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LaVey was an objectivist and he ripped off a shitload of Ayn Rand's "philosophy" when he wrote The Satanic Bible which, I think, tells you everything you need to know about LaVey.
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May 12, 2021 12:48
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Matthew 18-8 posted:8 And if your hand or your foot causes you to sin, cut it off and throw it away; it is better for you to enter life maimed or lame than with two hands or two feet to be thrown into the eternal fire. 9 And if your eye causes you to sin, pluck it out and throw it away; it is better for you to enter life with one eye than with two eyes to be thrown into the hell of fire. If what you see causes you to sin, that's on you, bro.
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Sep 14, 2021 16:23
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Whether or not something was considered evil magic or just neat cheat codes God baked into the world varies spectacularly by time and place so honestly it's hard to say. The guy asking about Summis Desiderantes may actually be thinking of Canon Episcopi, you know, the one that says some people, deluded by Satan, believe they travel at night in the retinue of Diana the Goddess of the pagans, and that this is a foolish superstition that Christians should not believe. IIRC Canon Episcopi was actual Church law but I have no idea how to find out if it still is. It certainly became a bit of a thorn in the side of some people during the European witch hysteria because it outright said that evil magic fuelled by Satan's power wasn't real. The neat thing about the witch hysteria is that in the early Christian era believing in things like witches and vampires was discouraged because those were superstitions for stupid and backwards pagans and now that we are enlightened and intelligent Christians we know that such things are imaginary and not real. Also hello religion thread, I am a member of priesthood for a small Wiccan temple, feel free to ask questions if you are so inclined. Mad Hamish fucked around with this message at 17:00 on Jul 4, 2022 |
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Jul 4, 2022 15:13
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Cowman posted:Where's a good place to order statues of gods online? Specifically Bast and Ganesh. I know Ganesh is Hindu and we have a Hindu temple here but it feels wrong/insulting to contact them for what they might perceive as a souvenir. There are several people on Etsy who sell very nice carved wooden statues of various deities and there's a guy whose shop name is Blagowood who does lovely work and IIRC has one of Bast. If it's the one I'm thinking of then she doesn't even have her tits out and when it comes to Bast that can be surprisingly hard to find. It would not be considered sacreligious to have a statue of an Egyptian deity, but I can't speak for the Hindus, obviously.
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Jul 26, 2022 21:12
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Shitstorm Trooper posted:Go to a yoga-mom-rear end occult book store. They'll have plenty of statues of both. Yes, but they will most likely be bland polyresin that you see literally everywhere which has also inexplicably become horribly expensive. I was running a Summer Solstice ritual at a small local pagan festival in June and I wanted a statue of Re for the altar. I haven't purchased a deity statue in a very long time, so when I was doing some online window-shopping I was quite shocked to see that even a fairly small statue goes for well over $70CAD these days. The last time I picked anything like that up it went for maybe $40 which seems like a rather precipitous increase.
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Jul 27, 2022 15:13
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Like an interfaith sort of thing, that's rad. The Wiccan temple I used to be priesthood for before I got kicked out would often have religious students or a world religions encounter group come through and that was always an interesting time. People were always very keen and asked lots of questions.
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Aug 18, 2022 21:07
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https://twitter.com/sscjusa/status/1597087359455350784
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Nov 30, 2022 15:23
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Happy Winter Solstice! In Wicca this is the time when we celebrate the rebirth of the Sun, since after the longest night the days will once again grow longer. This marks a transition to the season of Earth, of coldness and stillness and drawing inward. On Sunday I got to run the public Yule (observed) ritual for the temple I attend and helped start, and what I wrote was an elaboration on and expansion of the winter solstice ritual Doreen Valiente wrote back in the 1950s. We lit tapers from a central candle in a cauldron, representing the rebirth of the Sun, did some circle dances and sang some songs, and played a rather silly party game where we lined up to jump over a smaller candle in a smaller cauldron to see who could make it go out. There was wine and food and excellent conversation and four brand-new people showed up which was very exciting. I'm extremely fortunate to have this kind of community available as I know what a rare and precious thing it is.
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Dec 22, 2022 03:36
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Look, I'm just saying, we didn't have all these problems we see in today's world back when we were still burning incense unto the Queen of Heaven and pouring out drink-offerings to Her.
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Feb 8, 2023 02:11
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Prurient Squid posted:I'm interested in primordial myths. Maybe I should read the Golden Bough or Jung or something? I read the condensed The Golden Bough many years ago and found it to be an unspeakably dull slog and I assume that the entire twelve-volume text would be even worse. Frazer's anthropology has not aged well and there are assuredly better works on the subject by now, although I am not in tune with anthropology enough to have suggestions. There's part of me that is wondering how I would feel about it now, as it's been about twenty years since I read it, but I'm not sure if I deserve that kind of punishment. A while ago I was going through what I would describe as formative Wiccan writings, so Gerald Gardner, Doreen Valiente, Starhawk etc., re-reading them for the first time in literal decades in some cases. Some of it has aged like raw milk and some of it's still pretty decent. The notion of going through The Golden Bough again now has be thinking of re-reading Graves' The White Goddess, which is also a book about mythology but in a far more disconnected, dream-logic intuitive kind of way. I first read it about the time I read The Golden Bough and thought it was complete and total claptrap, but having now had the chance to read some of Graves' fiction (excellent) I wonder if I might have a different understanding of it now.
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Feb 8, 2023 17:59
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Nessus posted:If we had external cyberwombs it would solve a lot of problems. Is anyone working on that? Do you want axolotl tanks? Because this is how you get axolotl tanks.
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Mar 23, 2023 23:22
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HopperUK posted:Moby Dick is really good. Not empty quoting.
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Apr 30, 2023 15:25
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I'm pretty far removed from Christianity, being Wiccan priesthood and all, but from my (limited?) understanding of Mormonism I really don't think it should count as Christian.
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May 10, 2023 22:56
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I feel like the belief that after you die you get to be the God of your own planet is sort of incompatible with Christianity, but again, I am not a Christian.
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May 11, 2023 16:16
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Earwicker posted:are you allowed to listen to metal and swear and be gay and have sex and smoke weed on your own planet or do you still have to obey all the christian laws? if the latter still seems pretty christian to me. If you're not allowed then that sounds pretty loving lame if you ask me!
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May 11, 2023 17:22
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Nessus posted:I know the moneychangers tale about Jesus is popular; what do folks feel about the fig tree part? Sometimes even Jesus can get hangry.
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May 18, 2023 14:42
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Liquid Communism posted:Dante is so terribly misinterpreted as to be darkly funny. The Inferno is a work of political satire taken far too seriously by people who conflated antiquity with received truth. Much like The Prince. It's self-insert fanfiction.
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Jun 4, 2023 15:16
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I think probably when such individuals assert that an alien spaceship landing in front of the UN would destroy religion they are likely thinking that all religion is like American fundamentalist Christianity. Wicca has not been around long enough for us to have theologians - that is a luxury for larger and more established religions - but I feel it is absurd and foolish to believe that the Gods would have created the Universe in all its infinite glory but made humans as the only sentient and sapient form of life. They reveal themselves to us here in one way, and to those guys on the far side of Andromeda in a different way, I would imagine. Hell, some of those guys on the far side of Andromeda are probably having this exact same discussion right now.
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Jun 21, 2023 15:45
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It's been a minute but if I recall correctly the ritual format in the Satanic Bible is very Golden Dawn-flavoured and then for some reason he threw in some 'corrected' Enochian for???reasons??? Like my dude the Enochian system was allegedly delivered to Dee and Kelly by angels, I don't think they'd be ok with Satanic anything.
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Jun 29, 2023 16:32
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Killingyouguy! posted:That poo poo takes up like half the book with NO pronunciation guide it's honestly so funny I guess it could have been funnier if he'd taken various conjurations from the PGM complete with barbarous names and just replaced every instance of YHVH SABAOTH with Satan or something but sadly we will never know.
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Jun 29, 2023 16:54
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Nessus posted:Crowley was also pretty pro Satan as I recall but was certainly talking about more than that. Crowley was an edgelord dickhead but he did get literally kicked down the stairs by WB Yeats while trying to do a hostile takeover of the London temple of the Golden Dawn and also his bottoming skills were so amazing that he melted Victor Neuberg's brain with his butthole and drove him mad. In conclusion, Crowley is a land of contrasts.
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Jun 29, 2023 17:45
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Killingyouguy! posted:Was Crowley the one who'd write a bunch of nonsense and then be like 'what did I mean? That's for you to figure out' To be honest you could say this about an awful lot of modern occultists. That said, Crowley ain't got poo poo compared to weirdos like Andrew Chumbley's Cvltvs Sabbati when it comes to incomprehensible mystic garbage. The first time I ever encountered anything pertaining to Cvltvs Sabbati I thought the person whose website I was reading was having a mental episode.
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Jun 29, 2023 18:00
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In that case I'd suggest  for a copy of the Azoetia and if you can stomach it then go wild.When I read it my opinion was that it was as though Wicca and Trad Craft (which is just Wicca with the serial numbers filed off) had a baby and that baby did a lot of shrooms and LSD. I'd be curious to see someone else's take on it. Hello, Religion Thread. Some of us are Weird, it seems.
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Jun 29, 2023 18:43
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I believe that Hubbard and Parsons tried to do the Moonchild operation in the American desert, which involved jerking each other off (?) in an attempt at creating a homonculus, but I may be mistaken in the exact particulars. Fuckin' wild.
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Jun 29, 2023 20:15
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LITERALLY A BIRD posted:For me, the auspice that really hit me over the head was in April. Just about as soon as the calendar year ticked over I started getting a particular deity with Whom I had never had a relationship pointed out to me, like, a lot. A whole bunch of signs I was grudging about accepting as signs started popping up wherever She was concerned, but I was kind of holding out for lack of a better term. I managed to rationalize away every individual occurrence, even though it was getting pretty difficult to dismiss everything as a whole. Then on Earth Day I straight up got sent a white dove, Her sacred bird, a few hours after I had held a conversation with my coworker about doves in mythology, a particular God for Whom they were a symbol, and how (heretofore unrelated) I had always wanted a pet pigeon. I am trying to figure out which Egyptian deity is associated with pigeons or doves and am Having Difficulty, which is most likely a skill issue on my part. I know exactly how this feels, though. There was a time in my life when I was being veritably showered with signs - people kept giving me reproductions of papyri with Isis painted on them, I was having dreams about Her, my teacher unexpectedly gave me a statue of Her, but I was sitting there with fingers in my ears going LA LA LA I CAN'T HEAR YOU. I had a deep interest in Isis but firmly believed that it would be rude to just assume the Queen of Heaven would take notice and was holding out for a particular kind of ritual where I could confirm this and meanwhile I was being metaphorically beaten on the head with a sistrum. Fun times!
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Jul 2, 2023 19:38
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Nessus posted:A lot of the projections on how "religion" or "the church" would take alien contact (or even just the discovery of microbes on Mars or Europa) seem to presume that American fundamentalist Evangelical Christianity is modal. I can't really blame people for thinking that in the US, especially since uncounted numbers of people have traumatic stories, but it really is not the entire scene and never has been. It is in fact an anomalous outgrowth which happens to be terribly prominent because it's politically favored by a major party in the most powerful country on the planet. I try to remember this any time I see someone condemning religion as a whole.
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Jul 6, 2023 14:46
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A Bad King posted:lmao I haven't read a stanza. I remember reading that it's mostly a very beautifully written in its original language hit job against the people he didn't like? It's a self-insert version of one of those dumb isekai animes where Dante gets to clown on people he thought were his enemies, and somehow people nowadays think this is what Christianity Actually Believes.
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Jul 20, 2023 16:03
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LITERALLY A BIRD posted:Is modern culture misunderstanding Dante’s Hell as the Christian Hell, the Christian version of modern culture misunderstanding Egyptian funerary texts as being the body of the religion? Because I don’t think Hamish meant their comment as harshly as you may have perceived it, but man have I felt what you seem to be feeling here, within a different context It's this.
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Jul 20, 2023 17:36
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Also, while I'm thinking of it, while I can kind of understand people thinking that the ancient Egyptians were death-obsessed merely because most common knowledge of them comes from their funerary monuments and writings, it's very funny to contrast this grim and dour mental image with a society whose festival in honour of the goddess Bast was sufficiently scandalous that Greek writers were horrified at how loose and carefree the Egyptians were. Basically the festival of Bast involved a bunch of women boarding a party barge that travelled to Bubastis while they drank and sang and danced, and every time the boat passed through a town the ladies on board would try and cajole other women to join them on their alcoholic pilgrimage, mostly by screaming at them while flashing their tits. 'Death-obsessed society' indeed.
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Jul 20, 2023 17:43
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A Bad King posted:WHO DID THIS TO THEIR MEMORY? Was it the British?! And the French, and the Germans. Edit: to be fair to them, like, a LOT of the stuff in Egypt that was well-preserved was funerary monuments and the literature on those monuments. Like, the Great Pyramid was the biggest man-made thing on Earth for a long time, almost four thousand years! You can see how people would assume that the afterlife was a Big Deal to the Egyptians. I mean poo poo, look at the size of that pyramid, it must have been important to them, right? Mad Hamish fucked around with this message at 18:46 on Jul 20, 2023 |
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Jul 20, 2023 18:40
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Azathoth posted:Something that might not be readily apparent is that very early Christians did not share our modern preoccupation with the afterlife, and so the Bible has surprisingly few details on what exactly happens, choosing instead to focus on the Second Coming, the resurrection of the dead, and the coming Kingdom of God, which they believed would all happen on Earth. I'm trying, and failing, to not compare this with the Star Wars expanded universe.
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Jul 20, 2023 18:41
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Azathoth posted:Yeah, it definitely comes into play pretty early. Basically once it became clear Jesus wasn't coming back during the lifetime of the first generation of believers they started asking the same questions we are still asking today. I assume the question they asked about this was "Is Jesus not coming back because of that thing I / Quintus did?"
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Jul 20, 2023 21:16
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LITERALLY A BIRD posted:There's that bit in Job where God talks about binding the influence of the Pleiades, and moving constellations through the houses. This is clearly nonsense. The Aretology of Cyme explicitly says that it was Isis Who laid out the courses of the stars.
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Jul 21, 2023 12:52
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killer crane posted:It's amazing to me that it's one of the most formative books, and it's all about grief. Job's friends come up to him, and scream and throw dirt and rip their clothes and sit with him in silence in some radical empathy, but then they try to explain his pain, and gently caress everything up. If they sit there amid the smoking ruins of Job's entire life and try to suggest that maybe this is all somehow Job's fault then maybe he needs better friends.
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Jul 31, 2023 12:44
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Squizzle posted:get a piece of paper, and a dark-colored pen. draw a line, horizontal. label the left side 0, and draw a lemniscate to label the other. under the zero, write “verbally expressing thanks or praise to a spiritual or supernatural entity (understood broadly), in speech or song”. this line is to chart how many hoops you need to jump thru to explain a Religion Thing. mark the approximate midpoint, as a reference. put a dot on the line at what you think is the appropriate location for “a model of christian salvation that accounts for both god’s love and the existence of hell, and which is more coherent than origen’s” Zybourne Clock works the same way.
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Aug 2, 2023 18:08
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American evangelical Christians made their bed and now they can lie in it.
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Aug 10, 2023 16:12
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BTW Bonewits was a terrible sex pest, which is too bad because he is one of two (2) people who has written a book on how to run a large modern pagan ritual for public consumption. As I am a former member of priesthood of the Wiccan Church of Canada (and current member/organizer of priesthood for a newer, less lovely organization that doesn't keep sex pests around because they are useful idiots) I found said book to be an invaluable resource - very few works out there are written with facilitating public ritual in mind - but it's very regrettable that the man was ultra gross. Fortunately he's dead now so he can't harm anyone. (this is not me saying "don't read it, Bird!" because absolutely read it)
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Aug 14, 2023 13:24
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Something a bit less depressing - Bird, were you aware that there's an entire album of some guy who did a musical thesis on the music of ancient Egypt? It's Music in the Age of the Pyramids by Rafael Perez Arroyo and it's quite good. I was introduced to it by a local person who does Egyptian reconstructionism (she actually did a presentation on the subject at the Council of World Religions a few years ago) and it's pretty neat.
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Aug 14, 2023 16:25
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NikkolasKing posted:Possibly my favorite part about the Jurassic Park novel is Malcom's long speech about how humans grossly overestimate their importance to the planet. Climate change and nuclear war won't destroy the planet, just us. Well, too bad for us. The planet has survived species extinction before, it will do so again. Every so often I remember that the Cretaceous period in if itself lasted for far longer than the timeframe between the KT extinction event and today (a mere 65 million years! Chump change, really!) and feel weirdly humbled.
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Sep 1, 2023 13:32
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Nessus posted:Ironically, this was the stated goal of some of the stuff Aleister Crowley was doing; "the methods of science, the aim of religion". Tragically it did not outcompete heroin in his priority set. That was Theosophy, actually, but tbh Blavatsky casts a longer and deeper shadow over the modern New Age movement than many people realize, and it definitely set the tone for the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn which went on to flavour pretty much the entire Western magical tradition. Crowley was a member of the HOGD until he tried to take it over and got kicked down the stairs of the London temple by WB Yeats while Crowley was dressed up as a highland lord and no I am not making this up.
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Sep 3, 2023 04:39
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