The Church of the 12th night Cakesniffers

Cakesnifferology
Religions and cults are weird things. Are religions just cults with a large following? I don't know, and I don't profess to know enough about this other than to wonder why people get drawn to these things.

I suppose one difference between a religion and a cult is that a religion, or proper faith, would never seek to isolate a person from their families or natural environments. Faith should never instruct a person to make financial contribution, as a proportion of salary, to their cause. Faith should survive through generations of leaders who represent the god, rather than being short-termists with the leaders acting as a god.

I wrote this somewhere else earlier: "Faithless in faith, we must behold the things we see". I guess it sort of means that seeing is believing and this is the safest option for a lot of people who don't quite "get" faith.

Anyway. I'm going to start a cult.

The Church of the 12th night Cakesniffer, or Cakesnifferology, will be a virtual cult that has the basic remit to spread normality and common sense across the globe. Unlike the Heaven's Gate cult, which lost 39 purple shroud-clad members to a suicide pact under the flight of the 1997 Hale-Bopp comet, we won't talk about aliens being our saviours.

Fuck it, I can't be arsed.

You need to be an egotistical, mentalist wanker to want such adoration and no normal person would want that.

I suppose that's why normal people don't start cults.

And there it was, gone, no sooner than it had started. So Cakesnifferology was never to be more than a passing whim and the world is a better place because of it. And for all the weirdos hijacking it, the passing of Hale-Bopp throughout those weeks in the spring of 1997 really was something else. Searching through my photo archives, I was sure I had a blurred shot of it somewhere, alas no. But I did find this from the 1999 solar eclipse.

In some ways we in the North of England were lucky on that August day because we weren't expecting the full solar eclipse, so we weren't so disappointed when it turned out to be cloudy (as fucking usual). In the end, the cloud provided cover for some pretty decent photos. And the eclipse itself, partial though it was, was one of the weirdest things I'll ever experience: the dusck-like light; the sudden chill in the air; the quiet as the birds ceased their twittering and the cars stopped to witness the event. Then with a click of the fingers, it was gone.

Starting a cult would've been a great way of getting people to wear Cakesniffer t-shirts though. You could imagine mothers across the world going through their teenagers' washing bags to find a screwed up sniffer t at the bottom (how dare they treat the garment with such contempt!), crying to their husbands that their little one had been lost to the Cakesniffy forces of blogworld.

"My baby, why my baby?"

"Because they've got internet access and blogging all night sure beats watching TV with us."