Trash as a Means of Religious Communication

Warm Greetings to the General Heathen Public from the Toxic Temple

Abstract

Plastic, cement and nuclear waste will not only outlast us as individuals, but probably also as a species. What we pejoratively call ‘trash’ is that which will stand for us the longest. All our languages, cultures, and communications will be incomprehensible, and it is our waste that will represent us most virulently in the post-human life. In this sense, the speculative religion-turned-artistic project Toxic Temple regards our trash as a transcendent form of communication. Religion and spirituality were always means of speculating about the more-than-human and the beyond-human. At a time in which religion, at least in a European context, has lost its centrality in how we negotiate our desire for eternity, such eternity has instead become immanent in the form of trash, haunting us both in our present moment and in our possible futures. This essayistic, semi-scholastic contribution to On_Culture presents some of the central pillars of this speculative religion of trash, asking questions about wastefulness and eternity that exceed the boundaries between science, art, the humanities, and religion.