How is it that evangelical Christians, who have long advocated for America to more fully endorse their strict and bigoted interpretation of Christian morality, simultaneously endorsed someone who is so clearly morally destitute by their standards, or by any standard?
A Satanist Reads the Bible is Currently on Hiatus
I’ve injured my hand and my ability to type is limited, and that means A Satanist Reads the Bible needs to go on hiatus while I heal and recover. My aim is to be back in business starting in February but at this point I can’t say how long it will take. I’ll be pausing…
An Answer to the Pathologies of Ideology
Photo by Stillness InMotion on Unsplash This essay is also available as a podcast on anchor.fm In the first two parts of this month’s series, I’ve explored what I’ve referred to as the pathologies of human ideology, those aspects of human ideology with a strong potential to turn their ideologies toxic. With an emphasis on their manifestation in religion,…
Nihilism
I’ve never pinned down what exactly I mean by nihilism in anything more than a cursory way. This episode will remedy that deficiency and explore why nihilism, such as I construe it, is a pathological ideology.
Dogma and Hegemony
This month’s series will largely be a continuation of the November series, which was originally planned to be an exposition of some of the problematic aspects of religion.
Against Antireligious Atheism
Let’s start, as usual, by defining our terms. I think, first of all, that many different kinds of people who hold to many different kinds of belief systems can potentially be atheists, so I try not to posit anything beyond the minimum I can get away with. So typically I understand atheist to mean nonbelief in any gods. The many potential meanings of the word “god” complicate the issue considerably, but ultimately the atheist will claim that they don’t believe that anything that could be called “God” or “a god” or “a goddess” or anything like that exists. This does not necessarily equate to an affirmative belief that such things do not exist, but is rather, at the minimum, the absence of an affirmative belief that they do exist.
What Is Religion?
Do American Jews, Christians, and Muslims believe in the same god? Nominally, at least, the answer seems to be an obvious yes: I think Americans whose religion falls into the Abrahamic tradition in general identify their god as being the same god worshipped by other such Americans. But in practical terms, that may not be the case; even American Christians may functionally believe in a different god than other American Christians.
The Fringes of Religion: Aum Shinrikyo and the Branch Davidians
In this episode I’ll be examining two particularly fanatical manifestations of religious belief, with discussion on Aum Shinrikyo and a look at the Branch Davidians.
Contemporary Magic Practices
I’ve generated five stipulative definitions for magic: stage magic is a performative art in which neither performer nor audience truly believes that magic is taking place; magic proper is what we find in fictional accounts such as Harry Potter; type N pseudomagic describes real phenomena outside of present scientific models which could be studied, explained, and understood, but which have not been; type K pseudomagic describes real phenomena which are magic-like in character and which are explained by present scientific models; and type P pseudomagic is magic performed for the purpose of creating some personal psychological effect. Type K pseudomagic does indeed exist, with electromagnetism being an example. The potential existence and nature of pseudomagics type N and P will be explored in this essay.
A Brief History of Magic and the Western Esoteric Tradition
The questions I’m aiming to answer are one, whether there are any phenomena like electromagnetism which might be considered magic if we considered their properties independently of their realness (in other words, whether there are any other forms of type K pseudomagic beyond electromagnetism and whether there are any forms of type N pseudomagic at all); and two, if magical practices might be incorporated into personal religious belief and practice in a non-realist way (whether type P pseudomagic is viable, in other words). But first I’ll need to figure out more about what magic is.