DO IT.

The smugness with which that new atheist circlejerk announces their atheism makes me want to punch myself; so, too, when their little acolytes proudly proclaim their shallow stupidities. It is not enough to charge them with all their philosophical mistakes: that they uncritically carry on enlightenment epistemology, that immediately after denying the existence of any possible absolute grounding they claim absolute validity for science/logic/knowledge, .. the list goes on. They don’t care to consider these things. They are like the mockers in the early part of The Madman parable. 

“This deed is still more distant from them than the most distant stars — and yet we have done it ourselves.”

Uncritical atheism is threatening to become one of the most dangerous totalizing conceptions of the age, the new dogma. Dash over to reddit’s atheism forum some time and you will see posts that question whether atheism should even have a name, since it is obviously the default position of all mankind. “It’s like, you know, they don’t have a word for people that don’t believe in unicorns. Why should there be a word for people that don’t believe in God?” 

Do we see how dangerous this is? A totalized knowledge that is attempting to recognize itself as absolute, attempting to identify its finite and flawed propositions with existence itself. “This isn’t what I think; it’s how things are.” We ought not to even dignify this lockstep-stumbling through the world with the name philosophy, for to do so would imply a degree of openness, existential reflection, and concern with Being that none of these fact-mongers have any taste for. 

Sorry it took me so long to get back to you.

Yes, I used to be involved in the OTO. I took my first degree, which confers a lifetime membership. From around 2004-2007 I was a devoted practitioner and impassioned zealot. In late 2007/8, I endured a series of smaller existential crises that lead ultimately to The Big One. On that warm July evening I watched all of my Gods die and swooned in celestial abandonment. I have been in this state since. 

I no longer practice any magick. One can do all the gematria one wishes, work out all the enochian tables, and passionately vibrate all the archangels of all the planes.. but let us face the truth: no one is listening. Not God. Nor Gods. Nor daemons. Nor higher selves. Nor HGAs. We are alone. 

Of course, I am grateful for the lessons that I learned in that grab for transcendental meaning, for absolute purpose, for some sort of significance. Most of the people of my (our?) generation have no idea what it is like to believe anything. For them, God does not exist; we, on the contrary, know that he is dead, for we watched him die. And we are his murderers. 

I still retain some of the things I studied in the occult. Some tantric technique, for instance, I use regularly. But even tantra, in western occultism, so often becomes worship of femininity. This, in turn, requires one to conceive of femininity as something inscribed in an intelligible heaven: woman as caregiver, nurturer, source of life, or what have you. I have no stomach for this sort of thinking any more, and categorically reject any gestures that would essentialize woman or women. Women, like men, are subject to the same exact abandonment and as such are denied the luxury of such ready-made identities. Even the meaning of the word woman is ambiguous, determined as much by the choices of suffering existents as by power-structures and institutions.