There’s one on every single goddamn campus. You’ll see them on the lawns, in the quads, standing atop the public stands and podiums. There’s a trio of them less than ten feet away from me right now, screaming and ranting damnation, brimstone and hellfire. Cajoling, pleading, begging and screeching.

If it isn’t obvious by now, I’m talking about streetside preachers. Campus preachers. These forefront evangelists demanding the salvation of your souls at the cost of- what? There is a cost. Don’t give me that look. Faith is done in cost of free will. Faith, especially blind faith, is done in cost of recognition of alternatives. It is done in cost of one’s cognitive viability- one’s intellectual aptitude. These fundamentalists, these my-way-or-the-highway-to-hell radicals, are demanding my brain in return for the salvation of something that they cannot prove to exist.

I rant today about religion.

One word of warning: there is a difference between institution and individual. I love my Christian friends. I love, too, my Jewish, Islamic, Buddhist, Erisian, agnostic, atheist and other general cohorts and compadres. I do not blame them for the various atrocities their churches, synagogues, temples and movements have committed against Humanity. I do not accost them, demanding an apology for the Crusades, for jihad, for the excision of the rose, for the whippings and the bigotry and the general evil done and committed in the name of the Old Man in the Sky.

But, all the same, the individuals that do commit to these acts, that do make justifications for these evils, that don’t recognize our common humanity, that demand our bloodshed, that demand our servitude, that demand the death of dialog… I cannot forgive these fools for the evil they commit to. I cannot forgive any adherent to the ideal that I have to shut up, that I have to stop questioning.

Non fucking serviam.

I have lost friends to disagreements about my view of religion. I can be blamed justifiably for coming off as a hardcore militant radical myself- that I may be, at times, an almost Dawkinsian zealot. I claim no unflawed truth, I admit a very strong bias against what I feel to be primitive superstition. But understand: everything I have ever experienced, everything I have ever been taught, everything I have seen and verified and understood to be capital T Truth, to be the platonic ideal of how the wisest live and the foolish avoid, stems from the ascension of the sentient mind. That all of my protests, all of my rage and bile against the Church, against the ranting preacher, going on for a good, solid three hours now next to me, stem from the rejection against dogma, stem from the embracing of the responsibility and privileges, the pains and sorrows and joys and triumphs that come hand in hand with the doubt and uncertainty of the pursuit of enlightenment.

I cannot serve. I cannot reject this path that I have set out on. I cannot relinquish the responsibility of my education, of my noosphere. I cannot cease my questionings. I cannot relinquish my individuality.

And for all those that would demand that I bow, for all those that demand that there be a cessation to inquiry, a cessation to debate and dialog, for all those that demand that I serve…

Fuck you.

Fuck you.

Fuck you.

Mahalo,

Gonzo Mehum the First, Pope

Erisian Noosphere of North America

HAIL HAIL ERIS ERIS ERIS