Neal Stephenson Quote

Lagos, typically for a nonbusinessman, had a fatal flaw: he thought too small.He figured that with a little venture capital, this neurolinguistic hackingcould be developed as a new technology that would enable Rife to maintainpossession 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 morepowerful. He took Lagos's idea and told Lagos himself to buzz off. Then hestarted dumping a lot of money into Pentecostal churches. He took a smallchurch in Bayview, Texas, and built it up into a university. He took a smalltimepreacher, the Reverend Wayne Bedford, and made him more important than thePope. He constructed a string of self-supporting religious franchises all overthe world, and used his university, and its Metaverse campus, to crank out tensof thousands of missionaries, who fanned out all over the Third World and beganconverting people by the hundreds of thousands, just like St. Louis Bertrand.L. Bob Rife's glossolalia cult is the most successful religion since thecreation of Islam. They do a lot of talking about Jesus, but like many selfdescribedChristian churches, it has nothing to do with Christianity except thatthey use his name. It's a postrational religion.He also wanted to spread the biological virus as a promoter or enhancer of thecult, but he couldn't really get away with doing that through the use of cultprostitution because it is flagrantly anti-Christian. But one of the majorfunctions of his Third World missionaries was to go out into the hinterlands andvaccinate 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 letreligious fanatics come up and poke needles into us. But we do take a lot ofdrugs. So for us, he devised a means for extracting the virus from human bloodserum and packaged it as a drug known as Snow Crash.