The Church of Irony and Missing Myths

The Book of Irony contains a great many things, including recipes, advice columns, actuarial tables, and even a striking watercolor rendition of a kitchen sink. It is considered an exceptional source, especially, for polemics, philippics, jeremiads, tirades, diatribes, rants, reproach, incitement, indictment, and hortatory injunctions of all kinds -- not to mention manifestos. It is perhaps the single largest collection of manifestos ever assembled. This has been the natural result of the church's bylaws and tendency towards schism. According to article VII, section "flarf"¹, each of the church's (belligerent and numerous) subsects "shall be permitted, at the time of its departure, to contribute one (1) manifesto to scripture, making the case for the assumption of their views into orthodoxy, howsoever deviant they may be."²

¹ no relation.

² The origins of this peculiar convention are lost to the mists of time, as all records of the church's foundation have been mysteriously misplaced. It is widely assumed that the church's founders were shameless opportunists, ready to scatter at the first sign of trouble, but also eager for free publicity.

What the book does not contain, however, is a creation myth. This may be surprising to consumers of more conventional religious texts³, but they may rest assured that this exclusion was unintentional. Indeed, church officials were shocked to discover this when, in 1872, they finally sat down to read the whole thing straight through. This was a turbulent period for the church, as its leadership subsequently announced that the church was, in fact, against slavery, and had always been, but that they had been holding the relevant scriptures upside-down the whole time, and wasn't that the darnedest thing. At this point there is some discontinuity in the records, as the church hierarchy was shaken up by an equally-coincidental series of near-lynchings.

³ Convention is of course dependent on context. Readers raised in religions without creation myths will find the preceding perfectly conventional. Rest assured though, they will find the following^(a) highly unorthodox.

^(a) Notions of precedent and succession are also, unfortunately, dependent on context. The author regrets that his use of footnotes has made this post nondeterministic, and that it is no longer possible to be certain what the reader will find unorthodox.

However, rather than violate the integrity⁴ and spirit of the original, it was determined that the church's account of creation would be published as a companion piece and, as was the style at the time, in serial format. As a result, Creation Now! has been published continuously in tri-weekly installments for over a century, beginning with

In the beginning there was the beginning and so it began. Soon the beginning came to an end and at the end of the beginning there was a new beginning, and the beginning was before the beginning and the end shall follow after the end. In the beginning there was nothing, and what followed was quite similar. In the beginning there may have been quantum gravitational effects...

And so forth in that manner. Astute readers may have noticed that the above text is rather vague, and not particularly ironic. If you are such, your concerns have been addressed, and the various errata for Vol. I are available in Vols. XVII, XXXVIII, 0x47⁵, and C. It now reads

First there was nothing, but there was nowhere for nothing to be. And all that nothing with nowhere to go, that was really something.

⁴ This term is not strictly accurate

⁵ The church switched briefly to hexadecimal notation during the Second World War, for fear that Roman numerals were giving aid and comfort to the fascists.

Unfortunately, despite extravagant attention to detail, the publication has become increasingly difficult to sustain, as the church's mythography has remained roughly chronological. Despite efforts to the contrary, by 1937 the creation myth had absorbed the entire American Colonial period (during which process Henry Hudson was accidentally canonized) and appeared to be gaining speed. In a move that has been generally regarded as disastrous, the church kicked off 1981 with an in-depth summary of the 1980 election. Shortly thereafter it arrived at its current form, which is comprised largely of weather forecasts, horoscopes, and speculative fiction, though it also provides space for the still-plentiful corrections, scholarly clarifications, and wild-eyed jabbering regarding the extant myths.

In a 2009 bid to undercut the church's competitors, Creation Now! devoted an entire issue to eschatology, and proposed that the end times would arrive sometime in the Autumn of 2011, if not sooner. This produced a devastating decline in the publication's subscription rate, and the date of the apocalypse was quickly rescinded and placed "at least several several fiscal years from now."