Once upon a time it was believed that if the Pope excommunicated a country it would undergo a terrible catastrophe. Its citizens would be unable to marry, be buried, educated or healed by medicine. Hospitals (all church run) would be shut down, schools (likewise church run) would collapse and there could be no safe system of commerce because the priests administered the oaths. Times have changed. They sure have. These once firmly-held beliefs have now been transferred from the Church onto the State. If there was no government, the argument goes, there could be no schools, no hospitals, and so on. Like it or not, men and women are essentially enslaved to this huge heavily-bureaucratised belief-system. It is alarming how easily people— through fear, misinformation and the distortions of history— are conscripted into this complicity. Everywhere people are tethered to the idea that the world has to be the way that it is because any change might appear to the authorities to be impertinent.
I can't find a direct link to what looks like a wonderfully disrespectful publication, but the rest of this extract can be found here on page 2 in the May 2005 issue of The Individual.
It is taken from "The Cunningham Amendment". You can find out more about them here
Written, printed, and distributed by a group of Yorkshire free-thinkers calling themselves “Anarcrisps,” the Cunningham Amendment is a beautiful, witty declaration of independence from across the pond
The
Cunningham Amendment
1005
Huddersfield Road
Bradford BD12 8LP
West Yorkshire, England
