Oliwa Catedra
Project: What happened to nature?, Start your own revolution

In the 'tricity' of Gdynia-Sopot-Gdansk in Poland there is a suburb with a cathedral, Oliwa Catedra. The suburb is named after the cathedral, Oliwa, or is it the other way around?

I used to walk past it every morning from my lodgings to the intensive Polish language class I had started. This was in the mid-nineties, not long before I was emplaced.



As a good lapsed catholic I never went inside, but outside I noted the occasional hubbub of various clergy hopping in and out of dark important cars. Lech Walesa lived a few doors down from the cathedral, and I was staying but a few more down the road.

Eventually on some holiday or another I did go inside. It was very dark. My eyes adjusted to the narrow dark space and I saw figures everywhere. One of the side memorial altars caught my eye.



Local notables of their time, they were everywhere. The men at least, with the token virgin mary here and there. Typical patriarchal nonsense, baboons in all their frivolousness. I shook my head and wandered up to the main alter area.



I stared and stared into the counter-reformation's opulent vision of heaven and BANG it hit me.

Hallalujah!

Religion is all about foot traffic. It's about real estate. It's about the location, the location where people are most likely to be, to be wandering past and capturing the flow.

Just like any fast food franchise. They were about the real estate, while the hamburger business, or the coffee business could be delegated to a franchisee and charged rent for their troubles/investment.

Only the return wasn't profit, it was the return of believers to the the real esate and to that end churches were designed to download belief operating systems into peoples' sense of themselves. While the kernel, the tendency to believe, was probably a hardwired godspot thing, the interface was entirely in the hands of the priest.



This requires drugs, or complex ritual, in order to impress the natives with the shaman's control of altered states and so by proxy, demonstrated their ability to intercede on the laity's behalf to the gods. And if not drugs then just some colour and movement as in a multimedia experience (the angels on top of these organ pipes go up and down)(the organ is famous).



Churches and temples are very crude devices to engender a kind of virtual reality while operating instructions are written into the neurones of your behaviour.

That's why it has to be repeated each and every Sunday. Such masses are not even analog recordings, but only symbolic.

The real estate captured by the church was located next to a movement of people. The internet cannot be captured in the same way. The men in frocks drinking blood holding up the only copy in the parish of a text written out by hand in a language long dead— just won't be able to do the trick anymore. The technology has changed too much.

We ate nature, that apple, but for too long we shitted out churches when we should have shitted like the sun, a shining light, and not these pathetic caves peeking into the afterlife.

Techno-rapture transhuman dudes aren't much better a lot of the time.

Wed, Dec 19, 2007  Permanent link
Categories: epiphany
Sent to project: What happened to nature?, Start your own revolution

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