Critcal Mass: Sermon for the Church of the Atom

See images from the event by Jet here.

Welcome to this house of prayer. We have gathered here today to give thanks on this, the sixty fourth anniversary of the holy detonation. This is a modern temple. Very modern. Our temple, I believe, the largest in the world. On the outside, it’s a 12-sided dome with four towering minarets. Seen from outer space, it resembles a huge tent in the desert, and indeed it welcomes all pilgrims who come in from the scorched plains.

Today, we are assembled in but a tiny hall within the tremendous prayer chamber. Further in, the ceiling and the walls appear to meet like interlocking triangles, draped with pagan images, from a time before our sacred faith took hold. The ceiling juts down in angles and the walls sweep up to peaks.

There is a central peak in the incredibly high ceiling. A giant globe of lights hangs from this peak, and a metal ring with more lights swirls around this globe like the rings that swirl around Saturn. The room is brightly and evenly lit. The walls are perforated all the way to the ceiling to let the light in, and the ceiling appears to have skylights. It is clean and bright and sterile.

During the high holidays, in this mighty hall, we have witnessed a sea of men, all dressed in white, all of them kneeling, all with their heads bowed to the floor. A sea of bent backs. There is row upon row upon row of worshippers, too many people to count, thousands of people praying together beneath that glittering globe of lights.

They were, as we are now, praying for the bomb. On their knees, they thanked the Higher Power for nuclear weapons, as do we, the answer to our prayers: for God has gifted us the atom bomb.

The ancients have bequeathed to us so much deadly radioactive waste, that the stuff had to be sealed up in bunkers in the middle of nowhere, watched over permanently by the “nuclear priesthood”, whose task is the maintenance of the bunkers and the preservation of the knowledge of the nuclear waste.

A perfect combination of science and religion, the priesthood unifies the mysteries of the atom with the mysteries of God, our acolytes wearing robes embroidered with the symbol for radioactivity, the high mass held in missile silos.

We have come here to worship this surviving relic from Humanity’s downfall in the Flame deluge, the Doomsday device known as the Alpha-Omega Bomb, the Divine Bomb unto the Fellowship of the Holy Fallout. He speaks to us through the weapon. We adore her, not as his worshippers adored God, with vain compliments, but in order to serve her better by bettering ourselves.

Behold the missile at the nave of the altar in the cathedral

Amen!

Almighty Bomb --
who destroyed Devils --
to create Angels!

Behold His glory!
Behold the truth that abides in us, His handicraft!

All things bright and beautiful
All creatures great and small
All things wise and wonderful
The good Bomb made us all

He gave us eyes to see with
and Lips that we might tell
How great, The Bomb Almighty,
who has made all things well.

Every theoretical conception passes necessarily through three successive stages. The first is the theological, or fictitious. The second, metaphysical, or abstract. The third, positive, or real. The first is always provisional. The second, simply transitional. The third alone is definitive. The deities recognised by the first are reduced by the second to mere entities, or abstractions. The fictions of theology, in consequence of this transformation, lose, together with their supernatural character, their strength and consistency. They become socially useless, and even mentally; metaphysics are at last nothing but simply a solvent of theology.

They can never organize even within their own domain. Metaphysics are revolutionary in their character, and solely adapted for modifying previous systems. They have no other effect, in the original evolution, whether of the individual or of society, but to facilitate the gradual passage from theology to Positivism. They are the better suited for this transitional office, from the circumstance that their equivocal conceptions can take one or other of two shapes. They may become either the abstract representatives of supernatural agents, or general expressions for phenomena, according as the fictitious, or the real stage in our progress, is the one to which we are, for the time, the nearer.

The time has come to realise that an interpretation of the universe--even a positivist one--remains unsatisfying unless it covers the interior as well as the exterior of things; mind as well as matter. The true physics is that which will, one day, achieve the inclusion of man in his wholeness in a coherent picture of the world.

The more we split and pulverise matter artificially, the more insistently it proclaims its fundamental unity.

Ring-a-ring o'neutrons,
A pocketful of positrons,
A fission! A fission!
We all fall down.

We know where scientific reason can end up by itself: the atomic bomb, a flying death camp, fruit of a reason that wants to free itself from every ethical or religious link. The faithful have the obligation to listen to that which secular modern science has to offer, just as we ask that knowledge of the faith be taken in consideration as an expert voice in humanity.

I am the violet flame,
in action in me now.
I am the violet flame,
to light alone I bow.

I am the violet flame,
in mighty cosmic power,
I am the light of God,
shining every hour.

I am the violet flame,
the violet flame I am!

The heavens declare the glory of the bomb. And the firmament showeth His handiwork.
His sound is gone out unto all lands. And his light unto the ends of the world.

He descended from the outermost part of heaven. And there is nothing hid from the heat thereof.

There is neither speech nor language, But His voice is heard among them.

Praise him. Praise him.
My strength and my redeemer.

Glory be to the bomb and the Holy Fallout - As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be; world without end. Amen.

Allmighty and everlasting Bomb, who came down among us to make Heaven under Earth, lighten our darkness. Divine instrument - Grant us Thy peace.

Everlasting bomb come down among us, to make heaven under earth like the hour of darkness. Divine instrument. Grant us thy truth. The truth to define in us. Feel that truth and through that flicker let everyone go to his private shelter. Empty the streets. There to find the city of the dead. Let the blessing of the Bomb Almighty and the fellowship of the Holy Fallout descend on us all, this day and forever more.

Though you may never see a ‘Fallout’, and I hope that you will never see one, the thing born in the Flame Deluge is capable of inflicting all the woes which descended on Job. Half salamander, half incubus, it despoils virgins in their sleep, for are not the monsters of the world still called ‘children of the Fallout’?

From the place of Ground Zero,
O Lord, deliver us

From the rain of the cobalt,
O Lord, deliver us

From the rain of the strontium,
O Lord, deliver us

From the fall of the cesium,
O Lord, deliver us

From the curse of the Fallout,
O Lord, deliver us

From the begetting of monsters,
O Lord, deliver us

From the curse of the misborn,
O Lord, deliver us

A morte perpetua,
Domine, libera nos

May the blessing of the Bomb Almighty and the fellowship of the Holy Fallout Descend on us all, this night and forevermore.