“What the fuck has that got to do with ANYTHING INTERESTING?” -Richard Dawkins

I was listening to Alex O’Conner’s “Within Reason” Podcast while I completed a ten hour drive last week. A great Podcast to listen to if you’re interested in casual philosophy, religion, and okay science (I’ve been a fan for a long time Alex but I’m not convinced you nor I are qualified to really speak on “science”).

I let it play through the one’s I queued up because I wanted to listen to Justin Sledge from Esoterica talk about YWHW and then the Demiurge, then it played an older episode with Richard Dawkins. Honestly, an interesting podcast just from a history of atheism perspective. Dickhead Dawkins is an important figure in the atheist movement and has contributed greatly to atheist discourse and, regrettably, memes.

I’m generally not interested in the mind of a man who starts off a discussion equating “religion” to “wokeism” because “wokeism” isn’t a word used by someone wanting to have a good faith discussion about something they don’t like or don’t understand, but that realization made me want to know more about him because I think he is the quintessential disenchanted man.

##Enchanted versus Disenchanted world views

I have been reading “Western Esotericism: A Guide for the Perplexed” by Wouter Hanegraaff to sort of give me a better framework for interpreting occultism or “Western Esoterica” as is apparently the more correct idea. And one of the frameworks that really sings to me is the idea of the Enchanted World. In short, through most all of human history, religion, philosophy, and science have been very powerfully intertwined. For the most part this was due to necessity. We don’t have enough answers in any one “field” to really constitute it being a separate field. So, we keep them combined and inseparable for millennia.

To an enchanted person, they will always see the connection between this material world, their soul, and the great Absolute (whatever that is be it god/the Goddess/Flying Spaghetti Monster) and this makes everything feel important and connected. There is beauty in the smallest parts of life because that is the goddess at work. There are lessons in mundane emotions because you are one with the universe so no emotion is too big. It’s the world of whimsy and love that truly I think I want to suspend my disbelief and live in.

Yet there is a foil, the disenchanted man doesn’t see this deep connection with everything and only sees what is completely rational. If there isn’t a scientific field studying it, then it’s Not anything interesting and probably needs to go away.

Here’s a quick Wikipedia blurb on this

The history of the ideas is pretty interesting too. Hanegraaf believes this world view is new and is what allowed science to take off in the 1600’s. By separating the Natural Sciences from the questions of the soul and god, scientists were able to exist parallel too and mostly independent of gods and the oppressive church. No longer do we have to kill a man for making a scientific discovery that, because it proves old ideas wrong, is a heresy. Now you are simply learning the exact mechanisms through which god made things how they are! You will no longer be burned for thinking humans are made up of tiny humans because you don’t understand atoms!

Then as science advanced, we started to see people like Dawkins appear who have no attachment to the metaphysical realms of religion at all. You can now live your life happy with all the answers of science and psychology to make yourself feel better. No longer do you need the rituals of a god or your own musings to answer any tough questions. At the very least you can get some ideas on what to think or, realistically, enough evidence to gaslight people on your opinion as truth instead of real research.

Anything Interesting

Truly, that was the story that triggered this in me. Alex O’connor has told the story a few times now on his Podcast but the most recent telling is what triggered this whole thought bubble. Its an interview with Emily Gureshi-Hurst an Atheist theologian and its such a good Richard Dawkins quote because it exemplifies my frustration with him and the new atheist movement that I’ve had the entire time (16 years!) I have been an atheist. The story goes

“I had this conversation with Richard Dawkins in a car Park once, after I told him on this podcast that I didn’t think his treatment of Thomas Aquinas five ways was particularly comprehensive being all of two pages. And he asked me at this event, like, well, what would you have had me do? And I said, well, you know, you treated all kinds of causation as if they’re one thing. And he said, well, do you think there are different kinds of causation? I said, yeah, I think so. And he asked me to explain. So as best I could in about 30 seconds, tried to explain hierarchical and like linear causation, to which he interrupted the last sentence of my little speech by saying, I remember the exact words, what the fuck has that got to do with anything interesting? Thank God I’m not a theologian.” -Alex O’Connor

What a boring take. It’s just not interesting to talk about theology says THE FOREMOST PROMINENT FIGURE IN THE RELIGIOUS DEBATE SCENE!

I can’t imagine dedicating such a large portion of my life and free time to “debating” people on an Idea that I fundamentally don’t find interesting. His entire motivation was wanting to be the smartest person in the room. He only argued against the existence of god from strictly his evolutionary biology background. He wanted the spectacle of standing up to a christian orthodoxy. He helped set the standard that anyone can easily clown on even the best trained apologeticicist by simply, not reading their stupid book.

And that’s such a boring way to engage with religion and then the world.

Don’t get me wrong, I think this is a very useful way to remove one’s self from a debate with a theist. It is such a debilitating move to simply ask why I should consider the bible/quran/torah is truth. Why should I even consider it as a history book? At best in can be another “The Illiad” but we don’t take that as gospel. Dropping a holy text to the level of a Homeric Epic I think is fair but sweeps the feet of any arguments for god they have and then you can bully them for not having faith in their god if they have to use outside evidence for their claims. Damned if you do, damned if you don’t!

There is a very toxic sub current to this mindset though. This virulent search for truth in a “fuck your feelings” mindset has always lead to harassment of anyone deemed outside of a simple understanding of “basic biology”. Nu-Athiests have always been bigots because it “biologically doesn’t make sense to be gay” or “you can’t change your biological gender” and I’ve always thought they were annoying.

Imagine wanting to understand the world and those who inhabit it, but you completely reject the concept of “feelings” because they “aren’t real.”

Feelings, my friends, are real. They are how we experience the world and our place within it.

Feelings as a basis for the Enchanted World

Feelings, psychological responses, brain chemistry, neurological rewiring, etc, etc. is the enchanted world. Allowing your emotions to be felt and your world view to be open to interpretation. To write symbolic poetry in your mind to put into words the feelings you have about this material plane. That is where the enchanted world of the divine exists.

I really do think that is the cross roads for religion and spiritualism. I personally believe that’s where it stops, the mind.

All magick exists in that it is simply an expression of our intentions. It is a psychological trick to make us be the change we want to see happen. You casting a spell is you telling your subconcious to get into gear working towards that goal.

See my blog post here and also here for more.

And I know what that means for that whole shtick about the bible. It means we have to acknowledge people really do have strong feelings about the bible and that there is something more than pure facts and logic that is needed when engaging on those topics. It means there is some similar line between “wokeism” and “religion” but that that isn’t inherently evidence against it but a necessity for nuance in such discussions.

I am saying that, while useful for “winning” debates, Dawkins disenchantment is not conducive to a productive conversation.

Feelings are the driving force of humanity. At the core of all human action there is an emotion we are reacting too and it is our feelings we are trusting to guide those feelings. Even if we have a feeling to trust “rationalism” above emotions, it is still some inherent emotion that is causing such an attachment.

Conclusion

There are things in this world we have yet to understand and we may never understand. I think we have done the world a disservice in academia by ignoring the emotional angle for things in Dawkins time and we’re still seeing the repercussions of “Toxic Rationalism” in thought. Modern scholars are doing much better considering this and I think the increase in intersectionality has been a massive blessing to the Liberal Arts and even the Sciences.

It’s unfortunate that this old problem has been solved, but the conservative old guard has turned this Academic problem into a Political one. People like Dawkins who are wrong and no longer contributing to the discussions in a good faith manner end up as fuel for the censorship of good scholarship under our new authoritarian regimes.

Dawkins first made the claim that something simply wasn’t interesting, which is his right to not be interested, but then he added to an ideology that hurts people. That second sin is much much harder to forgive.

Reseña y reflexión desde una perspectiva cristiana sobre el último libro de Javier Cercas, relato en el que ese autor, desde la increencia, indaga en el cristianismo.

cross-posted from: https://startrek.website/post/33707780

Original Blog Post

My altar is less aesthetically pleasing than mosts I have seen posted on the Tumblrs and Instagrams of the world. It has a vibe to it that I enjoy.

It is based vaguely on the description in Oberron Zell-Ravenloft’s “Grimoire for the Apprentice Wizard” in that it has a representative of all four elements(earth, water, wind, fire) and it has a higher and lower teir to represent our higher and lower self. The shelf that separates the two is a black box that I have painted with symbols that are important to me. One is the symbol for the demon king Zagan (who’s name I stole to give to my cat Zagan) and the other is a Triquetra a symbol for unity and interconnectedness, something I value in myself and society. I painted them with silver paint which I just thought looks cool and I wear a lot of silver but the symbolism of silver in occultism is a connection to feminine energies and the moon.

Things to include by Element

Earth - rocks (duh). I have Labradorite. It’s my favorite semi-precious gemstone because it’s pretty, but it’s hard to find the parts that are pretty. You need the right light and angle to find the shiny beauty spots. It’s a reminder that beauty is always visible but not always immediately. One must look to find beauty in all things because all things are beautiful.

Water - Water (duh). I have a few vials of water on my altar. One is a jar of river water from my home town that I collected after a flood. The other is water from Lake Superior I collected on vacation there where I met some kindly witches collecting stones on the beach (like I was doing). It is equal parts a reminder of good times and the fluidity of time. Much like the river flows and the lake washes new stones onto the beach, so to does time flow and things change. Not always for the better, but we must carry on to find new beauty.

Air - Bells and Feathers. I have bells from all over that I’ve thrifted over the years. They make all kinds of chimes some deep, some light, some far too pingy and I get annoyed having to move them, but all of them are only making noise for a moment and that moment is long enough to drastically change my mindset. These are often actual tools as opposed to purely symbolic meditations. Much like Pavlov making dogs think of food, I use bells to pull myself out of whatever mundane drudgery I am experiencing and immerse myself in meditation. Although, to be honest, I am mostly using a meditation app with a gong sound more than bells.

The feathers I’ve collected from various places and types of birds (none I killed but many were deceased). Birds are wonderful symbols of freedom and letting go. View it as a symbol for that. Let your mind be free like the bird is free to explore and travel where it pleases. Follow a bird around one day. It’s a wonderful type of meditation.

Fire - Candles and Incense. Candles and incense are such an essential aspect of modern witchcraft and occultism that you can find lists of meanings and uses for certain colors and scents all over. Since I’m an atheist, I know it doesn’t matter and gave myself meaning and uses. Hell, I “summoned a demon” using battery powered tea lights and a essential oil diffuser because my dorm banned candles. So I have three preferred candle colors: red, green, purple. When I am working, I burn a red candle. When I am meditatating, a green candle (placed on the higher shelf of the altar). When I am relaxing, the purple candle.

Why those colors? I really like the color red and the other two were on sale at Hobby Lobby so I bought a bunch. The color symbolism is arbitrary to me. You can follow the traditional standards of chakra candles if you so wish. Or maybe certain colors remind you of certain contexts you wish to evoke. In a way, red does good as a working color because my childhood school’s colors were always red and some others. So I associate red with focus and academic work.

Things to Include by meaning (CW: Dead Animal Mention)

This sorta stuff really gives you and excuse to collect knick-knacks and baubles of all sorts. I enjoy collecting carved semi-precious stone statues, sexual idols, and animal remains.

The stone statues I collect are pretty boring. I was gifted a Blood stone skull by a dear friend and I already had a ceramic skull paper weight my dad had given me as a child from his own days of collecting haunted looking objects (he was a Cathoilic not an occultist, but he liked having props in front of his Dungeons and Dragons screen while Dungeon Mastering). So now I collect well done stone skulls.

The sexual idols kinda started as a bit. I also 3D print a lot and I love printing a penis shaped character called Ding Ding to test out calibrations, colors, and new printers. So my house is covered in little penis guys and some naturally ended up on all my altars. Then years later, my fiance and I were at a rock and gem show where someone was selling female bodies with an uncomfortable spine curvature, fine tits, and a ridiculous ass. So we bought some of those in various stones since we must balance feminine and masculine energies to achieve peak post-gender god like status as it were.

Animal remains was a conflicting call for me. I found a really well cleaned and reconstructed Cyote skull at a different rock and gem show early on in my altar building days. However, I didn’t know if I wanted to include it because it felt like I was evoking animal sacrifice imagry into my altar. And that is a fair read on my altar but not what I personally feel. For me its a Stoic reminder of our own mortality. I will die just as Mr. Bones died. I also have the preserved jarred body of a baby albino snake I bought at a reptile show. That one had similar symbolism too it but with the added allussion to the alchemical symbol of the ouroboros. Maybe the snake means more in that the cycle will end one day with death. Maybe it’s just a cool morbid knick-knack.

You can really include whatever brings you back to a sense of mindful reflections is the point. I have a friend who’s altar is exclusively for her crafted stuff like little statues and fairy homes. And what is a Christmas village or a Model Train table but an altar like zen garden with tiny people and tiny trains?

I may even be convinced of a digital altar like this one where I am simply meditating on my own actions publicly!

What is an Altar to me

My altar is a place for ritual. It’s a grounding space for me that I use to take me out of whatever mindset I’m in and enter into an appropriate one. It’s my portal into my own psyche and my own place of control. It is also we’re I keep reminders of things dear to me. Friends from years past. Memories of old versions of myself. Reminders that life is fluid and that I grow.

Gods and worship have been quintessential aspect of the human experience since all of known human history. Yet, there are those of us who have chosen to defy these well established rules of society. Why you have chosen to abandon a creator framework for life is, to me, irrelevant, but I do want to make a claim that the conception for god is a useful tool for navigating life and our journey of self discovery and self improvement.

Why should I care about “god”?

Gods have always been a societal tool and a personal tool in my eyes. It’s an abstract rallying point that gives common language and experience between otherwise wholly unrelated humans. Think of a modern Church, Synagoge, or Temple of any sort. They are less interesting as a lecture hall on a thousands year old book than they are as communal halls to give people from all walks of life a reason to interact with each other. It’s a neutral ground where teachers, laborers, bankers, and so on may meet and form relationships that may have otherwise never happened.

You have a language with which to describe feelings and an actionable framework with which to define “doing good”. You have a place to talk about experiences of your higher self in a, ideally, judgement free space. Take the Unitary Universalist service experience for example. The idea there is to just share art and poetry that inspires you to do good and feel the warmth of being a kind person. The sermons are similar in that they simply promote what their community views as virtues that make you feel good.

Is it correct to say you felt god channeling through you when you did a good dead? No probably not, but it communicates the idea that you felt really good while doing the good deeds. It’s actually a pretty complex emotion that is highly personalized, but by abstracting it in a vague language of a religion one is able to share those feelings easier with the subtext of this complexity.

Now yes I do understand the more cynical readings of a religious community. Believe me, I’m well aware of the stats of abuse and brainwashing that goes on there under the guise of maintaining Communal Cohesion or maintaining the community. But this work is to highlight the good parts of a religious community and further a conception of god.

Gods are as much a personal tool as a community tool. In a personal practice, I like to call gods an “Ego Saver.”

My favorite atheist debunking of religion is The Milk Jug Experiment. For those unaware, the Milk Jug Experiment is this logical thought process to debunk prayer. Imagine, when you pray to god there are three possible answers to your pray: yes, no, maybe. Yes, god has favored you and will assist you. No, god does not think you deserve the outcome or this is part of his plan so it must happen. Maybe, it might be granted but not in the way that you intended. The idea is that these are just how probability works and praying to a Milk Jug will garner the same results so long as you still ascribe the outcome of those prayers to the Milk Jug.

Now, the point of that exercise is to demonstrate the pointlessnes of prayer, but I think it demonstrates the abstract benefit of prayer in that you now have a scape goat to save your ego.

Ego and gods

Consider the convenience of blaming your problems on someone else. Sure, it’s a dick move to throw someone under the bus, but it really is a convenient mental load balancer if you don’t have a conscious or you hate that other person. You have worked hard to reach a goal, but that goal was always dependant on many stars aligning that are far outside your control. You can only do so much to manifest the outcome that you desire physically but you have no control over these, from your perspective, completely probabilistic events. This is where Prayer comes in.

Random Chance is just a fact of the universe in terms of our perception. Sure most all events could theoreticalyl be controlled but the effort to do so is cartoonishly high. The example I like to give is a sports event. You want to win the sports event so you spend months training for it, but all of that effort may be for nothing if you say, get sick, you’re out trained, or you’re simply off your game at show time. That randomness causes uncertainty that can be anxiety inducing. Yes, obviously you could just accept this is part of the joy of these types of events, but I’m proposing Prayer to a god as a means to displace this anxiety as well.

“Please, Lord Cthulhu, let me win this Ping Pong Championship”

You have now psychologically tied your odds of winning to the will of a probably fictitious Old God. The act of this alone should be absurd enough to calm someone’s nerves. Yet, now you have someone to blame other than yourself if you don’t win and that is the ego saver or atleast the absurdist grounding technique to not ruin your self esteem. You now have a thing to blame when forces outside your control do not go your way instead of only stressing about not being good enough, not being worthy, and so on.

There’s even something to be said for the perks of ritual worship.

Habits, Rituals, Gods

A feature of mine if my love of occult rituals and the book “Atomic Habits” by James Clear. In “Atomic Habits”, James talks about affirmations and “Habit Stacking”. The idea is that to reach a goal, you are more likely to achieve that goal if you build a solid habit around working towards that goal and those are two tricks to building those habits.

Affirmations are pretty ubiquitous these days, but according to James Clear there is research that indicates saying out loud often what your goals are and affirming you will reach them, does in fact increase the likely hood you will do such a thing. Habit Stacking is similar in that the idea is to do something small to trigger a mental response to then do what ever good habit you want to complete. For me, I use my altar as a ritual habit catalyst. I light a red candle to symbolize focus and burn a rose scented incense because I like rose scented incense. This is no different to Pray or Spell casting.

I used to play football for a church league (which was interesting since I did not attend any of these churches). In that league we would pray before every practice and every game. We prayed for protection from injury and for success in either training or on the field. This was always a good mental focus on working out since before I’d be horsing around with the other boys and we would all get serious after the prayer. It also had this interesting mindfulness aspect in that we were aware that you can get injured and this was just as much asking to not get hurt as it was to gain something from the event.

So we used prayer as a affirmation and as a habit stack. So why not use it secularly? Except now our options of prayer targets is grand since it doesn’t matter who, it’s the action that matters.

"950 year old Prophet" and the case for Reincarnation in the Quran

What is difference between soul and spirit?? Are these two same or different??

I'm fascinated by rituals. Especially rituals that have physical outcomes.

Praying, spells, sigils, etc anything to affect a metaphysical conception of probability or god.

This is how I understand most magic rituals to promise to help affect change. Say I want to become a successful author.

Nearly every magic or religious system (which I don't distinguish as different) promises that you can affect the probability of success so long as you devote yourself to your practice. Do the right rituals. AND, importantly, physically work towards that goal.

No system promises that you can simply wish to be a good author without you having to actually write. No, all serious systems promise that so long as you work on your writing and stay devoted to your system, then there is a chance that the cosmic controller of probability (god) will favor you.

Now this I think is a wonderful strategy for protecting the ego in that you now have two things to blame before you have to blame yourself.

"I must have performed the rituals wrong and displeased god"

"The gods don't want me to be an author yet"

"I'm a terrible author"

Now, I think there's an argument for both why this is good and bad.

Maybe you genuinely are deserving of whatever outcome you desire and it simply is out of your control that this didn't happen. Maybe you finally finish your magnum opus and your house burns down or your files were stored on an AWS US East server and you missed the submission deadline.

That I think is a moment where the ability to stoicly accept what happened and move on is good.

On the flip side there is the problem where god and ritual are shielding yourself from introspection. Maybe your AI generated in universe spin off of Sherlock Homes: Watson invents Anime series just genuinely isn't good. But it takes several rejections from publishers and a mountain of bad reviews on your self published amazon page to think "Maybe I've done the ritual wrong."

You're missing the problem because the layers of cope are too powerful. You have too many other thoughts before you even have to consider this probably is your fault.

To me, I think the bad ending is avoidable by simply constantly self reflecting. Being aware of myself and being aware of the sorta mental traps I can fall into.

Dogmatic religions I think lead to the bad ending here because its expected of X, Y, Z conditions are met then god will bless you. And then when you've tried nothing and you're all out of ideas, the world is impossible to survive and becomes scary.

You can also certainly get the good ending without a religion per se, but I'm really proposing the Milk Jug experiment in a different way. Does it matter if praying to the milk jug actually does anything if it makes me feel better ?

I've started reading Rene Descartes and I'm intrigued by his idea of "god".

Descartes is famous for his " I think there for I am." He doubted everything in life to such a degree that he believed the only thing he knew for sure was that when he was thinking then he existed. However, the second thing he deduced is that he knew this world he existed in, real or demonic deception, was imperfect by virtue of the fact that he can doubt it exists. So he knows he exists while thinking and has a conception of imperfections therefore perfection exists and the idea was given to him.

This perfection is god.

God is perfect in all ways. They are beyond deception because a perfect being wouldn't need to lie, their reason alone for you needing to believe something is enough.

And to me that's an interesting conception of god. Its a lot more sterile than the normal Christian stance that god is Love which has a emotionally textured connotation. It positions god as having feelings with which we can relate as opposed to Descartes perfection that is simply beyond our reasoning but also (conveniently) not malicious.

As an atheist, god as love makes more sense. God is the feeling of communal love that comes with a religion. People who care for each other for no reason other than because they're in the same community has always been beautiful to me. God as mislabeled inclusion and comradely behavior males perfect sense.

What is your god or gods like?

I've been reading a lot of esoteric belief systems and normal philosophy books trying to build my own religious practice.

To me the things that are important are

1. System of morals and values.

2. Rites and rituals that must be performed

3. Community engagement.

The first two are pretty obvious, but the community engagement is tricky for me in that its the most important and I have no intentions of spreading my religion.

To me its just a fun psychological game after all.

So to me, engagement means having something to relate to people or do with people.

In my case nature walks and meditation are important rituals to be dome regularly. So inviting people to come along or going to meditation classes creates a community engagement.

Is there anything else a religion needs outside of these things?

Which person in your religion, belonging to your religion, is most hated for his actions in history? Like, in Islamic history, Yazid is the most hated one character because he had a war with grandson of Prophet of Islam. What about your religion??

I attempted to kill myself when I was thirteen, and sometimes I’ve wondered if this is a place of punishment.

Be it from any religion

Every religion has like a slogan or something to offer to this world. They have a motto.

What is your religion motto??

Thing is that, I know it can't be proven by science as soul and spirit are something beyond like science can't answer that. I think that there is something called soul and spirit but I am very naive enough to understand what exactly are they. Those who believe, can you pls give me proofs like not scientific, but logical, metaphysical.

Hi there, I am always fascinated to hear the story of Jesus by Christians and Muslims. Thing is that, many persons like there are some denominations in Muslims that say that Jesus is dead.

I wanna know are there any historical evidences that Jesus is dead??

So I am an Atheist and I find a lot of joy in going through ritual motions. It is comforting and it does de-stress to sort of "pray" to an altar that I built. Logically it has no purpose other than to scare away proselytizers and be a neat conversation piece, but it is my favorite aspect of new age witch and pagan cultures.

Similarly, occult practices from those cultures and those found in things like Kabbalah or Chaos Magick are good for simple goal manifestation. I know in Chaos Magick, the idea is to set in motion the intention of whatever goal you have and that will increase the odds of it happening, but one must still work to achieve the goal. You cannot simply cast a spell for more money you must also be working towards a promotion. That idea paralleled with an idea in Atomic Habits for this kind of manifestation. It claimed that saying out loud daily what your goal was increased the chances of you actually doing the work to achieve the goal.

I wrote more about it at my blog, but I'm interested in what other people find interesting in other spaces.

"I will never again be gaslighted by an institution that sells out Jesus for political power."

The Solomon's temple in Jerusalem was a mistake... according to samaritan israelites, who follows 5 books of the old testament, and pray on Mt. Gerizim, 48km north of Jerusalem. THE place to worship God.

Most of the european christians probably know the term only from the story about the good samaritan. Today I've learned not only they are still a thing, practicing their barebones version of judaism, but in addition to israel and the west bank, some of them even live and practice their religion in brazil.

The so called new religious movements are a guilty pleasure of mine. Some of their followers often claim to be inspired specifically by Zoroastrianism.

But what is zoroastrianism? Apparently, it all started ~3000 years ago in the area currently known as iran, by the guy called Zarathustra. And although the number of active practitioners is rapidly declining, the ideas behind it affect us all to this day, as the christianity and islam seem to be highly inspired by the ideas behind zoroastrianism.