The guide has indeed failed to return, the screening room empty save for us. With a great lunge I flick the light-switch. Icons adorn the walls, held loftily by still-wet jissom, the smell smothering the room.

“Shall we leave?” says I.

“Aye,” the Duke mouths approvingly.

Duke De Mondo

The digital projector behind us murmurs contentedly, exuding curious tendrils of azure light that dance and whirl demented about the airways.

“What’d you make o’ that, at all?” Sir Fleming enquires.

“I dunno,” I say, scratching at the bum-fluff on my jaw, squinting a touch. “It’s all a bit… well it’s a bit self-serving, the whole thing, is it not?”

Thinking then - Christianity, Hinduism, Islam… Which of them isn’t self-serving? Their longing for justice (whatever their definition of such may be), their professed love (to lesser or greater extent) of the downtrodden and the weak and the beaten and bruised - it’s all self-serving, it’s all in pursuit of some personal gain to be garnered far side of a bullet in the eyehole or a topple off of a cliff or a battle with the minotaur or whatever.

Perhaps Scientology is just more honest?

Heads poking out the door of the screening room, scanning the stairways either side. “Where is she?” I ask. “Do they have a Rapture, these people? Has she been plucked from out the Earth by the thumb and forefinger of L. Ron? Has she been set upon by Psychlos?”

“Hubbard only knows,” Sir Fleming replies in hushed tones, his eyes narrowed, searching. “But I will stand in this darkness no more.”

Criticisms plucked out the broadsheets and the tabloids and the blogs, considered anew whilst clambering from one floor to the next.

“It’s absurd! Aliens! Fucking… fucking thetans!? It’s absurd!”

Maybe so, thinking, but none more at all than the idea of a virgin birth or of a woman turning to a pillar of salt or of a staff turning into a snake.

“They’re kidnappers!”

Thinking - It’s not really kidnap, though, is it? These people are adults. They can decide for themselves if they wanna whistle tarrah to the folks what raised them. Did not Christ himself bid his followers to leave her indoors indoors, to abandon mothers and fathers, to sling aside the progeny like a month-old wank-rag?

Says a man straddling the back of my brain - “Each epoch gets the religion it deserves!”

This is the crux of the matter.

Having outgrown Christ and Buddha, having decided that the whole rich man / camel / eye of needle carry-on is all well and good when you’re a student, like, but fuck me… Having decided a bypass is needed that folks can get to Heaven without having to go anywhere near the townships of Revolution and Individual Accountability and Solidarity where thon hoary old Marxist Christ done spent his gap year blathering and braying, having reached these conclusions, it was surely inevitable that the West would spawn something like Scientology.