The Church of Euthanasia
Save the planet - kill yourself!
I'm an unregistered but very enthusiastic member of the Church of Euthanasia. Actually, I label myself a Snyderian Euthanist.
The name of the Church and the names of its pillars were chosen a bit for their shock value, but we are serious. We are radically against consumism and against the lack of humor of the "politically correct". Read this interview.
*I would rather have been aborted!* If you feel the same, please, step out of the closet too - we need to show the world how numerous we are! The anti-abortionists have extremely biased visions of what is "life", and what is "mercy". They are selling narrow-mindedness, and making people think that life is just survival, nothing more, and that love and peace of mind are of secondary importance. Sort of saying that there is no problem in having a world full of psychos: "as long as they're alive they have the chance to repent".
By the way, Rev. Korda's position about saving the world is very close to mine, but she expresses herself much better than I do... Read this other interview with her, conducted by $aint @ndrew, and search for the word "convert". (Ok, ok, people are lazy on the Internets - I am quoting the relevant part below.)
$@: What about your average American kid who comes across this and says: "Oh, this is just some queer church trying to justify their homosexual activities." The Rush Limbaugh, conservative, right-wing, middle America... living off of Big Macs for most of his life. He sees no reason to change because life for him is really good. What would you tell him? How would you go about converting someone like this?
CK: I don't know what I would say to this hypothetical young folk. Part of running a church is being able to gauge who you can convert and who you can't, and concentrating on those you have some hope for. You have to draw the line somewhere. There are several people that I have to draw the line with and realize that I can't help. I'm a very compassionate and open-minded person. I've spent a vast amount of my life energy trying to help the earth, but I have to draw the line somewhere. No one has infinite energy, and you have to say, "alright, this person is not listening to what I have to say."
$@: What about the other side of the spectrum, the person who comes across the Church of Euthanasia's material and thinks: "Oh this has got to be a Dada action. This has got to be a joke."
CK: Yeah, we get a lot of that. We got one today on the talk group who had read something and thought it was the biggest joke he'd ever seen. We'll I'd rather see that because I'm all for laughter. I think laughter's healthy. I think that someone who can laugh is someone who is not totally crazy yet. Someone who can laugh at the ludicrous situation we're all in. That's a good thing, so I'm not opposed to that. I think the next step from laughter is understanding the truth, so I would devote some energy to someone like that. I would laugh with them for a while and then I would really slap them in the face with a big fish.
$@: Finally, the third kind of person I was trying to think of who I thought would look at this is the kind of person who is a vegetarian, into the macrobiotic trip. They don't consciously litter. They say: "I recycle. I do enough for the earth. What does it matter if I want to raise a kid? If I only raise one or two children, it's not going to be increasing the population."
CK: Now you're talking about the majority of the people I concentrate my energy on. These are the guys who are lined up in our cross-hairs. We do a lot of work with those kind of folks. We've had some good results. Those kinds of people are half the way there. That's the real point. They may not realize it, but they're half the way there. A lot of the time it's ignorance, the rest of the time it's hypocrisy. They're simply at some level in denial. They're allowing themselves to believe in a fantasy world that suits them in which their little sacrifices are good enough and they can continue to have whatever they want. That's a pretty workable situation. At that point we really whip out the heavy guns. We indoctrinate them thoroughly.
People often ask me if I really "believe" in this. The problem is that I don't have any idea of what "believing" means - how can we measure if someone "really believes" in something? Shouldn't it be by the consequences of those "beliefs" on that person's behaviour?
One way of seeing religious, mystical, and cosmogonic thinking that makes sense to me is this: these things give us guidelines for shaping our perception, and for reasoning about the indirect, long-range consequences of what we do - even about the consequences of very subtle actions, like thinking and feeling in certain ways instead of in certain other ways.
I can't dissociate religious, mystical, and cosmogonic thinking from ethics.
An argument that I want to expand someday (in a very compact form):
We are responsible for how we choose to spend our energy.
Thinking about the existence of a creator god is a waste of energy,
and thus a sin.