NAFR Sermon 16 / Rant 89: Echoes and Reflux

[Irreverend Hugh, KSC]

Sermon on Eristicism 16 / Rant 89:
Echoes of What You Heard Before

"Is fearr a bhi marbh na bhi 'nad thr?†ill ramhar."
[It is better to be dead than to be a fat slave. / ISS FyARa VEE MARav na VEEna TRAeel RAUR]
-Scottish Highlands Proverb

"You want bullcrap or witchcraft? You want suckery or sorcery?"
-Neopagan graffiti sprayed on someone's car

"How smooth must be the language of the whites, when they can make right look like wrong, and wrong like right."
-Makataimeshekiakiak (Black Hawk), 1834

"No process is possible in which the sole result is the transfer of energy from a cooler to a hotter body."
-What the Second Law of Thermodynamics actually says. (Don't believe those people who misrepresent it as "The entropy of a closed system cannot decrease." To wit, If 'order from disorder' is supposed to violate the 2nd law of thermodynamics, why is it ubiquitous in nature?)

"Mae 'y mhib yn smygu!"
[My pipe is smoking! /MAIya MEEBan SMUGGee!]
-Tequilarius Malignatus (quoting Bob's lost "Sermon to the Welsh")

Now pay some attention. The following is a concise summary of what I have said before...you know...during the previous sermons when you weren't paying attention. This is the second to the last 'sermon' that I will present. I must wind down this sermonizing project as others seem to have taken up the torch. A new era is dawning for Discordians. All I ask is that someday the rest of you all remember those of us irritant-word slingers who saw this dawn coming...people like the Good Reverend Roger (the Mad Prophet, Human Snafu, and Sack O' Hubris), and the Champion of Oppositional Defiance Disorder (and Scourge of Australia) Saint Trollax, and the rest. Sit back. Relax. And maybe let some of this sink in. And Remember, though St. Trollax may have disappeared from the Halls of Discordia, he is still out there practicing the art and science of the Walking Glitch. As for Roger, I can rest assured that he will not stop. The Roger device will keep preaching your ears and your eyes off. As for myself, I will be trying to write down all the damned sacred scriptures that Eris has dumped into my pineal gland. (She was nice enough to take them out of the heavy steel canisters first. So I am at least thankful for that.)

Perhaps the druids were right all along. Perhaps people should have been a little more vigilant in resisting and fighting off the human scourge known as empire. The modern Pagans often say that the Roman Empire never really collapsed. It just changed titles and management. Regardless of how you feel towards religion or towards Pagans, it is a statement to reflect upon. It refers to the fact that the revolution of the christs became twisted by the Paulists into a State Religion which justified first the Roman Empire and all later empires...even the later fascist attempts at building empires. The Celtic Gauls and Britons fought bitterly against empire for hundreds of years, eventually to succumb to the trojan horse of Paulist Christianity...and look where they are now. So, again, perhaps the druids were right.

However, the scourge of empire isn't just some vast collection of corporate and state enterprises out there in the world (despite it being a scourge and mournful plague that has killed more than all diseases in human history combined). The empire is also inculcated into you from childhood on up to the point that you think that it is a natural component of human socio-economic evolution. But if it is so natural, why does it have to be taught, inculcated, and forced?

If you paid attention to the sermon about grayfaces, then you know this line of reasoning: The empire is also inside your deepest thoughts, wrestling with your yearning to be free, even if you have forgotten how to think freely, or even if you have forgotten how you can live in freedom. It is so bad that even the very language we use reflects this. But language can be used as a tool of your yearning to find freedom as much as it can be a tool to control your mind. (Take heart here. The semanticians and their blathering theories about what a trap language can be are mostly wrong. Don't waste time with General Semantics*, unless you want more empire being shoved down your throat.) The moment you want to coerce someone else or make them agree with you, or the moment you allow yourself to be compromised, that is the empire inside you...and it comes with a whole set of voices in your head: the judge, the emperor, the god, the grayface, the false Eris, the pseudo-christs and all the rest that will try to get you to believe that something is horribly wrong with you if you don't like the way things are. You are a "heretic, filthy heathen, sinner," or you have some sort of "disorder." They will say "follow us." They will even convince you that they are you. And in a way, until you muster up enough strength to disown them, they ARE you. These voices must be silenced. You must reclaim your own mind. (Refer to the sermon about the rats to see how bad these voices and their supporters can get, if you are one of those rare individuals blessed with an integrated mind.)

But that's really nothing new to any of you who have even given a second to reflecting.

How to get out from under the stomping boots of empire that ring throughout your thoughts day in and night out? What to do when the massive stupidity of this society slips into your mind and makes you just want to curl up into a ball of tears and alcohol (or whatever your favorite substance is) consumption? How to actually take to heart the words of Eris and all of Her followers throughout the years? And how to go about tossing golden apples around at all of your snubbers? Lose your mind. Snap. Bounce around between the walls and the ceilings. Feel like tossing the ashtray out the window? Do so. Want to simply clear your lungs by shouting at three in the morning? Do so. See an area of society particularly vulnerable to and in need of a wrench being tossed into its machinery? You know what to do. You simply need to trust that you yourself can find a good way to do so. You don't need leaders or followers or ideas or theories or dogmas or catmas or gods or advertising slogans or shiny products or any of that. What you need is nonsense as your salvation. And if you don't know what that means yet, trust yourself to find out. Because it means something slightly different to each person and one person's truth is so much babble to the next person.

If you don't think you can ever be free then what are you doing here? You'd be better off spending your time watching cable television all day and collecting welfare in some trailor park somewhere. You'd be better off supporting the Real Amurricans(tm) and their Jesus Christ posing president Georgie Bush in his quest to inflict as much corporatism on the world as is humanly possible. (And that's a vast 'possible' considering the plague-like reach of him and his ilk.) Or you could simply sit there and watch the decline of people like little Billy once he takes up his proper meth habit with that girl next door. Or you could convert to Fundamentalist Christianity or Islam or the New Age and have your mind liquified into snot from the daily treatments of either 'the Word(tm)' or 'crystal therapy.' Or you could sit there and try to count the errant pixels on an aging computer screen. Or you could overdose on pie and have to be forklifted out of your home to visit the doctor who will tell you that it's only a matter of time before you draw the moon into your orbit. Or you could fall down a memory hole with the rope we had originally given you to hang yourself with just dangling there. Heh. There are more options for those of you who don't wish to be free. You could fall into all sorts of habits and activities. Perhaps that is what Eris wanted with you all along. But why should you even care what Eris wants anyway. It's not like She pays all that much attention.

But if you want to be free and are damned well at least trying to be, the list of things you could be doing or getting into or out of is endless. Just a little more endless than your imagination. Imagine that for a minute. [I'll wait.]

Okay?

You could spend your time doing worthwhile things like playing sink. Or learning how to get one over on the bosses. Or how to convince your neighbors that Bush is the stormtrooping Nazi anti-freedom machine that he really is. You could have a phage day...I won't list any examples of that here. I wouldn't want to imply that I myself could ever fall victim to such a thing myself. Especially since I consider the whole phage thing as more of an artform necessity than some mood that I pop in and out of. (Besides too many memories dealing with cayenne powder pranks would haunt me if I started on that tangent. And I really don't feel like invoking the White Mouse at the moment. I can only take so much at one time.) You could try to convince the coven of Wiccans next door that Eris is the Triple Goddess and that Bob is the Horned God - although Bob doesn't much do the horned bit much anymore since He smokes a pipe nowadays. You could show up at the local Baptist church and rail against the rising influx of godless Gypsies into the community. (That might just work since people seem to be tiring of beating that Satanic Panic dead horse.) If that is too far fetched (not all Baptists are THAT stupid), you could try to convince them that the theories of Intelligent Design are heresy and that they should be more concerned about the coming apocalypse that will destroy the world than with the genesis. Or maybe...

You could simply just wish to be left alone and likewise leave others alone. No shame in that, but do remember that society and all of its DUMB and DOOM still won't leave you alone so you might as well help get the ship aground so we can hack it apart and use it for fuel in our great Open Air Asylum of Discordia's Barbecue and Get-Our-Yuks-In-Before-the-Cabbages-Swamp-Us-Party. The cabbages, the DUMB, and the empire stand a real good chance of getting us all, you know. Not that they would ever get us all (they can't find us all, for one, even if THEY were that interested). It's just more useful to be a little on the paranoid side of things. It keeps the spice tasty in life. And, regardless, you should know that some of us aren't going without a fight or without a few yuks. So there. Chew on that. Or put it in Bob's pipe and watch Him smoke it.


-Irreverend Hugh, KSC, Co-Episkopos of the DSSS/PMM;
Chairperson of the Newly Reformed Erisian Liberation Front;
Facilitator of the Coven of Macha.

[march.24.2005]


*General Semantics was started in 1933 by the engineer Alfred Korzybski and made famous by followers like S.I. Hayakawa (of anti-protester fame). The idea of GS is that much damage to thought is perpetuated by language structure itself. Theorists of this ilk also get all hung up on the verb "to be" and claim that it is a source of much of both damaged thinking and evil actions. Semanticians today go further by using the "Sapir-Whorf" hypothesis of 'linguistic determinism' which posits that people's thoughts are determined by the categories made available by language. Thus the categories of reality are not 'in' the world but imposed by culture. This is, of course, wrong and blindly/stupidly so. Anyone who has even a cursory knowledge of cognitive studies can slice through the non-sequiturs and circular reasoning of their hypothesis. (Both Sapir and Whorf have been discredited. And Whorf especially was very misleading with his research. Why people still would still use their hypothesis probably has more to do with ideological concerns than with knowledge about both human thought and language.) Thought is NOT the same as language as is commonly known by linguists, cognitive scientists, psychologists, and artists/poets. Every attempt to prove otherwise has been shown to be false. And think about this: If language and thought were the same thing, or if language determined how one thought about the world, how could it be possible to ever coin new words, or even translate from one language to another? How could it be that you would write down a sentence but then scratch it out and start over because the words you picked were not exactly what you wanted to say? How could there even be a difference between what you wanted to say and the words you wrote? Evidence consistently shows that complex reasoning goes on all the time without language. General Semantics can be illuminating in some respects, but it is a dead end for inquiry which is adhered to religously by those who agree with its deterministic premises. GS also gets the gist of 'linguistic relativity' wrong. I could go on and on. Anyone with further need to discuss this should feel free to research it or contact me. Or you can go to the cognitive psychology thread.

[Horab Fibslager]

as always some good stuff to think on.

in regards to gs, someone said, and i quoted this in response to one of your more recent sermons - "every thought spoken is a lie". you hit it on teh nail, with out the floweryness of teh poet who wrote it.

in regards to teh entropy thing, the reason that doesn't work or at least isn;t observable(what you said doesn't work or show up) is because there is onlyone closed system, the whole of creation, or soemthign bigger than that. who can know who is within?

[Zurtok Khan]

You never cease to amaze, Hugh, my ever-loving shithead.  Whilst reading your sermon, I had a thought, quite a new thought, that before I had not thought to think! (okay, I'm over that now) The thought (uggh) is, that I am so willing to trust other people because I have never trusted myself.

This is my next project, and thank you Hugh, for bringing it to light, when it's really not what you were pointing at at all (of course, we all know only Babe Ruth hit what he pointed at...okay, okay, Emporer Norton did too).  I must trust myself.

No one else is going to do it, so good goddess damn, I might as well!

*goes off in a fervor of Hugh-love*

*sacrifices a virgin goat to Hugh*

*sacrifices Aini to Hugh*  (Yes, I know Aini sacrifice is not in vouge any more, but she's convenient, and doesn't fight as much as CHEF D does)

Okay Hugh, I'm over you now.  Damn Shithead.

[Irreverend Hugh, KSC]

You never cease to amaze, Hugh, my ever-loving shithead.  Whilst reading your sermon, I had a thought, quite a new thought, that before I had not thought to think! (okay, I'm over that now) The thought (uggh) is, that I am so willing to trust other people because I have never trusted myself.

This is my next project, and thank you Hugh, for bringing it to light, when it's really not what you were pointing at at all (of course, we all know only Babe Ruth hit what he pointed at...okay, okay, Emporer Norton did too).  I must trust myself.

No one else is going to do it, so good goddess damn, I might as well!

*goes off in a fervor of Hugh-love*

*sacrifices a virgin goat to Hugh*

*sacrifices Aini to Hugh*  (Yes, I know Aini sacrifice is not in vouge any more, but she's convenient, and doesn't fight as much as CHEF D does)

Okay Hugh, I'm over you now.  Damn Shithead.

That's it!

No More Crops For You.

[Zurtok Khan]

I had Crops?  Or maybe you meant I'm expelled from the Apple Corps...haha, I'm a Golden Apple.  FUCK YOU.

KAL-FUCKING-ISTI!

[Irreverend Hugh, KSC]

I had Crops?  Or maybe you meant I'm expelled from the Apple Corps...haha, I'm a Golden Apple.  FUCK YOU.

KAL-FUCKING-ISTI!

What she said.

[Zurtok Khan]

But I'm a boy, OPIE.

Sorry, I'm in a Semi-CHEF D mood tonight.

[Irreverend Hugh, KSC]

But I'm a boy, OPIE.

Sorry, I'm in a Semi-CHEF D mood tonight.

Hey man. I had nothing to do with any of that Apple stuff. What the hell do they know anyway? They don't have the secret handshake.

[/o\]

This was a most excellent read!

[East Coast Hustle]

RAH!

10/10

a fine vintage, Hugh.

[LMNO]

More tequila for Hugh!


Good stuff, my man.

[Ghost In The Machine]

That's some awesome shit.

Good to see you back, Hugh.

[agent compassion]

Where's that worship smiley when you need him?

Hugh for President!  

I can imagine the "Not a Fucking State of the Union Address" sermons now....

[Irreverend Hugh, KSC]

Where's that worship smiley when you need him?

Hugh for President!  

I can imagine the "Not a Fucking State of the Union Address" sermons now....

If they made me president of the USA, people should run as fast as they can because it would mean that my malice has access to the most destructive arsenal in the world.

[LMNO]

...instead of "stabbinations", you'd get "nukinations"