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Using Ecstasy in Church

Reviving church attendance with the use of entheogens

by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher

February 1, 2023



It's a well-known fact that the attendance numbers at houses of worship are in decline. For the first time in 2021, the percentage of attendees dipped below 50%, from a high of 73% in 1937, when Gallup first started keeping scoreFN0058. Pews are going empty. Ministers are wringing their hands. And yet nobody mentions the obvious solution to the problem, one that's been staring theists in the face for at least the last 50 years, were they not blinded by the light of the Drug War ideology of substance demonization.

It's time for churches (and dare I say mosques and synagogues as well) to start using Ecstasy (and/or similar entheogens) in their religious rituals.

In this way, church-going would become a sensual sort of full-body experience and not just a mental exercise for the tired brain of overthinking homo sapiens. Instead, the churchgoer would experience the oft-cited truths of the gospels, namely, that God is love.

Quanah Parker of the Native American Church best summed up the problem with the status quo as follows:

"The White Man goes into church and talks about Jesus. The Indian goes into his tipi and talks with Jesus."FN0057


This statement should be read as a wake-up call for the hand-wringing preachers mentioned above, but unfortunately said preachers are carrying on with business as normal, apparently convinced by their drug-war indoctrination that to do otherwise would be heresy, if not against the church itself then against the reigning orthodoxies of our time.

For the Drug Warrior has taught us to associate the super-safe drug called Ecstasy with irresponsible youths, notwithstanding the fact that those "irresponsible youths" took part in the most peaceful multi-ethnic get-togethers in world history during the rave phenomena of late 20th-century Britain. You remember how that ended, right? The politicians demonized ecstasy, cracked down on the same, and the dance floor soon devolved into liquor-fueled violenceFN0059. This shows the insane priorities of the Drug War: they do not want even peace and safety if it means okaying the use of substances that help the mind think sanely about the world.

And ecstasy is far from the only entheogen whose ritual use could increase church attendance. Alexander Shulgin has synthesized literally hundreds of substances whose use safely conduces to emotional harmony and love for one's fellows.

In fighting for these new experiential religions, which I call Church 2.0, we would be doing our bit to end the hateful Drug War by insisting to the brainwashed world that drugs are not evil in and of themselves, but that they can have beneficial uses as well. This fact would have been obvious to our 18th-century forebears, but it needs to be vigorously defended in an age in which agenda-driven and bribe-taking politicians are determined to quash our right to freedom of thought and consciousness.

By creating these new religions, we will be calling the Drug Warrior's bluff: saying, in effect: "Go on, tell me that I can't practice my religion, so that the world can see the full anti-democratic ignorance of the Drug War ideology that you represent."

Not that the DEA will back down without taking every challenge to the Supreme Court if necessary. Even as I write, the DEA is denying the legitimacy of a Florida religion which seeks to use ayahuasca in its religious rituals. This is such an obvious attack on religious thinking -- one in which a government organization is second-guessing the calls of a religious group -- that one scarcely knows where to begin in protesting it.

This is why the DEA needs to be abolished, not argued with. And then its leaders should be tried for crimes against humanity, in light of the billions who have gone without godsend medicines since that organization started criminalizing and lying about drugs in its politics-based scheduling system in 1973.











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Ten Tweets

against the hateful war on US




Psychiatrists refuse to acknowledge that it is hugely disempowering to turn patients into wards of the healthcare state with dependence-causing "meds." End drug prohibition and end the psychiatric pill mill.

The drug war tells us that certain drugs have no potential uses and then turns that into a self-fulfilling prophecy by outlawing these drugs. This is insanely anti-scientific and anti-progress. We should never give up on looking for positive uses for ANY substance.

Videos about science and psilocybin are funny. They show nerds trying to catch up with common sense.

When scientists discuss suicide without mentioning the fact that their government has outlawed drugs, it is like scientists discussing deaths from bacterial infection without mentioning the fact that their government has outlawed antibiotics.

Wanna show drug warriors the error of their ways? Legalize all less dangerous drugs than alcohol and then deny work to those who test positive for liquor and confiscate their property if beer cans are found on-site.

Here are some political terms that are extremely problematic in the age of the drug war: "clean," "junk," "dope," "recreational"... and most of all the word "drugs" itself, which is as biased and loaded as the word "scab."

The DEA outlawed MDMA in 1985, thereby depriving soldiers of a godsend treatment for PTSD. Apparently, the DEA staff slept well at night in the early 2000s as American soldiers were having their lives destroyed by IEDs.

People magazine should be fighting for justice on behalf of the thousands of American young people who are dying on the streets because of the drug war.

Drug warriors do not want to end "addiction": it's their golden goose. They use the threat of addiction to scare us into giving up our democratic freedoms, like that once supplied by the 4th amendment.

The so-called opiate crisis is really a drug prohibition crisis.


Click here to see All Tweets against the hateful War on Us






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Unless otherwise indicated, no AI is used in the creation of site content. These essays represent the original ideas of their author and not the ideas that the author SHOULD have based on an algorithmic parsing of existing data. For more on this subject, consider the AI-related viewpoints to which the author subscribes as delineated in the New York Times opinion piece entitled "What 370,000 College Essays Tell Us About A.I.’s Effects on Creativity" by Rebecca Winthrop of the Brookings Institution.

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