It seems that the fashion this week is for burning copies of religious tomes. Never ones to willingly miss out on a bandwagon, The European Church Of The Subgenius are keen to get in with the trend and hold a massive book burning session of our own.

But which holy book to burn? We don’t want to encourage burning the Qur’an since, well, that’s already been done and anyway, who wants to aggravate the Muslims and get a fatwa placed on their heads? Plus, we know they’re keen on burning works of fiction written by heretics like Salman Rushdie so you’d hope they’d be up for helping us, taking part in our book-burning event so we’d sooner have them on our side than calling the fire brigade and squirting our book pyres with fire extinguishers.

So we thought what about the Bible? We could get together with a bunch of Muslims and warm our cockles over the sweet bright flames of the books of the apostles and revelations. We bet Revelations would go up like a firework, it’s so crazy and trippy. Then Pope Finn pointed out that the Bible is already one of the best selling books in the entire world and that we don’t want to open the gap between it’s sales and the sales of our own religious book by encouraging people to buy burning copies.

And so it was decided that there’s only one holy book which we can all agree works as well for kindling as it does for religious enlightenment, only one book which can unite all the religious cults be they Christian, Muslim, Jew, Sikh, Buddhist, Church Of Scientology, Holy Church Of Subgenius, Discordian or Hindu: The Book Of The Subgenius.

Since the fashion seems to be to have your book burning on 911, presumably to make it easier to remember the number of the emergency services should the bestseller bonfire get out of control, we decided to have our book burning at 9pm on the 9th day of the 9th month. This should help UK book-burners remember their own emergency number should anything go wrong with the fiction fire: 999

Your instructions are clear;

1. Buy as many copies of the Book Of The Subgenius as you can afford. Buy some for your friends, buy a whole bunch of copies, they’re quite small and only burn for a few minutes. Try to empty all the local shoops of the book, ensuring that you’ll have a big old pile of books to burn.

2. At 9pm this evening, put all the books in a pile, pour petrol over them and SET FIRE TO THE PILE OF NONSENSE.

3. Dance around whooping and laughing in glee at the message you’ve sent to the Subgenius Church. We don’t be forgetting that in a hurry. Oh, burned!

If during the event a part of a page should float up, lifted by the fire, and land near you immediately rescue the fragment. It could hold important information from “Bob!” Store that tiny bit of truth and, as soon as possible, go and buy another copy of the Book Of The Subgenius. Look up where your cinder came from and study the chapter carefully. It could be the most important thing you’ll ever read.

Praise “Bob!”