example, there's been a whole wave of people who told us our writings are doing a disservice to discordianism because they aren't written in the same humor-collage form as the
Principia). You are the pope and can get the juice straight from Eris yourself.
That's an important point - Discordianism is not about Mal or Omar or RAW's writing. That's "Orthodox Discordianism", which is also a 100% fine version of it, if that's what you're into. Me, I only take a few parts from the Orthodox texts.
One of the energies in the Principia which nourishes me is the use of humor in service to love and understanding. This vibe is a little more clear in the sattelite writings of the OG Discordians, like
Zenarchy,
Zen Without Zen Masters, and a lot of the RAW lit -- Discordianism
can be harsh and sharp, but that sharpness is a tool meant to shock someone awake, like the fly whisk in a rinzai zen monastery. It's not essentially malicious or predatory.
And in the current world config, there are a lot of Discordians out there who are on the hate trip, the all-destructive-trip, they are edgelord assholes who have found a Belief System that says "you can do anything you want" and stopped thinking right there. They are bitter people who delight in causing pain to others.
To give a concrete example - in an unrelated discussion that got out of hand, a Discordian I knew went out of his way to "trigger" a trans friend of mine and really upset her. He fired off a bunch of boilerplate transphobic trash talk specifically to piss her off. When I confronted him about how I thought that was a dick move, he said that he was trying to save her from identity politics or something. But his words were not a fly whisk, they were a knife. He was HIGH off the dopamine hit from having pushed someone's buttons until they got TRIGGERED!!! Expanding understanding did not play into it. Chasing this high was a major component of how he interfaced with people
1.
And he's not alone. A lot of people are using the Discordian toolbox maliciously, selfishly.. they're out there, spewing racist shit, hurting people, high off the dopamine hit that you get from wielding power over someone.
So the OP's question is - is that something that Discordians should care about? Is it worth it to produce Discordian writings that help provide a breadcrumb trail away from being an edgelord dickhead? I mean, Discordianism belongs to us flesh and blood humans, it does not belong to the Three Dead Wiseguys who produced the texts we all fell in love with years ago.
As Popes, should we watch passively as the needle moves deeper and deeper into the hate trip? What if the Sacred Chao becomes a different kind of swastika, are you still cool with that, or is it worth resisting? When I see someone out there on the hate trip, should I get involved and try to inject a little compassion, or do I just back away and let racists have their playground all to themselves where they will grow and multiply?
And re-read the responses to the OP -- I don't think anybody in the thread says "Yes we need to correct everybody and get them to hold hands, we know what's right and wish to impose it on everybody".
I'm not here to say how one should interpret the Principia, or what views I'd rather see being dominant, it's about knowing that you are the majority and that there's people out there that are being pushed away because you'd rather not defile your perfect view of what Discordianism should be about. It's about being more open to other's interpretations.
We Discordians must stick Apart, as they say.
There are like 15 active users of this site, it's a stretch to call us the Majority. It's just easy to find our front door.
For what it's worth, if you hunt down any of the other discordian facebook groups / forums / IRC channels out there, you will also find stuff that repels you. I spent years trying to find other Discordian gathering points -- most of them are repellant as fuck.
And for what it's worth, if "being open to others interpretations" means being friendly with assholes and racists who are accelerating the harm and shit out there in the world... I'll pass.
