Kerry Thornley
Kerry Thornley
Kerry Wendell Thornleyis known as the co-founderof Discordianism, in which context he is usually known as Omar Khayyam Ravenhurst or simply Lord Omar. He and Hill authored the religion's seminal text Principia Discordia, Or, How I Found Goddess, And What I Did To Her When I Found Her. Thornley was also known for his 1962 manuscript, The Idle Warriors, which was based on the activities of his acquaintance, Lee Harvey Oswald, prior to the 1963 assassination of John F. Kennedy...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionPhilosopher
Date of Birth17 April 1938
CountryUnited States of America
What we lack in Prophets, however, we make up for in Saints. Only a Pope may canonize a Saint, but every man, woman and child on this planet is a genuine and authorized Pope (genuine and authorized by the House of the Apostles of Eris). So you can ordain yourself - and anyone or anything else - a Saint.
Every few thousand years some shepard inhales smoke from a burning bush and has a vision or eats moldy rye bread in a cave and sees God.
Although a madman, Norton wrote letters to Abraham Lincoln and Queen Victoria which they took seriously.
Winston Churchill pointed out another attribute of good rhetoric: it is sincere. You must yourself really be against the Germans buzz-bombing London before you can persuade the English people it is a rotten notion.
ZEN is MEDITATION. ARCHY is Social Order. ZENARCHY is the Social Order which springs from Meditation. As a doctrine, it holds Universal Enlightenment a prerequisite to abolition of the State, after which a State will inevitably vanish. Or - that failing - nobody will give a damn.
Organized religion preaches Order and Love but spawns Chaos and Fury. Why?
As for the Devil - that is somebody our religion tried to do without for a long time.
What we imagine is order is merely the prevailing form of chaos.
If organized religion is the opium of the masses, then disorganized religion is the marijuana of the lunatic fringe.
Intellectual respectability required mental health, and it was becoming evident to me by then that "mental health" consisted of trusting everyone about everything as much as possible - and, for good measure, poking fun at anyone who didn't. Especially to be trusted were the mass media, whose owners and personnel were not to be regarded as minions of the Establishment because, as they themselves used to attest with confidence, there was no Establishment in the United States of America. Only foreigners and paranoids believed (otherwise).
Before I was a Discordian, I took life much too seriously. When you take life too seriously you start to wonder what the point of it all is. When you wonder what the point is in life, you fall into a trap of thinking there is one. When you think there is a point, you finally realize there is no point. And what point is there in living like that? Nowadays I skip the search for a point and find, instead, the punch lines.