We have touched on the much-abused “a curse upon Because” and “reason is a lie” phrases from the second chapter of The Book of the Law in a number of places, including The fallacy of “experiential knowledge” and Sun enters Cadent of Aquarius, but we’ve never given them a thorough treatment in one place, so […]

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 […]

Executive Function wrote: If I were constantly to live in the now then I would have developed absolutely no ability to communicate nor make practical improvements to my life. I like my freedom too much to constantly *just* live in the now. There’s a place in the now for consideration of narrower and more limited […]

In a recent post, What’s the point of it all? we made the statement “When you’re dead, you’re dead, and nothing of the individual survives. Individuality is a temporal and temporary phenomenon”, which provoked the following comment: you are not able to prove it either This comment deserves a post of its own for a […]

A recent discussion over on heruraha.net about reincarnation saw Jim Eshelman make the following statement in response to the statement that “There are innumerable arguments against reincarnation”: Which I’m not going to rehash or enter into. My experience confirms to me, with certainty matching or exceeding that of any other certainty in the whole range […]

A recent thread over on LAShTAL.com has been discussing the highly suspicious account Aleister Crowley gave about the “reception” of The Book of the Law. One part of the thread has morphed into a speculation as to the nature of “Aiwass”, prompting Ian Rons to write this: I myself experienced something akin to this once, […]

On a recent reply to a post on John Crow’s blog concerning values, “Keith418” posted this: Where do values like this come from? Many of us suspect a transcendent origin for certain values. “The sense of the world must lie outside the world. In the world everything is as it is and happens as it […]

In our last entry, Sun enters Ascendant of Aries, we discussed Aleister Crowley’s definition of “magick”: the Science and Art of causing Change to occur in conformity with Will and commented on how the principle question relates not to the “causing Change” part as many suspect, but to the “conformity with Will” part. In other […]

The vernal equinox marks the time at which the length of the day begins to exceed the length of the night once again (technically, it doesn’t; due to the refraction of light in the atmosphere and because the Sun appears to be a disk rather than a point, the length of the day exceeds the […]

The position of reason and the intellect has always been a tenuous one in the realms of religious and spiritual pursuits. On first appearances, the reason (excuse the pun) for this seems obvious; rational analysis has a tendency to destroy the fanciful and often self-important delusions that often accompany these pursuits. Faith-based religions, for instance, […]