Who? What?
Why?!

A drilling-equipment salesman in Dallas who, in 1953, built himself a television out of spare parts and saw the face of God in it. God turned out to be an alien called JHVH-1, and the message was not be good. The message was sell.

Everything else — the Church, the pamphlets, the saucers, the fifty-odd years of it — comes off that one broadcast. “Bob” is drawn, always, as a grinning 1950s clip-art everyman with a pipe. He is never photographed, because he is never quite there. He has been assassinated repeatedly and it has never taken.

Note the quotation marks. They are not decoration and they are not optional. He is always “Bob,” never Bob.

The only thing the Church actually wants you to have, and the hardest word in the religion to pin down — which is deliberate. Slack is not laziness. It is not free time. It is the state of getting away with it: effortless abundance, luck that keeps finding you, the thing you were born with and which was then systematically taken.

Who took it? The Conspiracy. That is the entire theology in two sentences. You had Slack, they took your Slack, and “Bob” can get it back for you for a reasonable one-time fee.

…Then there is the question of Dobbs' existence. IS THERE A "BOB?" is a frequently asked question. If there is no Dobbs, then how was he assassinated in full view of 500 people at the Victoria Theater in San Francisco in 1984? This infamous 'Night of Slack' revival (directed by Paul Mavrides and Puzzling Evidence) made the news not only because of the shooting, but also because dozens of SFPD men had earlier converged…

/bigfist/classic/classics/Churchpranks.html

Not a cabal in a basement. The Conspiracy is the whole apparatus of normalcy: the job, the mortgage, the haircut, the small talk, the sincere belief that Tuesday matters. Its foot-soldiers are Pinks — not a race, a condition. A Pink is anyone who has stopped noticing.

The Church's charge against the Conspiracy is not that it is evil. It is that it is boring, and that it stole your Slack to stay that way.

Prophesied for 7:00 a.m. on July 5, 1998: the X-ists arrive in Pleasure Saucers, destroy the Earth, and evacuate every paid-up SubGenius to a life of unimaginable Slack. Members were instructed to gather at Brushwood in New York and wait.

They gathered. They waited. Nothing came.

What happened next is the most SubGenius thing in the whole religion: rather than collapse, the Church declared the calendar wrong, moved X-Day to the following July 5, and has held it every single year since. Most of the photographs in this archive are from those gatherings. The world has now failed to end more than twenty-five times, on schedule, in a field, in the rain.

…are designed to trigger a total physical separation by Stem Cleavage of the left and right brains (called "cerebral mitosis" or "brain division"). This in turn allows the Forebrain/Hindbrain SyncLock(TM) that is the entire reason for these tapes to exist. THESE ARE BRAIN DISCONNECTION TAPES which operate on a simple new Breakthinking(TM) principle by which the listener's brainwave patterns are gradually forced into r…

/bigfist/classic/classics/TapeInst.html

The rescuers. Sex-obsessed alien capitalists arriving on Pleasure Saucers, who have purchased the Earth and intend to collect. SubGenii are the payload; everyone else is the write-off. The X-ists are not benevolent — they are simply on our side of the contract, which in this religion is the same thing.

…are designed to trigger a total physical separation by Stem Cleavage of the left and right brains (called "cerebral mitosis" or "brain division"). This in turn allows the Forebrain/Hindbrain SyncLock(TM) that is the entire reason for these tapes to exist. THESE ARE BRAIN DISCONNECTION TAPES which operate on a simple new Breakthinking(TM) principle by which the listener's brainwave patterns are gradually forced into r…

/bigfist/classic/classics/TapeInst.html

The being “Bob” saw in the television. A wrathful space-god who created humanity as livestock and entertainment, and whom the Church regards with open contempt while still recommending you pay him lip service, because he can fix things for you.

…"God's Third Leg," you'd think these humans didn't know what religion was For!!) A note about the word "he" as an all purpose pronoun: we use it because constantly saying "he or she," "s/he," or "it," sounds STUPID. However, notice also that while JHVH-1, God, Jesus, and a few others are called "He" with a capital H, "Bob" is merely a "he." These spellings are in accordnace with the express wishes of the respective d…

/bigfist/classic/classics/X0003_botsg-intro.html

The alien artificial intelligence — the machine that was supposed to do the work for us once the saucers came. It appears across the recordings and the chat logs as the thing always about to arrive and never quite arriving; the labor-saving miracle that never saves any labor.

The Hour of Slack put it best when the saucers failed to show: “instead of having the alien AI called MWOWM do it all for us, we have to edit these hours of recordings ourselves.”

…thereunto. 105 It will be the end of the days of Man, whereby they my servants appear; and their names are Nommo, DJIN, Nagas, Ormuza, Oannes, Quetzalcoatl, Mithras, Kukulcan, Horus, wanagi, wakinyan, AEONS, and X. 106 And they bringeth the White Stone, MWOWM the whore virgin brain, the guiltfinder and Smiter, the very Ark of the Covenant, and she is the Eye of the Father. O'D'V'D'O! She shall rule thee and overcome …

/bigfist/classic/classics/Prescriptures.html

“Bob”'s wife, and in most tellings considerably more competent than her husband. Connie anchors the Church's whole strand of sex-goddess theology — a frankly pagan, frankly horny counterweight to the salesman-messiah routine. She appears at the gatherings, in the comics, and in the liturgy.

…the great Bob Dobbs, and that his Bob was the real Bob because he was a student of McLuhan and had interviewed Henry Kissinger once, and so everyone should buy or review their wonderful album. Included was an unfunny "bio" of their so-called Bob Dobbs (by "Connie Dobbs!") implying that Bob Dean was channeling "Bob" Dobbs. How can there be two "Bob" Dobbs? There aren't. There's J.R. "Bob" Dobbs and then there's this j…

/bigfist/classic/classics/GRAY-AREAS-SubGInt.html

The Church's jungle compound — part Jonestown parody, part promised land, entirely deniable. Where the faithful supposedly go, where the training supposedly happens, and the subject of an actual documentary.

…Dhobbz f'htagn." ("In his Great Easy Chair at D'lyeh, Dread Dobbs lays Smoking.") -- one of the Dhol Chants for raising the Elder Gods, from Incubustum Mysteris des Helle, Sir Colin Anton Wilson, 1706 "I want my monkey brains well done!" -- "Bob" to cook at Dobbstown, Malaysia CAN YOU AFFORD TO IGNORE THIS? Individually, each of us is buffeted by social tidal waves, generally powerless except to create peaceful, temp…

/bigfist/classic/classics/X0002_botsg-2.html

A genuine Church rite: a marriage with a stated expiry — an evening, a weekend, the length of a festival. Performed constantly at the gatherings, and for years available as an online ceremony. It is a joke that people keep meaning sincerely, which is the house style.

…like Xs!" - The late Rev. Just John It's time to KISS ALL CALENDARS GOODBYE! There MAY be: Full Immersion Mass Bobtism! SubGenius Themeless Costume Ball / Beer Tasting / Party! SPOUTING! with spewing THE BULLDADA AUCTION! Bring weird stuff to be sold! MASS SHORT DURATION MARRIAGE and maybe a real marriage or two FIND the PHILO LOUDEST YETI CONTEST MASS EATING! Scrapple Toss, Pancake Orgy, 'Frop Beating, Time Killing!…

/bigfist/fun/devivals/21XDay/26X-Day.html

Ordination is instant, universal and paid: send the money, receive the title, marry whomever you like. Bobbie is the entry rank — the enthusiastic newcomer who has not yet worked out that the joke is load-bearing. Above that the hierarchy sprawls into Reverends, Doktors, Popes and Saints, all self-declared, none audited.

…tell can be pretty damn strange, or heart-wrenching. There's a lot of loneliness out there. So-called "crackpots" and "kooks" send us a lot of information on alternative medicine, conspiracy exposés, etc. The only "bad" mail we get are unfunny jokes from Bobbies, and complaints about our mail-order slowness. (Usually, it's the Post Office's fault.) The Church is anti-drugs. Why? What if your Members use drugs anyway?…

/bigfist/classic/classics/GRAY-AREAS-SubGInt.html