Hi, and welcome to yet another in the series of official proclamations on MOOist dogma, catma, potatoma, fnordma, Louisianama, Bananarama, horsema, mama, pneuma, eggma, wafflema, and Dalailama that we call the MOO-COW Gamma series. This revelation is all about the fun-omenon of MicroChurching within MOOism... Read on.
Churching is one of the funnest verbs to verb in this modern day of slanguaging and generally verbing around. Our Hero, the great R. Bucky Fuller, wrote a truly superb Annoying Mind Drug once, called "I Seem To Be A Verb". Stuff seems to be process, moving, slipping, sliding, changing, and, at the risk of repeating stuff I've already said before once again for a second time, generally verbing around. That's why, when religioning changed from being static to being dynamic, away went the Churches, and in came the amusing activity of Churching.
Churching is an affirmation of belief, or lack thereof. Or, alternatively, an entirely unprovoked attack on an attidute of healthy skepticism, or vice versa: an entirely unprovoked attitude of healthy skepticism towards attacking in general. On the other hand, attitudes of skepticism hardly need provoking. They tend to go out for a good night of rampaging about the town a tad more often than attitudes of faithing tend to do. Besides, faithings have less fun.
It's a demonstrable fact: true believers, those easily converted to things of strong faithing potential generally tend to have less of a sense of humour than those who are really hard to brainwash. Military experience has shown this, and you can demonstrate it yourself by trying to play practical jokes in a church. Anyone who's worshipping or otherwise faithing there will be really annoyed, while the skeptics will be amused. Is this surprising? Not really.
We know a tad about how all that braining that goes on inside our head goes about working, just at this point in time... More than a tad, really: we have a pretty good working model for how it happens: lots of little specializing thinking blobs doing their little jobbing activities, cooperating and meming... But that's not the point of this document. The point is how laughing and faithing are related. In brains that are very suceptible to meming, that's getting invaded by foreign ideas and being taken over by them, there tends to be this kind of LAMINAR flow of thoughts (to approximate), a very smooth process, without disruption. That allows the foreign meming to break in easily, and use the force of that single-directional flowing type thought to support it.
In brains with laughing, paradoxing, satirizing, and all those other fun things happening, there's a much more turbulent flow. All the different memes get made fun of by the various laughing mechanisms in the brain, and it's harder for them to take hold. Just think about it from the inside of that brain. How severely could you support a Church if your brain were joking and funning at it perpetually? Not very, because you have a different angled looking at it most of the time. That's why skepticking and joking are related, while faithing and spoilsporting are related. This explains why scientists, who are paid to skepticize and rationalize, tend to have a high humourizing quality to them. You hang with some physicists on down-time some day, you'll see what I mean. The really, REALLY good ones, like, we're talking the BEST ones here, they have more fun than Mr. Dressup. WHOO-EE. Yeah.
The point is, the skeptical crowd, who have a hard time with giving support to Churches, as staticking things that sit there being Churches, expecting people to voluntarily give up faith to 'em, that same skeptical crowd has lots of fun when it's at home. That's the crowd that would really enjoy Churching.
Churching isn't for everyone, and MOO doesn't try to force it on everyone, but it's really good for some people most of the time, and at least for most of the people some of the time.
What Churching means is the active creating of dogma/catma/etceterama in realtime, by people who are actively churching. Each one can take out a different view of what the Churching experience is all about, and even if those points of view are completely, utterly, and ravishingly different, it's still okay, because the Churching is a subjective thing. It happens inside your head. The Churching of MOO is a ritual that happens all the time. We'll sit around and bounce Bananaramas and Dalailamas off each other, and see what sounds good, then pick what we like for later reference.
Bananaramas and Dalailamas, by the way, are even less strict than potatomas and fnordmas, which are less strict than catmas, which are less strict than dogmas. This was a Karma-accident that resulted from driving the Karma down the Wrong-Sidema of the roadma while ever-so-slightly Churching. The order of the strictmas is itself only a potatoma, and therefore entirely irrelevant if you should so choose.
Choosing a Bananarama from a good Churching session can provide one with spiritual solace for, yea and verily, a good coupla hours. Your life can be given temporary meaning by a good bit of horsema or even firmed-up wafflema if you're sufficiently flexible. Churching sessions can happen outside, inside, across telephones, through the Net, and any various combinations and/or permutations and/or permutations-or/and-combinations of the above, or anything else you can think of.
Wafflema is the second stage of a developing Dalailama, as it moves towards a temporary Bananarama. All of these are forms of Anti-Doubt, which is to Churching what beliefing was to the Church. Anti-Doubt is the temporary suspension of disbelief that goes into accepting the setup of a joke: "A priest, a rabbi, and a goat walk into a bar..." takes more than a little bit of Anti-Doubt, but it's worth it when you get to the punch-line. Churching produces such temporary wafflema-ings as seem appropriate. Anything that makes your life seem appropriate for that amount of time is a reasonable wafflema-ing product of a Churching session.
What, you thought I was going to finish that joke? It's SO much better left unfinished, rough-edged. Just like Churching. he Book of MOO is the collective punch line to a lot of best-left-unfinished Churchings. But we had to make it, or nobody would take us seriously. And we just couldn't STAND that.
Okay, so that explains what Churching is: a group of MOOists (or anyone else, for that matter) creating temporary belief systems the way SubGenii take on Short-Duration Personal Saviours, only faster. So much, so waffle... But it leaves open this MicroChurching thing, which this MOO-COW was supposed to be about. What's up with that, eh? Well, MicroChurching is the fragmentation of Churching, the way Heresy is the fragmentation of a Church. The difference is, MOOism avidly... nay, RABIDLY... supports MicroChurching. It demonstrates free thinking among those fools who choose to associate themselves with us. And the more free thought there is, the more the ThinkCorps have to drive their prices down to be competitive.
Which suits us just fine.
Of course, I can't just sit here and write a paper like this explaining what MicroChurching is without then telling you how I think you ought to go about it. If I didn't do that, you wouldn't have anything to avoid doing, and you'd have a dilemma: avoid all of it entirely, or try to do everything at once?
MicroChurching works best on the fly, in heated situations of lust or panicked flights from danger, or both. Making love in the back of a getaway car chased by Bank-Owned Rent-a-Cops is the optimum MicroChurching environment. If you can keep up your wit and humour in situations like that, your mind will be thrown perpetually into the kind of disarray that keeps people from brainwashing you. A filthy mind can sometimes dissuade even the most obsessive cerebrum-tidiers.
In groups of 2 to 5, bounce ideas around, wafflemas and Dalailamas, to be expanded later. Be as wild and creative as possible, breaking every taboo you feel like breaking, and leaving unbroken all those you don't want to smash just now. Or the other way around, if you feel masochistic.
MicroChurching in the hands of the power-hungry can lead to the creating of Sex Sects and ClutterCults of all descriptions. MicroChurching in the hands of the merely hungry can lead to increased Burrito sales worldwide, and doubtless a general increase in the number of used Instant Microwave Burrito Wrappers around on the ground, since MicroChurchers tend to get sloppy. It's the adrenalin thing. When the creative juices get going, and you get distracted, trying to think of how best to take over the world with your new barely-patentable Hyper-Sonic Filing-Cabinet Retro-Rockets, in that INSTANT between your imaginary world conquesting, and the sudden realizing that it's a foolish notion, the mind is thrown into total panic, your worldview is riffle-shuffled with the contents of your subconscious. And even though this does tend to give you the sensation of utterly sublime enlightenment, or at least a head-rush, it does tend to distract from the little details, like picking up your Instand Microwave Burri
What kind of eggmas have been created by MicroChurching? Aside from the obvious, of anything you can think of off the top of your Church-O-One's head, there are the curious MOOist slogans you hear so often, but don't understand... "Ahhh, Blow it out yer ear, Cinnamon-Feet!", or the infamous Burrito-12 rating. All these are eggmas of MicroChurching, and meaningless as they may seem to you, they are the products of deranged minds finding meaning to life, if only for a moment.
Perhaps someday we can keep a floating game of MicroChurch in the air, like one of those balloons you frantically chased as a child, for years on end, and stretch the satisfaction of wafflema and mama into the permanence of Dogma, without any of the unnatural rigidity that accompanies it. Living for the moment CAN pay off, if only we are able to keep the ball up, keep that hot potatoma passed on and on. Putting off reality for only an hour or a day won't solve anything, but maybe running away from it completely will fare a bit better.