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The Annihilation Fountain Issue 02
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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
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BORDEN'S MILK AD TURNS SOUR
by Skumqueen
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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Excuse me, but isn't that image of family life a bit out of date?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.
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CRAFT
by Mark Adiar
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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.
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MONTREAL POOL ROOM
by Arthur and Marilouise Kroker
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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
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THE DOOM OF RELIGION
by Paul Laurendeau
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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 Helvtius (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."
(Helvtius 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." (Helvtius 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." (Helvtius 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" (Helvtius 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). Helvtius (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. Helvtius 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."
(Helvtius 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
(1620Â1677), 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.
---Helvtius, 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.
---Helvtius, 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.
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WARNING: THE BANK PRESIDENTS DON'T WANT YOU TO READ THIS.
by The Metro Network for Social Justice Action Campaign
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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.
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2 POEMS
by Lob
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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....
-/\-
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CONTRIBUTORS TO THIS ISSUE...
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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
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The Annihilation Fountain & TAF Copyright c 1997-99 Neil MacKay
http://www.capnasty.org/taf/
the_annihilation_fountain@iname.com
