Lagos, typically for a nonbusinessman, had a fatal flaw: he thought too small.
He figured that with a little venture capital, this neurolinguistic hacking
could be developed as a new technology that would enable Rife to maintain
possession of information that had passed into the brains of his programmers.
Which, moral considerations aside, wasn't a bad idea.
"Rife likes to think big. He immediately saw that this idea could be much more
powerful. He took Lagos's idea and told Lagos himself to buzz off. Then he
started dumping a lot of money into Pentecostal churches. He took a small
church in Bayview, Texas, and built it up into a university. He took a smalltime
preacher, the Reverend Wayne Bedford, and made him more important than the
Pope. He constructed a string of self-supporting religious franchises all over
the world, and used his university, and its Metaverse campus, to crank out tens
of thousands of missionaries, who fanned out all over the Third World and began
converting people by the hundreds of thousands, just like St. Louis Bertrand.
L. Bob Rife's glossolalia cult is the most successful religion since the
creation of Islam. They do a lot of talking about Jesus, but like many selfdescribed
Christian churches, it has nothing to do with Christianity except that
they use his name. It's a postrational religion.
"He also wanted to spread the biological virus as a promoter or enhancer of the
cult, but he couldn't really get away with doing that through the use of cult
prostitution because it is flagrantly anti-Christian. But one of the major
functions of his Third World missionaries was to go out into the hinterlands and
vaccinate people -- and there was more than just vaccine in those needles.
"Here in the First World, everyone has already been vaccinated, and we don't let
religious fanatics come up and poke needles into us. But we do take a lot of
drugs. So for us, he devised a means for extracting the virus from human blood
serum and packaged it as a drug known as Snow Crash.
He figured that with a little venture capital, this neurolinguistic hacking
could be developed as a new technology that would enable Rife to maintain
possession of information that had passed into the brains of his programmers.
Which, moral considerations aside, wasn't a bad idea.
"Rife likes to think big. He immediately saw that this idea could be much more
powerful. He took Lagos's idea and told Lagos himself to buzz off. Then he
started dumping a lot of money into Pentecostal churches. He took a small
church in Bayview, Texas, and built it up into a university. He took a smalltime
preacher, the Reverend Wayne Bedford, and made him more important than the
Pope. He constructed a string of self-supporting religious franchises all over
the world, and used his university, and its Metaverse campus, to crank out tens
of thousands of missionaries, who fanned out all over the Third World and began
converting people by the hundreds of thousands, just like St. Louis Bertrand.
L. Bob Rife's glossolalia cult is the most successful religion since the
creation of Islam. They do a lot of talking about Jesus, but like many selfdescribed
Christian churches, it has nothing to do with Christianity except that
they use his name. It's a postrational religion.
"He also wanted to spread the biological virus as a promoter or enhancer of the
cult, but he couldn't really get away with doing that through the use of cult
prostitution because it is flagrantly anti-Christian. But one of the major
functions of his Third World missionaries was to go out into the hinterlands and
vaccinate people -- and there was more than just vaccine in those needles.
"Here in the First World, everyone has already been vaccinated, and we don't let
religious fanatics come up and poke needles into us. But we do take a lot of
drugs. So for us, he devised a means for extracting the virus from human blood
serum and packaged it as a drug known as Snow Crash.
( Neal Stephenson )
[ Snow Crash ]
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