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 […]

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 […]

In the previous entry – which should be read prior to this one – we saw how one of the most fundamental mistakes that the occultist makes is to believe himself to have discovered some truth, where in fact he has only discovered an amusing word game. Having dispensed with the word games, we will […]

John Crow has just posted an interesting new entry on his blog, to which I responded with the following comment to one of his points, reproduced here for reference. John Crow wrote: Empiricism? As Crowley points out, our senses are very limited and in many cases, we only know of phenomenon by the results or […]

It is common for the unthinking occultist (and unthinking dullards in general) to champion the place of “experience” over “reason”, or “theory”, in the acquisition of knowledge. As we have said before, this is not merely mistaken; it is an outright category error. Let us imagine that individual gets into a car accident, and by […]

In the old days, occultists with a high school education and a penchant for misunderstanding and misapplying science would wax lyrical about quantum mechanics. It offered – for those not willing or able to take the time to learn anything about it – an alluring prospect of “probability waves” which gave the occultist the delusion […]

I’ve been conducting a discussion over on another blog (which, incidentally, has predictably ended up with the other party crying foul, claiming that he is “not trying to attain a reasoning state” and “as a student of human psychology” insisting on reading sinister motives into getting comments on one entry he made to a public blog […]

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 […]