More from Dawkins’ The Greatest Show on Earth: As we trace the ancestry of modern Homo sapiens backwards, there must come a time when the difference from living people is sufficiently great to deserve a different specific name, say Homo ergaster. Yet, every step of the way, individuals were presumably sufficiently similar to their parents […]

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 […]

[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: moral statements are propositions which express subjective facts (individual subjectivism); moral statements are propositions which are false (error theory); or moral statements […]

[Read part one] We need to begin by addressing in more detail the philosophical objection we alluded to in the preceding discussion before we proceed too far into a discussion of meta-ethics. As we saw, some people fundamentally object to this type of philosophical analysis on the grounds that they know perfectly well what they […]

Ethics may be defined broadly as the study of values as they relate to human conduct. The subject matter is extremely broad, and the field has historically been divided into through main categories: Normative ethics is the study of what should be done, the study of what it is that makes an action `right’ or […]

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 […]

Every couple of weeks or so, I get an email from somebody claiming to have discovered some fundamental and important truth or another, particularly if it disagrees with something that I have written here. These “truths” usually fall into one of two categories. The first type comes under the heading of “gibberish”. Not just a […]

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 […]