_________ _______ ______ /___ ___\ / __ \ / ____\ / / / /__\ / / / / / / __ / / __\ / / / / \ / / / /__/ /__/ /__/ /__/ THE ANNIHILATION FOUNTAIN A JOURNAL OF CULTURE ON THE EDGE... TEXT ONLY - ISSUE #2 The Annihilation Fountain & TAF Copyright c 1997-99 Neil MacKay ISSN 1480-9206 http://www.capnasty.org/taf/ the_annihilation_fountain@iname.com CONTENTS: --------- *BORDEN'S MILK AD TURNS SOUR *CRAFT *MONTREAL POOL ROOM *THE DOOM OF RELIGION *WARNING: THE BANK PRESIDENTS DON'T WANT YOU TO READ THIS *2 POEMS BY LOB *CONTRIBUTORS TO THIS ISSUE ************************************************************************ BORDEN'S MILK AD TURNS SOUR by Skumqueen ************************************************************************ Borden Dairies is currently running an ad campaign in the U.S. touting their milk as being superior to other brands, apparently in hopes people will be swayed by the charms of Elsie the Cow and overlook their ridiculously inflated prices. Nothing unusual there, but what Borden is saying in radio ads is disturbing to this writer. The ad features the voice of a young boy going on about what a rotten childhood he had because his mother bought some garden-variety milk instead of Borden's. "I grew up normal" he says. "Dad worked and Mom kept the house." Excuse me, but isn't that image of family life a bit out of date? Borden seems to be stuck in a 1950's time warp, portraying a Leave It To Beaver fantasy of the days when mothers were rarely potrayed working outside the home. I've nothing against dads being the sole wage-earner and moms being housewives, but to say this is what's normal is wrong and certainly not an accurate reflection of the diverse kinds of families in our society. This may seem like nitpicking to some, but I think it's a valid criticism considering the impact advertising has on people. Also, the line "Dad worked and Mom kept the house." is completely unnecessary for the ad to be effective, which makes me wonder if Borden is trying to sell the public more than just milk. The radio ad further insults listeners by intimating the boy's mother was neglectful in not purchasing their product for her precious son. The boy goes on to talk about how he's actually a grown man the size of a young boy, forever doomed to shopping for clothes in the kiddie section and having his mother caddy for him on the golf course - the tragicomic result of not drinking Borden milk. That's funny, didn't the ad mention two parents? Seems rather insulting to imply that dad is too clueless to notice junior isn't growing properly. Apparently Borden's oh-so-brilliant strategy is to first make parents feel bad about mothers working outside the home, then make 'em feel guilty for buying their offspring an inferior brand of milk. Sorry Borden, but this mother and consumer thinks this is udder nonsense. I am boycotting your products and hope others will join me in doing the same. {}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{} ************************************************************************ CRAFT by Mark Adiar ************************************************************************ Craft is one of those words with three meanings -- there is the physical activity of making things; then there is the made thing itself, a craft or conveyance of some sort; and also there is the `craft' item, something of parochial or extra cultural origin. The notion of quality in craft in the first sense, the working of material to produce an object, seems to have assumed a particular historic value, a kind of `then-not-now' sentimentality, as in `do you remember the days when things were built to last?' (no), or `they really took pride in what they were doing in those days' (really?), and, `can you imagine, they actually made this thing by hand?' (how else do you think they'd have done it?). There is now a very definite sense that the well made item is a thing of the past, and while I believe this to be untrue, I would nonetheless describe most current associations with this sense of the word craft as mythic. Mythic. The baby Moses, in order to be saved, is put (by his mother) into a small boat of reeds (an example of the second type of craft): he drifts off, gets found (by a princess) and grows up and starts the Bible. If it was someone else's myth you'd make comments about the film industry. Myths don't always have much to do with the facts but they have everything to do with the construction of how we see and understand things and, as we all know, the weigh scales of perception are calibrated in accordance with time and space. In the `good ol' days', things were properly made, and they were made to last. While the truth of the idea is questionable the mythic assertion is clear -- crafted items are a relic of when things were good. Crafted items are good. Crafted items are moral. You might very well ask how such equations are formulated, how morality is constructed, and the simple truth of the matter is that it is only a by-product of myth; ergo, control myth and you control morality. There are a lot of forces that act on us as individuals and as individuals in groups (it's not impossible) that we don't tend to think about on a daily basis unless they are particularly oppressive. For me, the big question has always been `why do people assume the things they do when other people in different times and places have thought and acted so very differently?' People, the myth tells us, used to feel differently about the way they made things and about the objects they surrounded themselves with. While this seems suspect to me, the sense of nostalgia for the halcyon days of yore does not. I daily swim through a world of junk and shit that doesn't even pretend to work when its new, let alone twenty years down the road, and I know from extensive personal experience that the production of all this crap gives its makers pleasure only on pay-day. You know it's true, I know it's true -- it's a universal experience. I point out with regret that it is something you can get used to. Some people even pretend that it's an economic necessity, all the while pretending that the production of throw away commodities is a sustainable and desirable use of the planet's limited resources, and these same pretenders strive to convince us that health in the abstract construction `economy' is necessary, if not equivalent to, the health of social groups. We are all familiar with the old arguments: it's a big world and we have to compete; everyone else is computerised; labour is too expensive; we are falling behind; modernise and reduce labour costs; get lean; get mean; reduce social costs as they are tax burdens; be `open for business'; remove barriers to trade and corporate profits and accept high levels of unemployment as necessary and unavoidable as it provides for a large and inexpensive labour pool. Last and not least, open borders to trade with countries with wage scales that don't even show up on a subsistence scale, countries where there are no labour laws, no environmental laws, and no barriers to healthy economies where the definition of a healthy economy is an economic reality isolated from physical reality. What a litany! While `economics' may be at the rotten heart of the devaluation of labour and craft the devaluation of physical labour and its products is complex because it undermines us at several levels for not only do we lose the use of things made but also, we lose the functional use of the making thing -- the body itself. For countless millennia the body was the basic tool. It evolved to work, and needs to work to enjoy good health. Our bodies define the problems (need for food, shelter...) and have, in the past, provided solutions. With the rise of the machine and the machine economy a more symbiotic relationship has developed because machines are useful and facilitate survival. Now, during hard times, it is not so much that machines are the problem but that the economy of machines is an economy of centralised wealth (it takes a great deal of money to build that industrial infastructure) and the people who benefit from it always desire to maintain and increase their wealth and authority. The abstract economy (and surely abstract it must be for can there be any justification for poverty in Canada except monstrous stupidity or greed?) which regulates the flow of wealth through the control of remunerated work has finally resulted in a situation where there is no symbiosis between the machine and the body because there are no jobs = no money = threatened survival. Several years ago I read a novel, titled Ulverton, by Adam Thorpe, in which he describes a carpenter who comes to recognise that his work, in this case a farm gate, is only complete when the farm gate will no longer be needed. He understood his `work' was an integration of the making of the object and that object's ongoing function. Twenty years down the road when he confronted that gate he would have to accept responsibility for it: `that's my work', he would think and you can damn well bet that he hoped it was still working because if it wasn't, word would get out and that would be that. One hungry carpenter and one aspect of craft located in place. While I'm not advocating hunger as an incentive for today's workforce (it is, regardless of what I advocate -- hear what the current workforce fears for it's future retirement) there may be a moral in the story with regards to the relations between labour and craft and survival. If moral codes are involuted rules for staying alive, crafts evolve over time in a similar way -- an object is built, improved on, altered and added to until it is perfect. This perfection is, however, conditional to the time, place and user (the world's finest stone tools would be of little use around the home today). It is critical to note that most objects in the past have been designed to enhance the user's chances of survival. Survival has always been the name of the game -- the teleology of labour. We now live in a situation where the existence of labour is threatened and with it, no doubt, the existence of the labourer. The finest craftspeople that ever inhabited this continent were Those natives that, `pre-contact', dwelt in those arctic regions that lie to the far north. Never was so much done by people with so little. In an environment hostile to human life (and just about every other form as well) these peoples and cultures succeeded, for millennia, in surviving and often thriving by making do with whatever was at hand when that whatever was precious little. By accommodating themselves to a world of strict economies they inhabited a region few people would even consider visiting. Imagine the skills and level of mental understanding necessary to build an ocean going craft from little sticks, bits of bone, and strips of skin when your only tools, other then your own body, were fashioned from stone, bone, sticks and skin. And such beautiful boats! Boats designed after the individual proportions of the bodies of the builders. Long, sleek, fast boats designed and built for hunting and killing anything and everything that could be eaten, worn, burned as fuel, or turned into building materials. These were people who clearly understood the absolutes of evolved design and practised craft. A few years ago I had an argument with a friend about twentieth century art and it's odd relationship with it's host culture. It has been (absurdly) argued that the role of the modern artist is to stand outside of his or her own situation and analyse it critically. Questions of intellectual suitability or discipline aside, it seems bizarre that artists' should be called upon to first understand all of their own assumptions,` delete' them, and then objectively look around to make critically inductive observations. From what point of view? The tabula rasa is scratched upon: it is passive, not active. It could even be argued that this pursuit is itself peculiarly `western', or scientific, and inherently suspect. It's not that critical thought is not to be admired but it is questionable that it be `a priori' in all production of art. For many years now I've been having a great deal of difficulty discerning just what is and isn't art. If you have as much trouble as I do in buying into the artist-as-social-critic myth then, like me, you've been wondering just what does define an object as notable, and when does notability graduate into art? When we see artefacts from other times and places they either `touch' us, or they don't. By coincidence I have recently been exposed to objects from Java. Their funerary and ritual craft in particular hold pride of place in the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Akin to their distant arctic cousins the kayak, these long, keenly elegant dugouts were built as spiritual taxis for the transporting of youth to adulthood or for the conveyance of all to the next world. I believe that these objects would normally be described as `craft items'. I have a sense that we call non-critical cultural objects `craft' and critical cultural objects `art'. A fundamental categorisation of things seems to have been lost here -- need. I would hazard a guess that, simply put, most of the best art and craft objects derive from necessity and locate their sense of quality in the degree of excellence they achieve in fulfilling the requirements defined by the maker's awareness of the object's function in responding to the user's need. Does this obviate the question about the difference between art and craft? Perhaps not, but what an idle question based on such trite thinking. There are great energies wasted in identifying and naming the types of work that result from the creative impulse. That art objects and craft items are differentiated according to components of analysis and passion has far more to do with professional partisanship than meaning. As Marcus Aurelius put it, there is great pleasure to be had from the expert execution of a learned craft. {}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{} ************************************************************************ MONTREAL POOL ROOM by Arthur and Marilouise Kroker ************************************************************************ 3:00 a.m on an early Sunday morning, and I'm parking my flesh on a silver stool in the back-end of the Montreal Pool Room. Not that there's a pool table, there hasn't been for years. Just a slabby wide open space with tin silver counters running along the walls, video poker machines, glaring fluorescent lights, and a grimy order counter jammed by the front door. The kind of lunch counter where you flick your body off Boulevard St. Laurent, smell 100 years of fried grease, burnt onions, sour relish, and just know that you've got to have some. So, I've got a copy of the _Journal de Montreal_ for street-time reading pleasure about all the crime and the deals and the dead and the stars and the Rock Machine biker wars and the politics gone wrong and sometimes gone right that make up Montreal. Pucker your lips into the just-so-incorrect east-end tongue, and order a couple of chien chauds "all dressed and make that double onion, please," one big bag of ketchup-drowned frites, and some hard luck coffee. When you get your food, which is instantly since this a cash on delivery and fuck you buddy kind of place, you take your mouth and your eyes and your cooled down nerves to that empty stool at the back, vector a chien chaud, taste those perfect fries, and settle back for a good data-read of the _Journal de Montreal_. Except you never get that far because Robo-Dean appears at the door, spots you right away, and hustles over with breaking news on Nietzsche. He's got great street-smart body armour: shaved head, dark shades for better x-ray vision, long black leather coat, and the tattoo SPIT stitched across his forehead. But that's all beside the point because he's in a hyper-trance mood: no sleep, just the right mix of happy-time drugs to open up the wonder pores, and a multi-task read-through copy of Nietzsche's _Genealogy of Morals_ in his hand. Maybe a wild-eyed vision of Nietzsche in his last Turin days, the time when he just finally stopped writing and went home to the silence of his inner self, doing one final write on his body and mind and nerves and soul in ruins. Sort of like a virus that sometimes goes underground for a time, and just sometimes also slips out of the air to take possession of another wandering minstrel of the night. Like Robo-Dean who doesn't even wait for hailing distance, but shouts across the Pool Room. "Hey Cloner! Wake up, it's Nietzsche time. Did you ever read that passage in the Genealogy, the one where Nietzsche talks about the pleasures of cruelty? About how only pain hurts, and so the ascetic priest puts burs in our flesh, little memory-reminders, to keep us all in line?" Now I wasn't none too happy to get dream-jumped on my fries and hot dog and Journal, but I'm a sucker for Nietzsche, and if he's decided to pay me a visit on this early morning of the Lord in the Montreal Pool Room and in the likely person of Robo-Dean, then what the hell, let's get to it, and see what visions crazy, sad, mad, and maybe just keen-eyed wise this visitation of Nietzsche is all about. Because I know this. It would be just like Nietzsche to flesh-morph in the earthly form of Robo-Dean, saunter through the door of the Montreal Pool Room, and lay down to some new aphorism tracks for the late 90s. And it's sort of cool. Just when you think you've left Nietzsche long behind and you're settling into your own groove of maybe not settling for less but settling nonetheless, he suddenly whomps up in the middle of a night-time street scene, cackling and groaning and whining and bitching. And you don't necessarily want to listen to him, you may not even want to read him anymore, but he's got your cell phone number, and you know you're netted in his spider's web. Nietzsche even predicted it in advance. He once said: "Now that you've read me, the problem is to get rid of me." Or, as Kathy Acker would say: "Why that little fucker." So, with just a little murmur of what-are-you-doing-in-my-face discontent, I jump Robo-Dean with some fast theory. "Why not? Nietzsche is the medium. Not just little burs, but now digital burs, little electronic trodes cut into the flesh." Robo-Dean flashes a jack-happy smile. I've made a connect. Channeling Nietzsche -------------------- And I was right because Robo-Dean sits right down on the next stool, takes some of my fries, and tells me straight-out that he's got a story to tell. Something about channeling Nietzsche. But first, he looks up at the mega-sunshine fluorescents and says: "It's too bright here for Nietzsche. Let's go to Nausea." Which was fine with me because Nausea is a Nietzsche-like bar on Rue Ste. Catherine. Definitely not a cyber-cafe, it's where all the prostitutes and transexuals and drug dealers and pimps and philosophy students and slumming hackers from Softimage or maybe even Discreet Logic's latest mutation, Behavior, go to get one last fix of night-time spirits to see their way through to the morning light. A shot of scotch in one hand and a beer chaser in the other, Robo-Dean rocks on his heels and in that rabid voice that just jackhammers away at your nervous system with no apparent breathing holes, he looks me in the eye and asks: "Have you every channeled anyone?" When I admit right off that I haven't, Robo-Dean declares, "Well, I have. Last night I channeled Nietzsche, and he's got a message for you, actually a disk." Stranger things have never happened, and so I listen intently Robo-Dean's story of a nighttime rendez-vous with Nietzsche in the telematic sky. "It was in the middle of last night when the telephone rang, two rings. I get up, check out the caller I.D. on the screen, see that it's Byte Head in San Francisco, and call him right back on the principle that one wake up call deserves another. And Byte Head is delirious. Says that he just might be schizzed on a diet of Ecstasy but that he had a really haunting dream of channeling Nietzsche, talking to him directly, and really not having much to say because it was a long time since he had read his philosophy, and an even longer time before he communed with the spirits. Which turned out to be just happy jack-rabbit fine with Nietzsche since it seemed in some cosmic web mixup, he had flesh-connected with the wrong guy. It was Robo-Dean not Byte Head that was his body vehicle of choice. And since he was busy with a write for a new genealogy of the dead, would Byte Head mind passing on some info to Robo-Dean. Which was very simply that Robo-Dean should toggle into his jet black and customized yellow lightning Powerbook, and download a file he would find there. He'd recognize it right away. It was named: "Digital Nerve." Well, not to put a too-pretty point on it, but Robo-Dean was definitely not amused, told Byte Head to channel off, and slammed his body back to sleep. Until this evening when he thought again of this dreamy conversation, and on a Sunday lark, checked out his cyber-wheels for signs of the Nietzsche. Sure enough, there was the file "Digital Nerve" with an encryption guide that it was to be delivered to me personally, and that I might be found chomping dogs and fries at the Montreal Pool Room. Robo-Dean hands me the disk, and I flip it into a vector portal at Nausea, see a cute 4-D multiplex image of Nietzsche as he might have looked in his love affair with Lou Salome days, and read what looks at first as an introduction to a new text titled, "The Digital Nerve." Digital reality as the final story of Christianity. Clonal engineering, synthetic chromosomes, burning new genetic codes into the flesh: what are these but last signs of the viciously naive will. Exhausted with life, tired of dragging flesh on its death-march to the grave, the will fatigued, in lassitude, unable to believe in its own myth, unwilling either to go forward or to close time's door, the will declines to will, the will abandoned to the will-not-to-will. Digital reality not as simulation, but as an alternative reality, an artificially engineered reality of clonal flesh and synthetic nerves and android chromosomes. Two wills, two bodies for the millennium, divided and at war. The tortured body of the last remains of will-less Christian flesh, and the cynical will of the digital nerve. Has the will become a clone of itself? Which will triumph? The body as a vivisection-machine? Or the digital nerve as a successor species to a humanity taking cynical pleasure in willing its own disappearance? How long can the body tolerate its radical separation into two species-forms? And what beast of the virtual will arise from the graveyard of this meeting of great pity and great nausea? The Genealogy of Digital Morals as the tombstone of Christianity in its final resurrection-effect as the sign of the virtual beast.The epochal dreams of digital reality are not so far away from the deserts of North Africa in the fourth century, that moment when St. Augustine triumphantly severed flesh from spirit, beginning the search for our successor species, first in the torture chambers of absolute religion, then in the war zones of absolute ideology, and finally in the futurist algorithms of absolute technotopia. But I anticipate Camus: the union of absolute justice and absolute reason equals murder in the name of freedom. The question remains: Is digital reality the final act of species murder, the (human) blood sacrifice necessary to inaugurate the reign of the post-human? But that would be a question of myth, and mythical thought, most of all, is denied by the feverish and calculated positivism of the new codes. Nihilism today speaks in the algorithmic tongue of the digital nerve. The Digital Nerve? Life as an edge between Nausea and the Montreal Pool Room. ~~~~~ Montreal Pool Room was originally published in: CTHEORY THEORY, TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE VOL 20, NO 1-2 Event-scene 47 97/07/30 Editors: Arthur and Marilouise Kroker {}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{} ************************************************************************ THE DOOM OF RELIGION by Paul Laurendeau ************************************************************************ Religion is doomed. It is a huge shipwreck sinking in a stinking swamp. Religiosity manifests itself in our contemporary culture as efficiently and accurately as the race of the glorious chicken with its head cut off. Religiosity is a dying out conditionned reflex. Claude_Adrien Helvˇtius (1715-1771) had noticed that fact a while ago: "In relation to religious truths, reason loses all her forces against two grand missionaries, Example and Fear." (Helvˇtius 1970: 426). Consequently, it is still difficult to speak about religion with the cold mind of the philosophical perspective even today. Try to explain to people that god is nothing other than an old fart fading away from its initial source and observe the reaction! This is mainly due to the principal strategy of religion, that tends to root itself in the deepest of our irrationalities, this, of course, totally in accordance with the purposes of its crooked agents. "Superstitious persons, who know better how to rail at vice than how to teach virtue, and who strive not to guide men by reason, but so to restrain them that they would rather escape evil than love virtue, have no other aim than to make others as wretched as themselves; wherefore it is nothing wonderful, if they be generally troublesome and odious to their fellow-men." (Spinoza 1981: 206 - published in 1677) In other terms the champions of religiosity behave as a bunch of muddy bullies allergic to a clean piece of cloth. Towards that irrationalistic attitude of religious prozelits, the philosophical position put forward here is the one of Historical Materialism: "Historical Materialism does not fight religion directly; from its higher vantage point it understands and explains religion as a natural phenomenon under definite conditions. But through this very insight it undermines religion and foresees that with the rise of a new society religion will disappear." (Pannekoek 1948: 22 - published in 1938) I will try to present briefly here the long ugly path towards that disappearance. First, it is important to mention that all modern monotheist religions, despite the oppositions they stubbornly perpetuate around their details and specificity's are, from the philosophical point of view, fundamentally similar garbage. Being the belief in the existence of a supernatural spiritual being creator of the world (Mister G, for Grotesque) they are all of the same variety of OBJECTIVE IDEALISM, namely the belief in the objective existence of independent spiritual entities. The main representative of that conception in philosophy was Mister Dummy Asshole Plato in person, the most awfully odoriferous stinkface of the history of known philosophy. Thus, religion has not always been an objective idealism. "Religion is human nature reflected, mirrored in itself." (Feuerbach 1957: 63). Through time, religion DEVELOPED to become the flatulent objective idealism it is today. This development LEADS DIRECTLY AND INEXORABLY TO ATHEISM, as I will try to show it now. The millennial development of religion could be summarized in five broad successive steps: ANIMISM -- POLYTHEISM -- (MONO)THEISM -- DEISM -- ATHEISM Let us describe all these steps: 1) There are two opposed types of ANIMISM: HYLOZOISM is the attribution of a zoomorphic (i.e. animal-like) or anthropomorphic (i.e. human-like) life to an object of nature. FETICHISM is the anthropomorphization of a material object by a material and social action (statues, totems). If we examine any philosophical grounding for such beliefs, we will find in it crude attempts to determine the chains of causality in a complex unknown tangled universe. "Another disposition which serves to deceive the savage man, which will equally deceive those whom reason shall not enlighten on these subjects, is the fortuitous concurrence of certain effects, with causes which have not produce them, or the co-existence of these effects with certain causes which have not the slightest connexion [sic] with them. Thus the savage attributes bounty of the will to render him service, to any object whether animate or inanimate, such as a stone of a certain form, a rock, a mountain, a tree, a serpent, an owl, etc., if every time he encounters these objects in a certain position, it should so happen that he is more than ordinarily successful in hunting, that he should take an unusual quantity of fish, that he should be victorious in war, or that he should compass any enterprise whatever, that he may at that moment undertake." (D'Holbach 1970: 168 - published in 1770) The animist phenomenon common to FETICHISM and HYLOZOISM is introjection, namely that tendency human beings have to subjectivize his objective environment, and to objectivize himself. Introjection ONTOLOGIZES the gnoseological process of the interaction between subject and object (see my previous contribution to the ANNIHILATION FOUNTAIN for the distinction between ONTOLOGY and GNOSEOLOGY. If you are too lazy to click there right now, just fuck off: I mean here that human being is treating his activity of knowledge as if it was an independent part of the external world). Consequently to introjection, (human) life is attributed to the non living, and the human being builds his first DUALISM that way. "The introjection brought dualism with all its problems and contradictions. Let us look at its consequences already at the lowest state of civilization. On the basis of experience introjection takes place not only into fellow-man but also into fellow-animals, into fellow-things, into trees, rocks, etc.: this is animism. We see a man sleeping; awakened he says he was elsewhere; so part of him rested here, part left the body temporarily. If it does not return, the first part is rotting away, but the other part appears in dream, ghostly. So man consists of a perishable body and a non-perishing spirit." (Pannekoek 1948: 42 - published in 1938) 2) Through millennia, such a situation slowly reversed itself to become POLYTHEISM. Polytheism is a multitude of MONISMS: a god activating the ocean, another god activating the volcano, each god and goddess being deeply fusioned in its material source. In the same time, these mythological gods and goddesses are highly anthropomorphic. Sextus Empiricus (1961: 91) wrote of them at the end of the second century that "whereas it is customary with us to revere the gods as being good and immune from evil, they are presented by the poets as suffering wounds and envying one another". Everybody will remember having jerked off or played mandoline on mythology in their teenage years. "Poetical", oh yeah! The acknowledgment of that poetical dimension of the grasp of natural phenomena is crucial for an accurate understanding of the POLYTHEIST phase. "The imagination being thereby continually kept in action, nature was held in entire subjection to the empire of poesy, which enlivened and invigorated every part of the universe. The summits of the mountains, the wide extended plains, the impenetrable forest, the sources of the rivers, and the depths of the seas, were peopled by the Oreades, the Fauns, the Napae, the Hamadryades, the Tritons, and Nereides. The gods and goddesses lived in society with mortals, took a part in their feasts, their wars, and their amours; Neptune supped with the king of Ethiopia. The Nymphs and Heroes sat down among the Gods. Latona had her altars. The deified Hercules espoused Hebe. These celebrated heroes inhabited the fields and the groves of Elysium." (Helvˇtius 1969, vol.1: 67-68 - published in 1773) With these anthropomorphizations of specific elements of the natural environment represented by that myriad of human-like gods and goddesses localized and fusioned with the unknown element they incarnate, THE REST OF ORDINARY REALITY IS DE-SPIRITUALIZED. They are getting less (dum)mystical in a sense with these multitudes of divinities fooling around everywhere. Faith was in the first phase a dense ocean. It is now simply a pack of creeping roaches with flat material spaces between them. The omnipresent animist dualism passes in a plurality of localized monisms. The spiritual wrapping of the world is cracking like the surface of a dried out dung. The pluralist-monist perception of POLYTHEISM is then already a solid abstraction compared to the precedent stage. Even if the gods and goddesses it produces continue to be projections of anthropomorphic characteristics in natural phenomena, they are clear abstractions. Ludwig Feuerbach (1804-1872): "All religions, however positive they may be, rest on abstraction; they are distinguished only in that from which the abstraction is made. Even the Homeric gods, with all their living strength and likeness to man are abstract forms; they have bodies, like men, but bodies from which the limitations and difficulties of the human body are eliminated. The idea of a divine being is essentially an abstracted, distilled idea. It is obvious that this abstraction is no arbitrary one, but is determined by the essential stand-point of man. As he is, as he thinks, so does he make his abstraction." (Feuerbach 1957: 97 - published in 1841) Eventually this pantheon of gods and goddesses will see the emergence of one god among them, as their king or leader (Zeus for the Greeks, Jupiter for the Romans, Wotan for the Germanic tribes, etc). An important factor in that evolution is that pantheons are generally eclectically constituted through the contact of several cultures on long periods of time. The mythological intermixings, often consecutive to very acute wars and conflicts between tribes and peoples, lead to forms of competition between faiths. This "my god is better than yours" dynamics is the intellectual breeding ground in which the unavoidable turd of monotheism eventually emerged. Baruch de Spinoza (1632-1677) noticed that transition in the so called "holy (shmoly)" Scriptures, when it is referred to "...the highest and supreme God, or (to use the Hebrew phrase) the God of Gods. Thus in the canticle of Exodus (ch.15 v.11) [Moses] said, "Who is like unto thee, O Lord, among the Gods?" And Jethro says, (ch.18 v.11), "Now I know that the Lord is greater than all the Gods," as much as to say, "At last I am forced to admit to Moses that Jehovah is greater than all the Gods and his power is without equal." (Spinoza 1991: 82 - published in 1670) 3) With MONOTHEISM, we eventually move back toward a unique DUALISM: God on one side, the world on the other. But that dualism is qualitatively distinct from the one of the animist phase, since God is "in the sky" rather than everywhere on earth. By eliminating pluralism and monism(s), that new religious sensitivity terminates the movement of de-spiritualization of the material world. One can summarize that secular movement in the nice and polite terms, we owe to Paul Henri Thiry, Baron d'Holbach (1723-1789): "Such was the fate of man's imagination in the successive ideas which he either formed to himself, or which he received upon the divinity. The first theology of man was grounded on fear, modeled on ignorance: either afflicted or benefited by the elements, he adored these elements themselves and extended his reverence to every material, coarse object; he afterward rendered his homage to the agents he supposed presiding over these elements; to powerful genii; to inferior genii; to heroes, or to men endowed with great qualities. By dint of reflection, he believed he simplified the things in submitting the entire of nature to a single agent - to a sovereign intelligence - to a spirit - to a universal soul, which puts this nature and its parts in motion. In recurring from cause to cause, man finished by losing sight of every thing, and in this obscurity, in this dark abyss, he placed his God, and formed new chimeras which will afflict him until a knowledge of natural causes undeceives him with regard to those phantoms he had always so stupidly adored." (D'Holbach 1970: 170 - published in 1770) With the institution of the modern monotheisms, the religious development will now build itself around the characteristics of that unique God. The first monotheist phase is THEISM, the anthropomorphization of an invisible spiritual being, able to act on man, to punish or to reward, to get angry or become compassionate, to say to such prophet to eat shit, to the other to fuck his daughter, to the third one to gut his child, like a real Lord or a genuine Father would do. Highly historicized and anthropomorphic is "the theism which regards the Supreme Being as a personal being. But personal theism conceives God as a personal being, separated from all material things; it excludes from him all development..." (Feuerbach 1957: 97). God is human-like but he does not live, die, or fuck with human beings like the gods of the polytheist mythologies use to do. That situation is due, of course, to his status of spiritual (i.e. non material) being. The three main modern monotheisms were initially THEISMS. Early idealist philosophers (like shitface Plato -I hate the son-of-a-bitch- and his ass-licker cretin Plotinus) were theists as well: "The religion of Abraham appears to have originally been a theism imagined to reform the superstition of the Chaldeans; the theism of Abraham was corrupted by Moses, who availed himself of it to form the Judaical superstition. Socrates was a theist, who, like Abraham, believed in divine inspirations; his disciple, Plato [Asshole! - P.L.], embellished the theism of his master with the mystical colors which he borrowed from the Egyptian and Chaldean priests, and which he modified himself in his poetical brain. The disciples of [butthead - P.L.] Plato such as Proclus, Jamblichus, Plotinus, Porphyrus, etc. were true fanatics plunged in the grossest superstition. In short, the first doctors of Christianity were Platonists, who combined the Judaical superstition, reformed by the Apostles or by Jesus, with Platonism. Many people have looked upon Jesus as the true theist, whose religion has been by degrees corrupted. Indeed in the books which contain the law which is attributed to him, there is no mention either of worship, or of priests, or of sacrifices, or of offerings, or of the greater part of the doctrine of actual Christianity, which has become the most prejudicial of all the superstitions of the earth. Mahomet, in combating the polytheism of his country, was only desirous of bringing back the Arabs to the primitive theism of Abraham and of his son Ishmael, and yet Mahometism is divided into SEVENTY TWO sects. All this proves that theism is always more or less mingled with fanaticism, which sooner or later finishes by producing ravages and misery." (D'Holbach 1970: 257-258 - published in 1770) The theist phase is the one with the most sophisticated clerical organization since the God-with-a-will needs flunkies to interpret and dictate to the mass of reluctant and fidgety ass-lickers what that will is. Any society with a highly sophisticated clergy is at the peak of the theist phase. In such cases we are given the opportunity to observe another type of anthropomorphization of the divinity: the god-churchy! "The priests [...] found their religion on revelation, and declare themselves the interpreters of that revelation. When anyone is the interpreter of a law, he changes it at his pleasure, and at length becomes the author of it. From the times the priests charge themselves with announcing the decrees of heaven, they were no longer men, but divinities. It is in them, and not in god, that men believe. They can in his name command the violation of every law contrary to their interest, and the destruction of every authority that rebels against their decisions." (Helvˇtius 1969, vol.2: 150 - published in 1773) In the theist phase, religiosity loses all the dimension of free-minded poeticity it might have had in the polytheist period. Jerk-off and mandoline are forbidden from now on! The ideology of theism is not free-minded poetry anymore and not free-minded investigative activity yet. The God-with-a-will accepts neither metaphorical delirious nor rational learning. "What does the priest persecute? Learning. Why? Because a man of learning will not believe without examination; he will see with his own eyes, and is hard to be deceived. The enemies of learning are the bonze, the dervise, the bramin, in short, every priest of every religion" (Helvˇtius 1969, vol.1: 350). But, from the strict philosophical perspective, it is clear that theism was also a mode of logical organization filled with mysticism and irrationality. The movement of abstraction already described perpetuates itself: "There the Chaldeans searched for the divinity by way of abstraction, not knowing what to affirm about it; and they advanced without demonstrations and syllogisms, and tried to penetrate further by brushing aside obstacles, furrowing the field and clearing the forest, by a forceful denial of every species and predicate whether comprehensible or secret. Plato [Shitface! - P.L.] searched for it by alternately tearing down and building up barriers, so that the inconsistent and floating species would remain as in a network held in a row of definitions; for he considered that superior things exist by participation, similitude and reflection in inferior things, and that inferior things according to their greater degree of dignity and excellence exist by their participation in superior things; and he considered that the truth is in the one and the other according to a certain analogy, order and scale in which the lowest degree of the superior order joins the highest degree in the inferior order. In this way, by traversing the intermediary degrees, he contributed a progression from the lowest in nature to the highest, a progression from evil to good, from darkness to light, from pure potency to pure act. Even Aristotle boasted of being able to arrive at the desired prey by means of the footprints and vestiges that could be traced when from effect he wished to reascend the cause. However most of the time (and more than all the others who preoccupied themselves in such a chase) he lost the way, hardly knowing how to distinguish between the vestiges Finally, some theologians, nurtured in the doctrine of various sects, seek the truth of nature in all its natural and specific forms; and they consider that it is through these forms that the eternal essence specifically and substantially perpetuate the everlasting generation and mutation of things called into existence by those who create and build them..." (Bruno 1964c: 224 - published between 1583 and 1585) At a certain moment of its development (namely in the early Middle-Age, as far as good old rotten western culture is concerned) the main problem of theist theology has been to perpetuate the belief in a God in socio-historical contexts more and more de-spiritualized by the progress of techniques and knowledge. The theist God became more and more abstract and, in the purpose of imposing faith over reason, delirious over reflection, stupidity over intelligence, hot-dog over salad, theologists worked to make of that supreme being a total challenge for the understanding. One of the main constituents of that strategy of irrationalist ontology of God was the use of incompatible characteristics in the definition of his essence: ""Ut sic intelligamus Deum, si possumus, quantum possumus, sine qualitate bonum, sine quantitate magnum, sine indigentia creatorem, sine situ praesidentem, sine loco ubique totum, sine tempore semp itenum". ("We must understand God, if we can and in so far as we can, as being good without quality, as being great without quantity, as being creator without necessity, as presiding without throne, as being everywhere without space, as being eternal without time".)" (Saint Augustine (354-430) quoted in Plekhanov 1967: 11) 4) The last step in abstracting the supreme being leads to DEISM i.e. the elimination of all the anthropomorphic powers assigned to god within faiths such as the three main monotheisms. That movement seems to start with the disparition of tyrannic will in the supreme being. The tyrannic figure remains sometimes under the form of a "devil" (which is often nothing other than a former god trashed in the abstracting process). Helvˇtius (1970: 257, footnote) mentions the following ethnological curiosity: "In the city of Bartam, the inhabitants offered their first fruits to the evil spirit, and nothing to the great Deity, who, they say, is good, and stands in no need of these offerings". It is clear that in such an intermediary situation, the tyrannic anthropomorphic god is getting replaced in the supreme position by a more abstract "good" entity toward which no religious fuss and servile butt-kissing is required. When such a movement of abstraction of the deity is totally completed, we reach DEISM: God is "there", it determines and created the world but does not act anymore as a FORCE on or within that world. "One is a theist if one supposes that this transcendent force is nevertheless immanent after some fashion in what there is, continuing to affect it one way or another. If, on the other hand, one holds the force to be strictly transcendental, and excludes it from the world once made, then one is a deist." (Nkrumah 1964: 8-9) Consequently, in the deist vision, God has no human characteristic such as pity or anger. It is not a father or a lord since it does not have a sex or any human characteristic whatsoever. It does not dictate orders anymore. We passed from EAT SHIT to SHIT HAPPENS, so to say!. The god is rather some form of fly-floating spiritual entity, calmly and silently constituting the inner structure of existence. We cannot talk to it through prayer and the notion of "act of God" becomes meaningless. Consequently, the connection of the believer to it is not to be mediated by any body of priests whatsoever. The churchies are considered meaningless parasitic defenders of an obsolete cult by deism. Helvˇtius describes the consequences of the transition from theism to deism on priesthood as follows: "When it is left to God to take his own vengeance and to punish heretics; and the inhabitants of the earth do not arrogate to themselves the right of judging offenses against heaven; in short, when the precept of toleration becomes a precept of public instruction, the priesthood having no longer any pretence for persecuting mankind, fomenting the people to rebel, and usurping the temporal power, their ambition will be extinct. Then, divested of their ferocity, they will no longer curse their sovereigns, nor arm a Ravaillac, nor open the gates of heaven to regicides." (Helvˇtius 1969, vol.2: 383) God being, in the deist view, independant from any clergy falsely interpreting its "reality", the knowledge we have of it is private, undirect and unclear. Then a very difficult scholastic problem appears in the intellectual representations of deist believers, specially when arguing with theists: WITHOUT ANY POWERFULL CLERGY TO BACK THEIR VIEWS AND KICK THEIR ENEMIES ASSES, DEISTS HAVE TO PROVIDE A CONVINCING EXPLANATION FOR ALL THE ANTHROPOMORPHIC CHARACTERISTICS GIVEN TO THE GOD OF THE THEIST PHASE IN SACRED TEXTS THEY USUALLY STILL ACKNOWLEDGE. The deist philosopher Spinoza is the champion in that type of scholastic bullshit: to him the supreme being simply had the "cleverness" to make itself understandable to the narrow mental representations of the human pygmies it was inspiring: "It is therefore by no means surprising that God adapted himself to the imagination and preconceived beliefs of the prophets, and that the faithful have entertained very diverse ideas about God [...]. And it is again not at all surprizing that the sacred books frequently speak so inexactly about God, attributing to him hands, feet, eyes, ears, mind movement, and even emotions such as jealousy, pity, and so forth, and depticting him as a judge sitting on a royal throne in heaven, with Christ on his right hand. For they are speaking in accordance with the undestanding of the common people, in whom Scripture seek to inculcate obedience, not learning." (Spinoza 1991: 218 - published in 1670) That elitist conception of the propagation of "faith" hides its internal contradictions with difficulties. Struggling to ground the credibility of the deist spiritual non-anthropomorphic supreme being, Spinoza is forced, within the implacable rationalist logic of his, which is tearing apart the consistency of his scholastics, to say things that discredit the very old Judeo-Christian religious tradition and that we could translate more clearly in the following terms: theists are mere morons! "All who have any smattering of education know that God does not have a right hand or a left hand, that he neither move or is at rest, nor is he in any particular place, but is absolutely infinite, and contains within himself all perfections. These truths, I say, are known by those whose judgement is formed from the perceptions of pure intellect, and not from the way the imagination is affected by their outward senses. This latter is the case with the masses, who therefore imagine God as corporeal, holding royal sway from his throne in the vault of heaven above the stars - which they believe to be at not great distance from the earth." (Spinoza 1991: 136 - published in 1670) Any deist reading the Talmud, Bible or Coran is shocked by how gross and stinkily human-like the theist god can be. Deism rejects that dimension and tries at the same time to stay within the standard monotheist culture. A delicate gig to perform. The major intellectual crisis in religious representations that constitutes the passage fron theism to deism makes of the new supreme being a very puzzling entity to conceptualize. The crucial question of its relationship to humankind becomes suddenly a highly complicated problem. If God has no contact whatsoever with us, how the fuck can we even know its existence... or trust that it exists? The republican quaker Thomas Paine (1737-1809), described the God of deism in the following terms: "We can know God only through his works. We cannot have a conception of any one attribute but by following some principle that leads to it. We have only a confused idea of his power, if we have not the means of comprehending something of its immensity. We can have no idea of his wisdom, but by knowing the order and manner in which it acts. The principles of sciences lead to this knowledge; for the Creator of man is the Creator of science; and it is through that medium that man can see God, as it were, face to face." (Paine 1984: 187 - published in 1794) "We can know God only through his works". It is the initial clock-ticker of Newton, the "Dieu" of Voltaire, the Supreme Being of the Free-Masonnery, the quaking source of the Quakers. The belief in the possibility for God and Human beings to talk directly to each other like Jack and Jill on the orchard's hill is shortcircuited by deism. As a corrolary, deism ends up seeing explicitely the traditional theology of the three main monotheisms as irrational anthropomorphic and immoral superstitions: "But the Christian story of God the Father putting his son to death, or employing people to do it (for that is the plain language of the story) cannot be told by a parent to a child; and to tell him that it was done to make mankind happier and better is making the story still worse - as if mankind could be improved by the example of murder; and to tell him that all this is a mystery is only making an excuse for the incredibility of it. How different is this to the pure and simple profession of Deism! The true Deist has but one Deity, and his religion consists in contemplating the power, wisdom, and benignity of the Deity in his works, and in endeavoring to imitate him in everything moral, scientifical, and mechanical." (Paine 1984: 51 - published in 1794) Deism eventually scraps all the endlessly tangled folk-lore of the Talmud/Bible/Coran. It is simpler because it is more abstracted from life. The fart is beginning to seriously fade away with deism. With the emergence of deism, theology, the "science of god" entered a major "epistemological" crisis. In the strict philosophical sphere, Spinoza was definitely the first major deist thinker. At the beginning of the personnal reign of the very Catholic Louis XIV, bringing the thought of Descartes to its logical consequences, Spinoza wrote: "Although theology declares that God accomplishes many acts through his good pleasure and in order to display his power to many, however, since those things that depend solely on his good pleasure are not known except by divine revelation, they must not be admitted in the Philosophy where only what Reason dictates is investigated, to avoid confusion between Philosophy and Theology." (Spinoza 1961: 82 - written in 1663) Slyly using the strategy of splitting a theist theology from a deist philosophy, Spinoza puts God under the lens of rational investigation, as he would do with a vulgar squashed fly. The real issue at stake is the destruction of god's last connection with day-to-day reality: its kit of human-like "intellectual" or "psychological" characteristics. "Further, I would have you observe, that, while we speak philosophically, we ought not to employ theological phrases. For, since theology frequently, and not unwisely, represents God as a perfect man, it is often expedient in theology to say, that God desires a given thing, that he is angry at the actions of the wicked, and delights in those of the good. But in philosophy, when we clearly perceive that the attributes which make men perfect can as ill be ascribed and assigned to God, as the attributes which go to make perfect the elephant and the ass can be ascribed to man; here I say these and similar phrases have no place, nor can we employ them without causing extreme confusion in our conceptions. Hence, in the language of philosophy, it cannot be said that God desires anything of any man, or that anything is displeasing or pleasing to him: all these are human qualities and have no place in God." (Spinoza 1955: 347 - letter written to Blyenberg in 1665) 5) With the deism of Spinoza (who got flushed out of his synagogue in 1656 for "heretism", and was constantly hassled afterward by the Christians, who hated the force of his rationality in the destruction of theism), we are on the straight path leading to ATHEISM (No/god): God is being slowly removed from reality. At the deist stage, it lost one of its crucial characteristics: OMNIPOTENCE (he cannot say "fuck your daugther" or "gut your child" anymore, remember). That shift is ancient. One can quote as an example of it the two sucessive names given to God in Jewish faith. In the very old texts, it is called El, or Eloah "which signifies nothing other than 'powerful'" (Spinoza 1991: 216). Later, it is "quoted" in the following terms: "And I appeared unto Abraham, unto Isaac, and unto Jacob as El Sadai, but by my name Jehovah was I not known to them." (quoted in Spinoza 1991: 216). That second name, Jehovah, "is to be found to indicate the absolute essence of God, as unrelated to created things." (Spinoza 1991: 216). This is already the God of deism: we shifted from the "powerful" to the "UNRELATED spiritual essence of existence". Not acting on the world anymore, God is OBJECTIVELY POWERLESS ("shit happens", remember). It is just "there". The only characteristic remaining (the last one to loose) is actually that OMNIPRESENCE. In deist view, God's "help" is then only and strictly the manifestations of that "omnipresence". It is around that last characteristic that Spinoza shaped his deist ontology of God: "... I wish to explain briefly what I shall hereafter mean by God's direction, by God's help, external and internal, by God's calling, and, finally, by fortune. By God's direction I mean the fixed and immutable order of Nature, or chain of natural events: for I have said before, and have already shown elsewhere, that the universal laws of nature according to which all things happen and are determined are nothing but God's eternal decrees, which always involve eternal truth and necessity. So it is the same thing whether we say that all things happen according to natures laws or that they are regulated by God's decree and direction. Again, since the power of Nature in its entirety is nothing other than the power of God through which alone all things happen and are determined, it follows that whatever man - who is also part of Nature - acquires for himself to help to preserve his own being, or Whatever nature provides for him without any effort on his part, all this is provided for him solely by the divine power, acting either through human nature or externally to human nature. Therefore whatever human nature can effect solely by its own power to preserve its own being can rightly be called God's internal help, and whatever falls to man's advantage from the power of external causes can rightly be called God's external help. And from this, too, can readily be deduced what can be meant by God's choosing, for since no one act except by the predetermined order of Nature - that is, from God's eternal direction and decree - it follows that no one chooses a way of life for himself or accomplishes anything except by the special vocation of God, who has chosen one man before others for a particular work or a particular way of life. Finally, by fortune I mean simply God's direction in so far as he directs human affairs through causes that are external and unforeseen." (Spinoza 1991: 89-90) In other terms, Bozo, God is nothing other than existence itself! The gnoseological consequences of the Spinozist deist option are along the same line: "... we acquire a greater and more perfect knowledge of God as we gain more knowledge of natural phenomena. To put it another way, since the knowledge of an effect through its cause i[s] nothing other than the knowledge of a property of that cause, the greater our knowledge of natural phenomena, the more perfect is our knowledge of God's essence, which is the cause of all things." (Spinoza 1991: 103) In other terms, Bozo, to know God is nothing other than to know existence itself! The Christian theist, Henri de Oldenburg (1620Ā1677), saw clearly the ultimate atheist consequences of the pure and systematic deist definition given by Spinoza to the concept of God, ontologically and gnoseologically. Oldenburg to Spinoza: "Do you clearly and indisputably understand solely from the definition you have given of God, that such a Being exists? For my part, when I reflect that definitions contain only the conceptions formed by our minds, and that our mind forms many conceptions of things which do not exist, and is very fertile in multiplying and amplifying what it has conceived, I do not yet see, that from the conception I have of God I can infer God's existence. I am able by a mental combination of all the perfections I perceive in men, in animals, in vegetables, in minerals, etc., to conceive and to form an idea of some single substance uniting in itself all such excellences indefinitely; it may thus figure forth for itself a most perfect and excellent Being, but there would be no reason thence to conclude that such a Being actually exists." (Spinoza 1955: 280 - letter written to Spinoza by Oldenburg in 1661) In a sort of ultimate phantasmagoric movement out of dualism, God vanishes in a mish mash of abstract characteristics that makes of it a sort of subjective mode of conceptualizing the totality of the existing universe. In nominalist terms we could say that "God" is just another NAME given to the substance of existence. The so-called OMNIPRESENCE of God means that "all" is God. This explains the origin of the name of the ultimate hyper-monist deviation of deism: PANTHEISM (All/God). No faith or mystic in the traditional sense can be grounded in such a concept anymore. We passed from SHIT HAPPENS to ALL IS SHIT. Well, try to argue consistently that the integrality of reality is grounded on a deeply shitty ontological foundation, and you will eventually be answered: WHAT YOU CALL SHIT I SIMPLY CALL EXISTENCE (Oldenburg to Spinoza!) Religion as a human mode of "interaction" with God is then fatally doomed. God reaches a level of abstraction that makes of it the non existent. The fart finally fades away... such are the truths! "The arms of fanaticism may destroy those who support these truths, but they will never destroy the truths themselves" (La Mettrie 1988). God is a non existing lunacy and Religion, as a tradition, is a slowly rotting corp. If we summarize the intellectual phases of the religious putrefaction, aged each of them by hundreds of years, we see that animism and polytheism are the VITALIST steps, the two varieties of monotheism (theism and deism) are the OBJECTIVE IDEALIST steps, and that the natural final step, through the ultimate phantasmagoric smoke curtain of PANTHEISM, is ATHEISM. Constantly swinging between pluralism/monism and dualism, religious development is nothing other than the fade out of idealist introjection, i.e. the slow de-objectivization of (our own subjective) spirit. "The course of religious development which has been generally indicated consists specifically in this, that man abstracts more and more from God, and attributes more and more to himself." (Feuerbach 1957: 31). Presently, in 20th century North America, we are still in the midst of the OBJECTIVE IDEALIST step. Whatever your specific confession can be (if, of course, you are the type of looser who still has one), it is quite likely that you are a monotheist, and most interestingly, that YOU ARE PROBABLY ALREADY IN THE MIDDLE OF THE DEIST PHASE WITHOUT HAVING REALLY REALIZED IT. Ask yourself a simple question. Do you kneel at night by your bed, praying to God with the ABSOLUTE CERTAINTY that that son of a bitch hears you and will (or will not, if He is angry because you fingered your anal crack or ate a hamburger on a friday) do something about what you asked for. To be a genuine theist (and consequently an authentic traditional Jewish/Christian/Muslim) this is what you should actually spontaneously do. That type of "interactive" spirituality was possibly the one of your great grand parents or grand parents. It is not yours anymore. That is a flat fact, even if you are still moron enough to "pray God" in a form or another of traditionalist lip service. Diderot's character Jacques the Fatalist is a deist, without exactly realizing it. He is also, as his nickname suggests, believing in the existence of a fully pre-organized destiny. For him, God is the author of a "Great Scroll" slowly unrolling in the sky, and on which all our destinies are written once and for all. Jacques does not realize yet that his religious views are actually the one of deism: he still prays as if his God was hearing him, like in the old theist phase. But Jacques the Fatalist's prayer is actually the purest deist statement. It goes as follows: "Here Jacques stopped talking and his master asked him: 'What are you thinking about, what are you doing?' JACQUES: I am saying my prayer. MASTER: Do you pray? JACQUES: Sometimes. MASTER: And what do you say? JACQUES: I say: 'Thou who mad'st the Great Scroll, whatever Thou art, Thou whose finger has traced the Writing Up Above, Thou hast known for all time what I needed, Thy will be done. Amen.' MASTER: Don't you think you would do just as well if you shut up? JACQUES: Perhaps yes, perhaps no. I pray on the off-chance, and no matter what might happen to me I would neither rejoice nor complain if I could keep control of myself." (Diderot 1986: 154-155 - published in 1796) Lots of modern "believers" are actual varieties of Jacques the Fatalist. Do you see the notion of direct interactive prayer and the type of religiosity asssociated to it as dum, childish and old-fashioned? Or is the only type of "prayer" you formulate unavoidably sounds like Jacques the Fatalist's prayer and brings you to "theological" conclusions similar to the ones formulated by his master? (namely: what is the difference between eructing such a statement and shutting your stupid slot?) Furthermore, do you reject all types of cults and preachers for their dishonesty and the falsity of the "prayer" they are supposed to convey to God on your behalf? Do you then rather go directly, privately and in all simplicity for a pure Supreme Being creator and incarnator of the universe? That is it. You are already at step 4): deism. Believers reading this text are mainly in that situation: MONOTHEISTS (polytheism or animism is nothing other than an ethnological curiosity for them), they claim themselves as OFFICIALLY THEISTS (because they affiliate themselves to one of the traditional theist religions... slowly sliding themselves in the direction of deism, as collective beliefs) but ACTUALLY AND CONCRETELY DEISTS, since god is absent from their day-to-day life, they do not talk to it, they see it just as some distant non-human abstraction. In a word, they do not give a fuck about it. Many of my readers are also already at step 5): atheism. They are then natural philosophical adversaries of objective idealism under all its forms, including the crappy religious one. "Indeed, what is an atheist? He is a man who destroys chimeras prejudicial to the human species, in order to reconduct men back to nature, to experience, and to reason. He is a thinker, who, having meditated upon matter, its energy, its properties, and its modes of acting, has no occasion, in order to explain the phenomena of the universe, and the operations of nature, to invent ideal powers, imaginary intelligences, beings of the imagination, who, far from making him understand this nature better, do not more than render it capricious, inexplicable, unintelligible, and useless to the happiness of mankind."(D'Holbach 1970: 300 - published in 1770) Atheists are not noisy people, but they have been "out there" for centuries. In the second half of 18th century, an obscure encyclopedist by the name of Deleyre already described the foundations of the peace of mind of atheists: "FANATICISM has done much more harm to the world than impiety. What do impious people claim? To free themselves of a yoke, while FANATICS want to extend their chains over all the earth. Internal zealomania! Have you ever seen sects of unbelievers gather into mobs and march with weapons against the Divinity?" (Deleyre in Diderot et Alii 1967: 106-107 - published between 1750 and 1765) That is why believers can kiss the asses of atheists. Religion being doomed, why do we even bother talking about it. Well, an ANNIHILATION FOUNTAIN can sometimes vomit its intellectual mixture on a reality in the process of annihilation, can't it? But the why-bother-then gig around religion is as old as old uncle Karl with his OPIUM OF THE PEOPLE (in modern english we would call it: THE VALIUM OF THE TRAMP) development. Here, for the pure joy of it, is that historical fragment, written 154 years ago: "For Germany, the critique of religion is essentially completed; and the critique of religion is the prerequisite of every critique. Error in its profane form of existence is compromised once its celestial ORATIO PRO ARIS ET FOCIS [DISCOURSE IN DEFENCE OF ALTARS AND HOMES - P.L.] has been refuted. Man, who has found only his own reflection in the fantastic reality of heaven, where he sought a supernatural being, will no longer be disposed to find only the semblance of himself, only a non human being, here where he seeks and must seek his true reality. The foundation of irreligious criticism is this: man makes religion; religion does not make man. Religion is, in fact, the self-consciousness and self-esteem of man who has either not yet gained himself or has lost himself again. But man is no abstract being squatting outside the world. Man is the world of man, the state, society. This state, this society, produce religion, which is an inverted world consciousness, because they are an inverted world. Religion is the general theory of this world, its encyclopedic compendium, its logic in popular form, its spiritualistic POINT D'HONNEUR, its enthusiasm, its moral sanction, its solemn compelement, its universal basis of consolation and justification. It is the fantastic realization of the human being because the human being has attained no true reality. Thus, the struggle against religion is indirectly the struggle against that world of which religion is the spiritual aroma. The wretchedness of religion is at once an expression of and a protest against real wretchedness. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people. The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is a demand for their true happiness. The call to abandon illusions about their condition is the call to abandon a condition which requires illusions. Thus, the critique of religion is the critique in embryo of the vale of tears of which religion is the halo. Criticism has plucked the imaginary flower from the chain, not so that man shall bear the chain without fantasy or consolation, but so that he shall cast off the chain and gather the living flower. The critique of religion disillusions man so that he will think, act, and fashion his reality as a man who has lost his illusions and regained his reason, so that he will revolve about himself as his own true sun. Religion is only the illusory sun about which man revolves so long as he does not revolve about himself. It is the task of history, therefore, once the other-world of truth has vanished, to establish the truth of this world. It is above all the task of philosophy, which is in the service of history, to unmask human self-alienation in its secular forms, once its sacred form has been unmasked. Thus the critique of heaven is transformed into the critique of the earth, the critique of religion into the critique of law, the critique of theology into the critique of politics. (Marx 1970: 131-132 - published in 1844) Like it or not, the critique of religion is over. The present text is a pure exercice of self-indulgent (e)sc(h)atological shit disturbing. God-Ass-Lickers and Mother-Mary-Fuckers can sit on their religiosity and spin like the meaningless humming tops they are. Religion has this in common with the millenium: it is doomed... REFERENCES: ---Bruno, G. (1964), The Heroic Frenzies, Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 274p. published between 1583 and 1585. ---Diderot, D. (1986), Jacques the Fatalist and his Master, New York, Penguin Books, 261p. published in 1796. ---Diderot, D. et alii (1967), The Encyclopedia: Selections, New York, Harper and Row, 246p. published between 1750 and 1765. ---Feuerbach, L. (1957), The Essence of Christianity, New York, Harper Torchbooks, 339p. published in 1841. ---Helvˇtius, C.A. (1969), A Treatise on Man: his intellectual Faculties and his Education, New York, Burt Franklin, Philosophy Monograph Series 25 [reprint of the English edition of 1810], vol.1, 395p.; vol.2, 498p. published in 1773. ---Helvˇtius, C.A. (1970), De l'Esprit or Essays on the Mind and its Several Faculties, New York, Burt Franklin, Philosophy Monograph Series 33 [reprint of the English edition of 1810], 498p. published in 1758. ---D'Holbach, P.H.T. (1970), The System of Nature: or, Laws of the Moral and Physical World, New York, Burt Franklin, 368p. published in 1770. ---La Mettrie, J.O. de (1988), Man a Machine, La Salle, Ill., Open Court, 216p. published in 1748. ---Nkrumah, K. (1964), Consciencism - Philosophy and Ideology for Decolonization and Development with Particular References to the African Revolution, London, Heinemann, 122p. published in 1964. ---Marx, K. (1970), Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right, Cambridge England, Cambridge University Press, 151p. written in 1843. ---Paine, T. (1984), The Age of Reason, Buffalo, Prometheus Books, 190p. published in 1794. ---Pannekoek,‡A. (1948), Lenin as Philosopher, New York, New Essays, 80p. published in 1938. ---Plekhanov, G.V. (1967), ESSAYS IN THE HISTORY OF MATERIALISM, New York, Howard Fertig, 288p. published in 1896 ---Sextus Empiricus (1960), Works of Sextus Empiricus Volume 3 - Againsts the physicists, Against the Ethicists, Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 556p. written at the end of the 2nd century. ---Spinoza, B. de (1955), On the Improvement of the Understanding - The Ethics - Correspondence, New York, Dover Publications, 420p. published in 1677. ---Spinoza, B. de (1961), Principles of Cartesian Philosophy, London, Peter Owen Limited, 192p. written in 1663. ---Spinoza, B. de (1981), The Ethics, Malibu, CA., J.‡Simon Publisher, 244p. published in 1677. {}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{} ************************************************************************ WARNING: THE BANK PRESIDENTS DON'T WANT YOU TO READ THIS. by The Metro Network for Social Justice Action Campaign ************************************************************************ BANKS HURT JOB GROWTH In 1995 the Bank of Montreal made a profit of $986 million (an increase of 20% over the previous year) and cut 1,428 jobs from their pay roll. Other banks have followed the same pattern. The CIBC increased their profits by 14% and cut 1,289 jobs. The Toronto Dominion Bank increased their profits by 16% and cut 354 jobs. Although the small business sector has created 90% of the jobs in Canada since 1983, and employs half of all Canadians, only 3% of the banks' total lending goes to small business, while 77% goes to big business in loans over $5 million. BANKS ARE UNFAIR EMPLOYERS Beyond laying off staff while making huge profits, there is a vast gap between the salaries of bank workers and management. For instance, Matthew Barrett, the CEO of the Bank of Montreal made $3.9 million in 1996, while an average teller with 20 years experience made $11 an hour. Full time tellers earn an average of $21,000 at all major banks. Statistics Canada lists the poverty line in Toronto as approximately $20,569 for a family of two. There are a number of bank branches which have been unionized in an attempt to gain better wages and working conditions for bank tellers and non-management staff. If you are a bank worker and want information on organizing your work place, call the Metro Labour Council at 441-3663. BANKS WANT SOCIAL PROGRAMS CUT All major banks are members of the C.D. Howe Institute. This private think-tank has called for the cutting of almost all federal spending on health care, and for drastic cuts to employment insurance, post-secondary education, welfare and old age security payments. The Royal Bank, CIBC, and the Bank of Montreal are all members of the Business Council on National Issues. The BCNI was the major lobby group behind the free trade agreements with the U.S. and Mexico. Since the free trade agreements came into effect, the 48 biggest corporations in Canada (all members of the BCNI) have increased their annual revenues by more than $32 billion, while at the same time eliminating 200,000 jobs. BANKS ARE RUN BY CANADA'S CORPORATE ELITE The directors and shareholders of the major banks include many recognizable names from Canada's corporate elite. Wallace McCain (of the McCain Foods family, and head of Maple Leaf Foods) owns $4.32 million of shares in the Royal Bank; Galen Weston (of Loblaw's and husband of Ontario's Lieutenant-Governor) owns $4.05 million of shares in the CIBC; and Eric Molson (of the Molson Brewery family) owns $3.9 million of shares in the Bank of Montreal. As a further example, the Board of Directors of the Royal Bank includes the corporate heads of Alcan Aluminum, McDonald's Restaurants, NOVA Corporation, Canadian Pacific, Imperial Oil and IBM. BANKS CAN BE BOYCOTTED: There are existing alternatives to the major banks. Across Canada there are approximately 1,000 credit unions and 1,500 caisses populaires serving more than eight million Canadians. Credit unions are financial cooperatives jointly owned and democratically controlled by their customers. In addition, credit unions offer the same complete range of banking services as the major banks, very often with smaller service charges. Free information on the locations and service areas of credit unions is available from the Credit Union Central of Ontario at 1-800-661-6813. Unbank Your$elf! BANKS AND MIKE HARRIS All of the major banks gave the maximum amount allowable by law to the Ontario Progressive Conservative election campaign fund in 1995, the campaign which elected Mike Harris as premier of Ontario. Since the election, the Harris government has rammed through the unpopular megacity legislation, cut funding to public schools, colleges and universities, reduced social assistance rates by 21.6%, decimated worker protection legislation, and reduced environmental protection regulations. BANK PRESIDENTS SHOULD KNOW The average salary of bank presidents was $2.99 million in 1996. It's time they earned some of that money by answering some difficult questions directly from Canadians. Call them and let them know your concerns: John Cleghorn Royal Bank 974-4049 Matthew Barrett Bank of Montreal 867-4686 Peter Godsoe Bank of Nova Scotia 866-6081 Richard Thompson Toronto Dominion Bank 982-8356 Al Flood CIBC 980-4101 We believe that banks are at the visible centre of the corporate agenda in Canada. You are welcome to join the Metro Network for Social Justice Action Campaign on the Banks which will leaflet in front of banks across Metropolitan Toronto and offer "teach-ins" at King & Bay streets on a regular basis. To join call 598-4945. {}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{} ************************************************************************ 2 POEMS by Lob ************************************************************************ seeing the MISFITS in 1997 off to the punk gig bacardi in the back seat lots of funny colors in lots of funny hair styles stop for some grinds & margaritas a bar-b-que... man says, "COME ON...Let's hit the fuckin'road" pile in to vehicles thru the hollywood wierdness more backseat rum under camoflauge of tinted glass park and piss stumble into WAY too hip club attack bar in seconds ale another ale 4 more and life is okay somehow end up backstage more ale wow you have pills? i'll take one.. ooh the dull fades to calm the night fades away the punk becomes a frat party wake up in early afternoon dressed still wearing shoes thank the gods i'm in MY bed time says mid afternoon the next day wow that was some gig huh? -/\- - Lob 4:29p 7/21/97 HB, CA -/\--/\--/\--/\- ROAD TO TOMORROW As she places the final stone on the road she has been building... She says it is time for her to travel this road. and as swiftly as the pavement has dried and stretched itself away.. she makes her final decision to take a walk on down those old cobblestones, to see what was there when last she traveled, when it was dark, and sight was ellusive. I cry hard and quick so that no one will see I hold her close and whisper into ear that I understand I've watched her a year and a day building that old road asked many a times for knowledge as to where it goes... and with faraway eyes and a sip of her tea, a slight glipse of a smile trying to creep into the frame, she would tell me she didn't know. But today she knows and so do I. It is so plain, no asking is needed. Her road leads to tomorrow and whatever lies in it's path is her's for the taking. And she, being it's caretaker is impaled by it's call.. and must adhere to whatever the road has laid out before her. in passing we are friends and have been lovers given each other strength and caused each other to cry... Now her lover is this road and I am left waving, wishing her my goodwill and missing her warmth and energy. I petition to the gods: May the road love her as I have and may she love the road as equal... Her path stretches out... She firmly places that final stone, the one with the shape of my heart, into the collage of bricks and rocks that make up the path.. stands, and takes a step forward into tomorrow.... -/\- {}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{} ************************************************************************ CONTRIBUTORS TO THIS ISSUE... ************************************************************************ MARK ADAIR - is a Toronto artist/sculptor who has a BFA from York University and an MFA from University of Victoria. His most recent show was Torontoniesis. His piece entitled Things Fall Apart was featured in TAF issue #1. Mark can be reached through TAF. SKUMQUEEN is the Internet's resident Goddess of all things Skum. Transmitting from the Lone Star State, Tejaz, she maintains her own collection of digital Skum on her website, Hello Kitty Ninja Warriors, which has recently been awarded the Orignal SANRIO Excellence Award. She is also known to frequent certain IRC channels. ARTHUR and MARILOUISE KROKER are the co-founders and co-editors of CTHEORY: Theory, Technology and Culture - "a multi platform and multi media Journal of Theory". Arthur is a currently a professor in the Political Science department of Concordia University in Montreal. Marilouise is currently the General Editor of the CultureTexts Series for St. Martin's Press (New York) and Macmillan (London). Between them they have numerous books, articles and performances. PAUL LAURENDEAU is an associate professor in linguistics at the department of French Studies, York University. Influenced by the thought of Spinoza, Diderot, and Marx, he is currently working on a book titled MATERIALISM AND RATIONALITY (PHILOSOPHY FOR THE SOCIAL ACTIVIST). Describing himself as a materialist rationalist atheist, Laurendeau formulates the religious debate in philosophical terms in the tradition of the progressive struggle against the mystical and irrationalist tendancies of philosophical idealism. His piece entitled On a Philosophical Implication of the Astronomical Big Bang Theory was featured in TAF issue #1. LOB is a 32 year old creative artist from Orange County, CA. He is the director of Thee Instagon Foundation a creative alliance dedicated to thee promotion ov thee creative notion. He has a few chapbooks available and has appeared in numerous publications. Lob is single and lives with his spider named Jehova. THE METRO NETWORK FOR SOCIAL JUSTICE ACTION CAMPAIGN ON THE BANKS is a Toronto, Ontario based group that believes that banks are at the visible centre of the corporate agenda in Canada. To further spread their word they will leaflet in front of banks across Metropolitan Toronto and offer "teach-ins" at King & Bay streets on a regular basis. For inquiries call (416) 598-4945 {}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{} The Annihilation Fountain & TAF Copyright c 1997-99 Neil MacKay http://www.capnasty.org/taf/ the_annihilation_fountain@iname.com