Over on Jim Eshelman’s Temple of Thelema forums, there’s a thread called True Will and physical obstacles. The original poster asked:

A man, who is black receives repeated racial discrimination and abuse which affects his life so badly that he feels suicidal. He makes every effort to live his True Will and the path that involves etc. but he finds that the racism means he can’t even get through most days with peace in his own home and his ambitions (which because he is a ware of his True Will ARE in accordance with his True Will) are thwarted at every attempt…How do you suggest they [the original poster provided two other similar examples – EH] have caused the obstacles that they would have to overcome, not only to discover their True Will but to also follow that True Will? And how could they have avoided those obstacles?

to which Eshelman made the following astonishing reply:

Roll it back… Why did that individual incarnate as a black man in a time and place where this is the case? Until that questioln is answsered, we can’t really know what his True Will is. Under the conditions you mentioned, his True Will must include the component of the struggles that he dropped himself right into the middle of.

The original poster, understandably, asked for clarification:

So, you’re saying any problems people have, no matter how horrendous, they ‘dropped themselves into’?

You’re saying that racism is a collaboration between the black person (or other race) and that the black person (or other race) is actually permitting the racism. That idea would also suggest that people wanted to go into concentration camps – that they collaborated with the Nazis. And that paedophiles victims are collaborating with their abusers – how do you suggest a child ‘permits’ or ‘collaborates’ with that?

which received the following even more startling reply from Eshelman:

I am saying that, yes, we pick the essential elements of our lives in advance and enter into them as an act of choice…I am saying that, given the context of racism, choosing an incarnation that has you step into a suppressive situation as one of those guaranteed to be suppressed is a choice.

Now, let’s get an obvious objection out of the way first. Unlike some others, the present author doesn’t get “offended” or “outraged” at the mere suggestion that racism, for instance, is anything other than a self-evident outrage against the universe. While other people may have moral objections, we don’t. The principle objection here is that this is a stupid thing to say. An unbelievably, boneheadedly, stupid thing to say.

The primary culprit appears to be Eshelman’s colossal misunderstanding of will:

their True Wills cannot (by nature of how the universe is compose) conflict with yours. Not at all. Not in the slightest. Their wants can conflict. Their choices can conflict. But not True Will.

The Ethics of Thelema has already deftly dealt with this particular misunderstanding, so we need only point out here that this is the kind of stark, raving, drooling insanity you’re going to come out with if you doggedly stick to a self-evidently stupid idea and incorrectly insist that that’s how the universe must work without actually bothering to check.

Talking of which, here’s the real kicker from Eshelman, the one that makes it all worthwhile:

I’m not arguing for anything. I’m answering your question by explaining the nature of reality. I don’t care if you’re convinced. I’m instructing you in how the universe works

We refer the reader back to A belief in experience, Evidence of the supernatural?, Scientifically testing the supernatural and Go-go-Godel! for more. The gall of this clown in even mentioning the word “reality” is almost awe-inspiring. Almost.

So you see? We’re really not making this stuff up, kids. If you go about believing in reincarnation, secret chiefs, goblins and all the rest of it, this is going to happen to you one day. You don’t want to turn out like that idiot. Don’t do it. Just say no.

A few months ago, in the entry Religious naturalism and religious thinking, we criticized the much-vaunted but actually non-existent benefits of religion within the context of philosophy (which actually does not exist) which eschews the regular supernatural components of traditional religious beliefs. We saw that:

• once you take the supernatural out of religion, you are left with nothing at all – that there is and can be nothing in naturalism deserving of the term “religious”;
• religious naturalism – in particular, John Bowie’s interpretation of it – postulates a deep-seated human need for various myths and stories, religious practices, and ethical frameworks which religious naturalism does not yet possess, and without which religious naturalists are apparently able to live spiritually fulfilling lives perfectly well;
• that religious naturalism – and religion in general – attempts to hijack numerous perfectly natural and human qualities and label them “religious” to justify their claims; and that
• by searching for answers to the “big questions”, religion – and religious naturalism in particular, by allowing us to see what happens when we remove the supernatural elements – clearly encourages and propagates the kind of conceptually mistaken thinking which causes people to ask those questions in the first place, and thus propagates the misery thereby caused in order that it can (falsely) claim to provide a solution.

Recently, continuing discussion over on “Swimming the Sacred River” demonstrated a marked reluctance on the part of Bowie in particular to address these issues, indeed having to defensively hide behind a long list of excuses in order to avoid doing so. The kind of basic questions being asked of religious naturalism boil down to: what is it? Why is it useful? Why should the sought after stories, practices and ethics be considered necessary if even religious naturalists appear perfectly able to get by without them? One would think that the creator of a blog dedicated to religious naturalism would be able to answer such fundamental questions with a snap of his fingers, but not only have answers not been forthcoming, but it appears that Bowie is incapable of providing them. Read the rest of this post »

I recently received the following questions via private correspondence:

I want to ask you some detailed questions about the Trumps & the hebrew letters if you don’t mind? Do the hebrew letters play any part in Tarot readings? Ok for example the Chariot is assigned Cheth/Fence well we know that a fence can keep people/things out but it can also keep a person trapped or imprisoned. So what then is the real meaning to Cheth what are we protecting & keeping out or in? I want to know how to use the hebrew letters when applied to a reading. I wish you could teach me more on this subject. Can i ask you if you have received any Tarot papers from the O.T.O or any other Mystery School giving the true hidden meanings to the cards? You seem like you know a lot about the cards…if you or someone is looking to teach the Thoth Tarot please let me know I would love to learn the “True Meanings” to the cards.

My response was as follows.

You appear to have picked up some rather strange ideas about the Tarot. The Tarot originated in 15th century Europe as a game. The Tarot was, originally, a deck of playing cards. The occult associations of Tarot began, as far as anyone can tell, in 1781 when Antoine Court de Gebelin published a speculative and spurious essay asserting that the Tarot was descended from Ancient Egypt and represented the mysteries of Isis and Thoth. It isn’t. It started off as a deck of playing cards and then, from the late 18th century, occultists started overlaying symbolic meanings onto it.

The point of this is that there are no “true hidden meanings”. In particular, the Tarot is not (or originally was not) a pictorial representation of the Qabalah. Some occultist at some point once noticed that there were 22 Tarot trumps, and 22 Hebrew letters, and so he assigned one of latter to each of the former, but the trumps categorically do not originate with the Hebrew letters. The same thing goes for the astrological, numerological and other symbolic attributions – they are, as the name implies, attributed to the trumps, they are not some kind of hidden meaning underlying the trumps. The Tarot is not an embodiment of ancient secret wisdom – it is a deck of playing cards to which some occultists have attributed symbols several centuries after it was invented.

The upshot of this is that the only “objective meaning” for any particular symbol attached to any particular card resides in the intent of the creator of that attribution. Read the rest of this post »

The U.S. OTO Frequently Asked Questions page contains the following:

What if it’s your True Will to do [some bad thing]?

This is the philosophical puzzle at the core of Thelema, and like most puzzles, it resists easy solution. One school of thought considers “Do what thou wilt” to be a descriptive rather than a normative law, similar to the distinction between the speed-of-light limit imposed by the physical nature of the Universe and a posted highway speed limit. Given that your having carried out a given act indicates that you both intended it to occur and successfully made this intention manifest, it is evident that you have conformed to the laws governing such actions; q.e.d. The other school argues that the Law should be seen as a goal to be achieved, and that it is very possible to act against your (true) Will. In this view, it is posited that were all to do their own Wills and nothing else, there would be no strife.

Another post on Kjetil Fjell’s blog called Adequate tension with the surroundings attributes the OTO’s failure to develop into a religious movement of anything other than miniscule size to a lack of strictness:

Where even the term thelemite itself has become so vague that when someone talks about how much he hates the tenets of the Law of Thelema, people will reply gladly that they are so happy that this person has found his Will as a Thelemite and are doing it as opposed to all those who merely mimic Crowley’s. Where obvious borderline psychopaths, people with poor social skills, people who are attending the great parties and because they like the people are accepted as equal to stable and committed members who are knowledgeable and have achieved success with it’s teachings. The list is nearly endless, but in general it can be summed up with that we have an extremely permissive culture, one that is so permissive that it even tends to drive away people who otherwise are supportive of the tenets of the Law.

As it stands, this is a sensible enough observation. Fjell calls it “counterintuitive” but it really shouldn’t be – exclusivity is a major reason why people join groups in the first place, and exclusivity is incompatible with extreme permissiveness. To grow a group, people have to want to belong to it, and in order to want to belong to it there needs to be some more-or-less exclusive criteria or standard which defines the group as a group and makes it attractive. As Fjell says, “strictness promotes an increase of numbers…people join something because it gives something different than they can get elsewhere.”

However, when considering actual Thelema – as opposed to Fjell’s space-alien brand of Thelema – we’d suggest that the aforementioned quote from the OTO’s FAQ reveals the real problem with a lack of what we might term “strictness”. Although Fjell-Thelema may be concerned with “getting into contact with praeterhuman intelligences”, actual Thelema is concerned with discovering and performing the will, or “true” will. Yet, as the OTO’s FAQ page shows, the official position of the largest organisation of Thelemites declares the will – the one central concept of Thelema – to be a “philosophical puzzle”. Read the rest of this post »

A post entitled A Church of Magic over on Kjetil Fjell’s blog has, despite being over a year old, been recently brought to my attention. The subject matter covered, a type of sociological, OTO-obsessed, college-kid “Thelema” inspired by Team418, is not the usual fare for this site, but in this particular entry – and in the comments to it – Fjell makes some extraordinary claims that illustrate nicely what’s wrong with this kind of undergraduate approach whose proponents appear to be becoming more vocal in recent months.

Firstly, it will be helpful to summarise what the entry in question says, since the task is made difficult by Fjell’s disjointed writing style and clumsy English.

He begins by distinguishing two types of “magic”. The first, “Frazer’s magic”, is the type outlined in The Golden Bough, one which assumes a regular and predictable order behind physical events, but which assumes an order which is simply wrong, something Fjell freely admits. The second, “religious magic”, is one “that attempts to win over the favor of supernatural beings with sacrifice and prayer.” In comparison to the first type, religious magic assumes alternately that there is not a regular and predictable order behind physical events, or that there is one, but that it is regularly overridden by “the capricious intervention of supernatural beings.” He then goes on to declare “this is the key feature which separate[s] magic from religion: One is testable, the other is not,” having already determined that while “magic” is testable, when it actually is tested, it is almost universally found to be false. This, as far as it goes, is a reasonable summary, which merely serves to make the remarks we will encounter later all the more extraordinary. Read the rest of this post »

Reposted from LAShTAL.com:

Iskandar wrote:

While I very much disagree with Mika’s last sentence, I am in complete agreement with her essential thesis, that “living according to one’s Will *is* achieving one’s Will.” I would consider Crowley as responsible for some confusion regarding this issue, but mostly because he was – Prophet or not – also a cultural product of his times and a successor to a rather linear understanding of the nature of the Great Work as formulated in a bulk of the teaching of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. There is thus – in my current understanding – a continuous subtext that one may equate with ‘the lust of result’ in Crowley’s opus: you do certain things and then certain results follow.

The admonition of “lust of result” is often mistakenly read to promote a complete disinterest in results at all, but it doesn’t mean anything like this. A statement that “the end results, if any, are irrelevant” is far too strong.

To continue an earlier analogy, one cannot sensibly play a game of chess without trying to win, since it is the objective of winning which provides the context within which a “good move” can be judged. In the same way, one can’t sensibly learn to play a musical instrument without deliberately trying to get better at it. On an even more banal scale, nobody would ever drop a couple slices of bread into a toaster without having the end result of toast in mind.

The important point is that nobody makes the mistake of thinking that if they win this particular game of chess that they’re playing right now, all their problems will go away. While you are playing, you definitely want to win, but it never occurs to you to think that winning this game will have much of any significance to your life once you’ve won it. Once it’s won – or lost – it’s done, and you move on to the next thing. It should be clear to anyone that although the objective of winning is of critical importance to playing a game of chess, it is the act of playing that is ultimately of worth to one’s life – as a form of enjoyment, or intellectual stimulation, or whatever – and not the winning. You’d be suffering from “lust of result” if you started believing that there was something inherently valuable to winning games of chess in and of itself, which – naturally – very few people believe, not least because winning a game of chess is all the evidence you need to show you that there isn’t.

This is often not the case with “spiritual practice”. Certainly it is true that practice is directed towards an end. One might engage in meditation to improve concentration, or to engender a feeling of relaxation, or just to enjoy the process of meditation itself, for that matter. It is not indicative of “lust of result” to work towards an objective when you do such things. However, where people start going wrong is when they start believing that if they “practice” enough or if they “attain” to a particular level then they will become enlightened beings and all their problems will go away. They won’t. Just like when you win a game of chess, all that will happen is that you’ll be in a new place with new things to do; at that point, any “success” you had will be in your past, and it won’t matter a whole lot to what you are going to do next.

All “lust of result” illustrates is the obvious truth that static things don’t bring satisfaction or enjoyment. It doesn’t mean that the end result is unimportant to what you are doing now and should be studiously ignored; it just means that the end result is not important in and of itself. Results are only valuable insofar as they provide context for action; once they are achieved, they really won’t matter much to anyone, because you’ll be acting in a different context, but a major part of “enjoying the journey” is indeed deliberately striving towards the goal. All “conquering lust of result” entails is realising that when your brain starts telling you that everything is going to be great if only you can achieve this result or another, it’s telling you an outrageous fib. Realising this then naturally enables one to focus on the real life instead of the imaginary one, and enables one to prevent one illusory pipedream after another from continually distracting one’s attention from what actually is happening now.

During a recent conversation I had with Dutch poet Martijn Benders we talked about the “path of least resistance” idea of will that I have previously discussed in The three dimensions of will and on the occasion of the Sun’s 2008 entrance into the cadent decan of Pisces. It is same idea that Aleister Crowley presented on several occasions, most notably in his new comment to AL I, 22:

We are asked to acquiesce in this Law of Nature. That is, we are not to oppose resistance to the perfect fluidity of the “Becoming” of Nature.

and in Liber Aleph:

Learn this also, that even the Will to the Great Work may be misunderstood of Men; for this Work must proceed naturally and without Overstress, as all true Works.

During that conversation, Martijn hypothetically asked how, if the path of least resistance were to be followed, would anyone undertake any works of significance, such as the production of an artistic masterpiece, since the obstacles to such an accomplishment are legion? It soon became clear that we were talking about exactly the same thing, but in different words, and it occurred to me that this idea of will as the “path of least resistance” could be misconstrued, and some clarification may be in order.

We can remark, for instance, that while I find it physically difficult to, say, walk 30 miles over the mountains, I don’t find it mentally difficult to do so, and a very simplistic view of “resistance” is therefore not appropriate.In the same way, we can observe that a river encounters some very significant resistance indeed on its downward path – i.e. from the ground – but seems to have little problem continuing its downward path nonetheless.

We may imagine that one has some kind of inner “urge” to create the kind of artistic masterpiece that Martijn was talking about. While it may seem easier to loll around the house idly and avoid putting the effort into such work, the frustration of such an urge itself encounters resistance. It is as if such an urge “wants” to “come out” but is prevented from doing so. Thus, although the need to expend significant effort to create such a masterpiece may indeed constitute “resistance”, the constant gnawing regrets, sense of lost opportunity and feelings of lack of fulfillment may constitute even greater resistance.

In other words, the inertia created by such “urges” itself encounters resistance from attempts to subdue or otherwise direct them, and that resistance may be greater than the resistance posed by the practical difficulties of fulfilling them. Thus, the “difficult path” may indeed still be the path of least resistance if even greater resistance is required, over time, to suppress the expression of those urges. The “path of least resistance” therefore does not necessarily translate to “a life of ease” if one’s nature inclines one towards difficult tasks and if the difficulty of those tasks is less of obstacle than is needed to frustrate that nature. Read the rest of this post »

J. Ash Bowie’s web site, Swimming the Sacred River, is greatly concerned with “religious naturalism”, which he defines as:

a movement that offers a reverent orientation towards the natural world (which includes humans and human culture) that is in harmony with reason and our unfolding understanding of the universe as informed by the sciences. It denies the necessity of the super-natural, including personal deities, non-corporeal intelligences, meta-terrestrial dimensions, or occult/New Age forces.

The rationale behind religious naturalism seems to revolve around an old and tired cliche that occultists in particular seem very prone to spouting, namely, “don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater.” On a page of his called The Three Pillars, Bowie argues that:

Religion arguably exists in order to address certain human needs, such as assuaging existential anxiety, maintaining a sense of purpose and agency, developing an understanding of the workings of the world, and feeling connected to others. At another level, it is possible to surmise that people often desire what can be called a religious experience, here defined as a profound and meaningful shift in perspective involving an embodied sensation and a resultant interpretation that is explicitly religious in nature. Stated more simply, religion can potentially provide a sense of meaningful profundity, a sense of deep significance and/or transcendence from normal states of being, involving a connection with, experience of, or insight into a perspective of reality that is normally outside of everyday awareness.

In other words, the prompting behind religious naturalism is that there is “something in” religion, something which would be valuable to humanity if only the self-evidently absurd supernatural beliefs could be purged from it.

The primary purpose of this entry is to reject this idea, and to show that what is needed is not a naturalistic religion, but a naturalistic alternative to religion. The secondary purpose is to show that this kind of attitude arises in the first place from a phenomenon we shall introduce and call “religious thinking”.

Before proceeding we should make it clear that the purpose of this entry is not to criticise religious naturalism per se, although we certainly shall do that. The purpose is also certainly not to criticise J. Ash Bowie, although again we shall indeed criticise many of his ideas. The purpose is to criticise religion, and to show that the deleterious effects of religion are not simply limited to supernatural beliefs, but are inherent to the entire religious mindset, whether supernatural or naturalistic. Religious naturalism is, in theory, the ideal subject against to make such a point, because it purports to present a religion free from supernatural belief, leaving only the religious structure which we intend to criticise visible. However, it does only have this advantage in theory, and we must understand why it only has this advantage in theory before we continue. Read the rest of this post »

In You are not entitled, we raised the possibility that a liberal society and liberal values, although clearly preferred by many, may actually be detrimental to a society and ultimately unsustainable. Earlier, in Let there be no difference made, we saw how natural selection has not “designed” us to be spiritually fulfilled and happy, presumably because those things – while clearly pleasant – may have no discernible survival advantage, and may even be a disadvantage.

The purpose behind making these points was not to suggest that we should abandon a preference for liberty or spiritual fulfillment, but to highlight the fact that we cannot afford to ignore reality in the process. We can reasonably suppose that it will be little consolidation to a society who succeeds in achieving a complete state of non-violence and shortly afterwards finding itself invaded and overrun by a more aggressive neighbour with fewer sensibilities, to then reflect (presumably after death) that they may have been the “moral” victors, if not the actual victors.

This week, Jefferson Seaver over at the “Center for Inquiry” reports on a Daily Telegraph story which reports a British scientist suggesting that authoritative religion may be the only solution to combating climate change, if “no country was prepared to take the lead and a ‘punisher’ was needed to make sure the rules of co-operation were not broken” (although, as he rightly points out, the current brand of U.S. fundamentalism will not fit the bill since “people who believe in the End of Days, who believe the world is going to come to an end, don’t care about climate change.”)

The ubiquity of religion, despite its patent absurdity and laughably false claims, suggests that it must have some kind of tangible benefit to have lasted this long, regardless of the fact that it does not do a good job of accurately describing the world. Lord May, the scientist in question, suggests that religion “makes for rigid, doctrinaire societies, but it makes for co-operation”, and that it may be “immensely stabilising in individual human cultures.” Where we may expect faithful representation of the world to be a survival advantage for organs such as the eyes and ears, it’s not beyond the realms of possibility that a religion which does not faithfully represent the world could nevertheless confer a significant enough advantage on its adherents that it manages to survive for thousands of years, despite that fact that it’s utter garbage. If so, it is also possible that there are potential problems which only religion has the capability to solve. If these problems are significant enough that, for instance, they put the survival of the planet at risk, then this would bode ill for atheists across the globe. Read the rest of this post »

[Read part one]

[Read part two]

If moral realism is the idea that moral propositions express objective facts, moral anti-realism is the idea that they do not. Anti-realism can take three potential forms:

1. moral statements are propositions which express subjective facts (individual subjectivism);
2. moral statements are propositions which are false (error theory); or
3. moral statements are not propositions at all (non-cognitivism).

By describing moral judgments in terms of individual expressions of intrinsic value, we have already seen the first form, and by examining emotivism and prescriptivism we have also already seen the third. We saw that both the emotional statements of the emotivists and the command statements of the prescriptivist can be expressed in terms of a description of the underlying emotion or command — `I have an emotional distaste for murder’ and `I disapprove of murder’ — which would make non-cognitivism all but indistinguishable from individual subjectivism, so we needn’t expend much effort worrying about the distinction between them. Error theory is the remaining form that we have yet to cover in detail.

Error theory arises from a brand of skepticism, which argues that we are justified in holding any moral belief. The moral skeptic would require that the moral believer justify his beliefs before accepting them, and as we saw in the preceding section on moral realism, so far at least nobody has been able to satisfactorily do this. We would not, the moral skeptic would argue, accept a statement such as `Mars is the largest planet in the Solar System’ without requiring some justification for that statement, and moral statements should be no exception. Unless the believer is able to justify why a statement such as `murder is wrong’ is true, then it follows that he should not hold that belief. The moral skeptic would not accept the argument from individual subjectivism because, as we have seen, it provides no basis for why anybody else should conform to one’s individual values, and since this is the very basis for morality then individual preferences cannot justify moral beliefs.

The moral skeptic proper therefore considers that there can be no such thing as moral knowledge, and moral statements can therefore not be judged either true or false. The moral nihilist, on the other hand, goes further and says that all moral statements are false. This may be a result of the argument from queerness already mentioned, or simply as a natural result of the `is-ought’ problem which states that values can never be derived from facts. It could, for instance, be argued that suicide is never in the self-interest of any rational agent, and that there is always a motivation for any rational agent to avoid suicide, and that there is therefore a sound rational basis for saying one should not commit suicide, but the moral nihilist may simply deny that it’s possible to sensibly get from `against self-interest’ to `should’. One might wish to avoid suicide if one does not want to die, but the error theorist would argue this is an extrinsic motivation, not an intrinsic one, and that if something is not instrinsically motivating then it makes no sense to describe it in moral terms.

If we cannot justify moral realism, and we cannot accept individual subjectivism (including non-cognitivism as described above) as a basis for morality — without denying that people do indeed have individual intrinsic values as they pertain to the conduct of others — then error theory appears to be what we are left with. If an exhaustive search leaves us without any evidence for the existence of objective moral properties, if we have good reason to suspect that there are no objective moral properties, and if subjective moral values are unable to form a sensible basis for a system of morality, then we are lift with little choice other than to accept that moral statements are false. Indeed, the inability of either consequentialism or deontologism to give an adequate account of morality and the seemingly hodge-podge way in which actual moral opinions do appear to arise may have led us to this conclusion a lot sooner. In the words of the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, `although the arguments for moral skepticism are hard to refute, most people reject their conclusion.’ Read the rest of this post »