Artist/scholar/witchdoctor M. Dudeck offers a concise precis of his massive RELIGIONVIR.US project, a queer science fiction religion. In this video montage, Dudeck and his collaborators enact aspects of PSALMS: a 45-minute music-centered performance featuring 13 invented psalms accompanied by a complex digital soundscore and projected video.
A trailer for the 2017 documentary American Jedi, which is available to stream via various platforms. Here’s an in-depth interview with Jedi Knight and Deacon Alex Bird, explaining his devotion to the philosophy/quasi-religion of Jediism: But your myth doesn’t reach back to any time that’s actually real. That’s true. I mean that it has to speak … Read more“American Jedi”
A ’90s-vintage documentary on the Radical Faeries, a queer spiritual counterculture dating back to 1978-9.
We are Cultpunks. We affirm that belief systems, rituals, symbols, pilgrimages, tenets, holy days, shrines, festivals, taboos, mythologies and pantheons can and should be created as works of art. If so, then surely any sufficiently advanced magic is likewise indistinguishable from technology, and religions may usefully be considered as psychological technologies. Just like any other tech, … Read moreRead this first: “A Cultpunk Manifesto”
Existential wisdom from Jamie Wheal, the author of Recapture the Rapture: Rethinking God, Sex and Death In a World That’s Lost Its Mind.
Gore Vidal’s 1954 dystopian satire Messiah is the story of a religious movement that forms around a charismatic undertaker named John Cave. Cave’s central message is, simply and profoundly, that people should not be afraid of death; not because they could look forward to an afterlife of eternal bliss in paradise, but rather because oblivion means an … Read moreCavesword: A Nontheistic Religion of Radical Death Acceptance in Gore Vidal’s “Messiah”
Any readers intrigued by the mostly inchoate phenomenon that I optimistically refer to as Poetic Faith – the notion and practice of creating one’s own religion, as a work of art – should track down Alan Moore’s story Grandeur & Monstrosity, which appears in the graphic narrative anthology “God is Dead: the Book of Acts; Alpha” … Read moreAlan Moore’s “Grandeur & Monstrosity”
I’m reading Carole Cusack’s excellent Invented Religions: Imagination, Fiction and Faith and am delighted to have discovered the Hot Tub Mystery Religion, intriguingly described in this 2003 Reason.com article by Jesse Walker: Atheists have long regarded religion as, at best, a collective work of art, but in the last century that view has grown popular with churchgoers as … Read more“Inside the Spiritual Jacuzzi”
In 2017, Burning Man’s theme was “Radical Ritual,” and the Burning Man Philosophical Center project produced a series of essays and interviews exploring the place of ritual in modern society. Here’s a section from Larry Harvey’s introductory essay: Is Burning Man a Religion? “The practical needs and experiences of religion seem to me sufficiently met by … Read moreThe “Radical Ritual” Series
Somewhere between the rock-ribbed skepticism that is satisfied with saying “no” and the credulity of true belief in the supernatural – or maybe not between those poles, but the third point in a triangle – is the sentiment of poetic faith expressed in legendary singer/songwriter Don McLean’s haunting Sister Fatima. Lyrically inspired by the text of … Read moreSister Fatima