James Bay Cultural Blog #7

- - The Cult of the Printing Press - -

fig.7 - The McLuhan is the Message.

Many Christians are no better than “printing-press enthusiasts”-- and James Bay has seen her fair share of these phonies & false religionists. It is only a very feeble brain that mistakes Official Words for Gods... or who imagines Page Numbers and Old Printed Fables are the heart of the genuine religious enterprise.

Strong words?

Follow up:

Too strong -- or perhaps just strong enough?

Before I go any further I must be responsible to you. I should make a full disclosure of my own bias: I am pro-Christian. It is a noble creed, both as the root of Western Culture and as a route into spiritual self-development and community power. I even admire certain facets of Church life. I believe that if we strip away the liars, dogmatists, masochists, red-neck authoritarians, shameless theologians, and political opportunists, that the remaining half-a-dozen Christians will definitely be among the most sublime and vital human beings to have ever lived. So I am definitely biased in favor of a deeply organic & aesthetically profound Christianity.

That is why it is ugly to find public graffiti like this:

“Jesus is God. John 1:1-14, 3:16"

This nightmarish propaganda is found periodically, plastered onto public phones all over James Bay. I first encountered these hand-written stickers at the pay phone found outside "The Royal London Wax Museum” (Belleville & Michigan St.)

The invisible cretin who posted these notices is, hopefully, gifted with enough Christian charity to forgive me for my slanderous tone when I say that he seems spiritually retarded. Have you seen these foul slogans? They give the general impression that if you doubt the Jesus=God equation that your doubts will be readily resolved by simply looking up this fact in an objective reference book... such as a Printed Bible. Not convinced by my argument? It technically has to be true. After all, it WAS written down!

This is exactly the kind of backwards folly that still gives Christianity a bad reputation. Have you ever passed by a Church and seen a public posting of their favorite "sentence" of the week? One cannot help being utterly astonished by their servile worship of Literature.

This guy who posted these stickers isn't religious – he's a librarian!

The old, original Christian communities -- who used the Sign of the Fish -- were thriving for centuries before anyone tried to impose a "book" upon them. Ultimately, it was the lawyers and cult-bureaucrats of Imperial Rome who wanted to formalize an official "text." The devotees of paper & print were already corrupting Christianity by 325AD.

Marshall McLuhan (fig. 7 above) was Canada's only authentic philosopher (You got a problem with that, John Ralston Saul? Contact James Bay's finest information tool, www.jamesbay.org, OR ELSE you are a complete fraud... a mere philo-philo-sopher!) Remember McLuhan? This guy built phrases like “global village” and “the medium is the message.” Famously, he played himself in Woody Allen's Annie Hall.

In The Gutenberg Galaxy, he wrote:

"Typography is not only a technology but it is itself a natural resource or staple, like cotton or timber or radio; and, like any staple, it shapes not only private sense ratios but also patterns of communal interdependence."

The use of the Printing Press made us into Printing Press People. It hit some of us harder than others. A few folks are still reeling from the blow -- and they have the unmitigated gall to call themselves "religious" and "christian." Neither is true.

Check out this pamphlet found pinned to a pole on quaint Niagara Sreet:

fig. 7.5 - "Religious" literature from James Bay... marked with commentary.

This document should tell you how to become a Christian. It does not. It only demonstrates the worship of quotes, names, and signatures. It treats religion as if it were a mere answer to a poll-question, the remembered answer to the query "Fill in your religion here:______" Lists. Names. Page Numbers. Authoritative Declarations. Chapter & Verse. Passages. Pamphlets. Phrases. Holy Sentences! What do all these things have in common, Batman? Paper.

The medium is the message.

This “faith” that worships the Printed Word is only a cult of False Idols – plain & simple.

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