(Video via Dangerous Minds.)
The Church of the SubGenius is a “parody religion” organization that satirizes religion, conspiracy theories, unidentified flying objects, and popular culture. Originally based in Dallas, Texas, the Church of the SubGenius gained prominencein the 1980s and 1990s and maintains an active presence on the Internet.
In 1996 the legal entity SubGenius Foundation, Inc. was established in Cleveland, Ohio. The Foundation’s president is “Reverend” Ivan Stang and the Vice President is Dr. Philo Drummond, a.k.a. Steve Wilcox. Publicly accessible cited figures from 1988 indicated a membership of 3,500,”more than 5,000” in 1990and “close to 10,000” by 2003.
The church started with the publication of SubGenius Pamphlet #1 in 1979. It found acceptance in underground pop-culture circles and has been embraced on college campuses, in the underground music scene, and on the Internet.
According to its “mythological” origins, the Church of the SubGenius claims to have been founded in the 1950s by the “world’s greatest salesman” J. R. “Bob” Dobbs. “Bob” Dobbs is depicted as a cartoon of a Ward Cleaver-like man smoking a pipe, an image originally seen in one of the many “can you draw this” ads commonly found in the back of comic books in the 1950s and 1960s.
Trust in “The Bob”.
