In a literal interpretation of a Zen teaching, born-again Buddhist Shamba LaGiamba killed her parents on the road outside their suburban home. "I told them it wasn't safe for them there," said LaGiamba. "'If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him. If you meet a Patriarch on the road, kill him. If you meet your parents on the road, kill them.' It doesn't get any clearer than that."

LaGiamba is a member of Gautama's Witnesses, a part of a growing trend of fundamentalist sects of belief structures that really shouldn't have fundamentalists. Elsewhere, fundamentalist Unitarians have been seen burning question marks on their enemies' lawns, fundamentalist Rastafarians have started fire-bombing hair salons (and smoke-bombing everyone else), and fundamentalist Quakers now knock on people's doors and refuse to not shut up. Nor is this wave of fundamentalism restricted to religious groups. Radical Mets fans have gone to war with hard-line Yankees supporters, trekkers are burning trekkies at the stake, and fundamentalist goths are campaigning to ban pastel clothes from public schools.

"Literalism can be liberating," explained Simone deBeauxcheveux of the Latter-Day Existentialists. "Philosophy used to give me such a headache, but now that I take everything literally, it doesn't even feel like work."

Latter-Day Existentialists go door to door and depress people. They also engage in depression by proxy, a ritual in which one's ancestors are made retroactively despondent. Believing that Hell is literally other people, Latter-Day Existentialists see it as their mission to ensure that everyone is depressed before. . . well, nothing. "Camus died for you!" insisted deBeauxcheveux. "Today. . . or maybe it was yesterday, I'm not certain."

Perhaps nothing exemplifies this trend more than The 700-Fold, a show hosted by televangewitch Tammy Fey Moonwolf, who tells her followers that everything you put out comes back to you sevenfold—or more if you send it to the right place—so the surest road to prosperity is to send your money to her. "But don't think of personal gain when you do it," Moonwolf added. "If you send me money and don't get rich, you were probably seeking personal gain, and you should start over and send more." Ratings plummeted recently, when Moonwolf's viewers starved to death trying to literally harm no one.

LaGiamba, for her part, shows no regret. "The Buddha would be so proud of me!" she gushed in a recent interview. "If I told him," she added in an afterthought. "But then I'd have to kill him."