“It is a curious thing that every creed promises a paradise which will be absolutely uninhabitable for anyone of civilized taste.” — Evelyn Waugh
If you’ve ever opened an issue of Watchtower—that magazine handed out by Jehovah’s Witnesses—you’ve seen the illustrated post-rapture scenes of bounty. A typical drawing features people returning from the orchards with baskets of apples, a child reclining on a docile lion, and a man leading a cow to slaughter. Always predators, children, apples, cow.
But if Hare Krishnas published Watchtower, the scenes of afterlife bounty, considering their vegetarian ways, would be free of predators and prey. They would look depict scenes more like photographer Carl Warner‘s carefully crafted vegetarian foodscape:
However, if there’s a pescatarian religion—is there a fish religion?—the followers would enjoy an afterlife on the salmon seas:
Man, that’s gross. And sorry, no turkeyscapes today.
The Fish Religion was that one where they put a fish symbol on the back their car. Duh.
Ew! EEEEEEW!!!
If Hare Krishnas made the afterlife, at least it would have a beat and you can dance to it. I don’t agree with all of their religious tenets, but I will jam with them any day.
It’s not quite what you’re looking for, Dominic, but Pastafarians (members of the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster) use an image of a pirate fish. This is related to their beliefs that global warming, earthquakes, hurricanes, and other natural disasters are a direct effect of the shrinking numbers of Pirates since the 1800s (see the graph of the approximate number of pirates to the average global temperature in Bobby Henderson’s 2005 open letter to the Kansas Board of Educa… for details) and that humans evolved from pirates (rationale: humans share around 95% DNA with monkeys, and more than 99.9% DNA with pirates).
Dear Website Which Resize My Browser,
Fuck you.
Sincerely,
Good Design.
I used to love reading those pamphlets, they were always funny.
It’s satire, right?
There’s nothing gross about salmon. Salmon is delicious.
Did you say Pescaterian or Presbyterian? Never mind, either way it’s still symbolized by a fish.
@4: The Noodly Appendage be with you.
I’ve always enjoyed Rupert Brooke’s poem about a heaven for fish (rather than fish-eaters):
http://www.poetry.com/GreatestPoems/poem…
Are those trees made of dill? I LOVE it!
Ah, the Carl Warner vegiscapes are sublime–and I, too, have occasionally gotten lost in the trippy, sweet, naive magical realism of Watchtower illustrations.
It’s an evocative analogy.
But, Dominic, if you’re speaking of idealistic Hare Krishna imagery, you can’t ignore the wonderful, transcendentally shrill color plates published in many modern editions of the Bhagavad Gita. (Check the personal library of your nearest grizzled paleohippie.)
But if Hare Krishnas published Watchtower, the scenes of afterlife bounty, considering their vegetarian ways, would be free of predators and prey.
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WRONG. The Hare Krishnas have no happy sweetness and light utopia in their vision of the future of Earth. The Hare Krishnas believe in an apocalyptic future that they say is well on its way (Kali Yuga), and that in the future they believe that humans will devolve into cannibalistic dwarves that live underground who are so demoniac and stupid that they can only be liberated by being killed by God Himself (in the form of Kalki wielding a sword) personally.