⛧ First Church of Hypocrisy, Blasphemy, and Self-Righteousness ⛧

In the Kingdom of God, the only place to spit is his face.

(Diogenes is my second favorite philosopher after Robert Anton Wilson.)

Been reading "Right Where You Are Sitting Now" by Robert Anton Wilson. In one article/chapter, he talks about how the Real Knowledge of the world has been doubling, how that affects civilization, and the rate it's been doing it at. And of course there are hubs of growth, where this Real Knowledge creates Real Capital, and where the warring elites are most localized. What's more, there's a pattern to the growth; it started in and around India, and started moving west and sometimes north, but mostly it moved west. It moved from India and China to Babylon, from Babylon to Phoenicia and Egypt, from there to Greece, from Greece to Rome, from Rome to the rest of Europe, and from Europe to the UK. The British Empire did well for a while, under the trade the "New World" opened up and then industrialism, but then the growth shifted over to the northeast coast of the US. And at the time he was writing the book, the growth was in the process of shifting to the west coast, with the east coast and west coast elites fighting for control. (I think that's still true.)

I bring this all up because he then said that he thought the growth, having nowhere left on the planet to go, would head up into outer space, into orbiting habitats; and that if it didn't go up there, it would just stay where it was. But that was in the 80's, and I've noticed that the westward pattern continued, if you keep in mind that "west" is a relative direction; the US empire is failing, and the growth is shifting over to China and Japan. With this in mind, I guess as long as civilization doesn't utterly collapse, the growth will continue going west again, unless we do something to shift it into space, or work to even out the growth so everyone on the planet can be comfortable, which Wilson keeps pointing out we have the technology to do.

(Starts out a little annoyed, but gets better.)

Again, I shall try to write this in E-Prime, AKA "English without any form of the word 'be.'" I will put "is," "are," and other forms of "be" into "suspicious quotes" if I feel I cannot avoid using them.

I keep seeing blogs where their owners keep talking about their depression in a way that seems almost like glorifying their depression, and talking about wanting to die, giving me the impression that they think their depression makes them special somehow. These vary from "oh my gawd my pain is so unique; nobody could ever possibly understand how much pain I'm in" to things like "I an such a creative genius because I'm soooo depressed."

I do not know whether they really have clinical depression or not. I do not intend to dismiss clinical depression, either. I have clinical depression, and so I know firsthand that depression will make you feel bad no matter how hard you try to cheer up. But it's one thing to complain on your blog about the effects of depression, and another thing entirely to act like having depression makes you some kind of creative genius or better than those who don't have depression. First, it makes no sense at all. Secondly, in my own experience, my depression tends to suck away the energy and will I need to make use of my creativity. I won't claim that this is true of everyone... and I won't say all these "depression makes me so special" people are lying about being depressed... but I don't see how being truly, clinically depressed could possibly help in any way.

Then there are the people who seem to be genuinely depressed, and they keep talking about it in a way that focuses so hard on the depression, I don't see how it could possibly do anything but make the depression worse.

You see, language has power. Anyone who doesn't agree hasn't thought about it enough, or hasn't had the right experiences. Words can and do hurt; just look into how many people got depression or other mental issues from the damaging power of words. People can use words to heal or to hurt. People can use words soothingly or violently. I know, because my own issues resulted from people in my childhood lobbing the verbal equivalents of hand grenades at me constantly. My childhood was like a warzone, the only place I felt safe was at home. I still live with the damage, and I still have issues of lobbing verbal grenades at anyone I interpret - whether correctly or not - as a threat. At least, online I do. Offline, I am quieter and more polite; though that is as much a defense mechanism as the verbal grenades are.

( More under the cut )

The Nine Ten Satanic Sins

by Anton Szandor LaVey ©1987
With edits by Alexander Antonin ©2012

1. Stupidity—The top of the list for Satanic Sins. The Cardinal Sin of Satanism. It’s too bad that stupidity isn’t painful. Ignorance is one thing, but our society thrives increasingly on stupidity. It depends on people going along with whatever they are told. The media promotes a cultivated stupidity as a posture that is not only acceptable but laudable. Satanists must learn to see through the tricks and cannot afford to be stupid.

2. Pretentiousness—Empty posturing can be most irritating and isn’t applying the cardinal rules of Lesser Magic. On equal footing with stupidity for what keeps the money in circulation these days. Everyone’s made to feel like a big shot, whether they can come up with the goods or not.

3. Projection—Can be very dangerous for Satanists. Projecting your reactions, responses and sensibilities onto someone who is probably far less attuned than you are. It is the mistake of expecting people to give you the same consideration, courtesy and respect that you naturally give them. They won’t. Instead, Satanists must strive to apply the dictum of “Do unto others as they do unto you.” It’s work for most of us and requires constant vigilance lest you slip into a comfortable illusion of everyone being like you. As has been said, certain utopias would be ideal in a nation of philosophers, but unfortunately (or perhaps fortunately, from a Machiavellian standpoint) we are far from that point.

4. Self-deceit—It’s in the “Nine Satanic Statements” but deserves to be repeated here. Another cardinal sin. We must not pay homage to any of the sacred cows presented to us, including the roles we are expected to play ourselves. The only time self-deceit should be entered into is when it’s fun, and with awareness. But then, it’s not self-deceit!

5. Herd Conformity—That’s obvious from a Satanic stance. It’s all right to conform to a person’s wishes, if it ultimately benefits you. But only fools follow along with the herd, letting an impersonal entity dictate to you. The key is to choose a master wisely instead of being enslaved by the whims of the many.

6. Lack of Perspective—Again, this one can lead to a lot of pain for a Satanist. You must never lose sight of who and what you are, and what a threat you can be, by your very existence. We are making history right now, every day. Always keep the wider historical and social picture in mind. That is an important key to both Lesser and Greater Magic. See the patterns and fit things together as you want the pieces to fall into place. Do not be swayed by herd constraints—know that you are working on another level entirely from the rest of the world.

7. Forgetfulness of Past Orthodoxies—Be aware that this is one of the keys to brainwashing people into accepting something new and different, when in reality it’s something that was once widely accepted but is now presented in a new package. We are expected to rave about the genius of the creator and forget the original. This makes for a disposable society.

8. Counterproductive Pride—That first word is important. Pride is great up to the point you begin to throw out the baby with the bathwater. The rule of Satanism is: if it works for you, great. When it stops working for you, when you’ve painted yourself into a corner and the only way out is to say, I’m sorry, I made a mistake, I wish we could compromise somehow, then do it.

9. Lack of Aesthetics—This is the physical application of the Balance Factor. Aesthetics is important in Lesser Magic and should be cultivated. It is obvious that no one can collect any money off classical standards of beauty and form most of the time so they are discouraged in a consumer society, but an eye for beauty, for balance, is an essential Satanic tool and must be applied for greatest magical effectiveness. It’s not what’s supposed to be pleasing—it’s what is. Aesthetics is a personal thing, reflective of one’s own nature, but there are universally pleasing and harmonious configurations that should not be denied.

10. Solipsism—The real world DOES exist. Granted, a large portion of the perceived world is invented by your brain, but that's based on data from the real world. Anyone who thinks they're the only person in the world, and that they create 100% of reality, is a delusional fool.

I read recently in one of Robert Anton Wilson's books (Cosmic Trigger III) that some feminists actually believe that Beethoven's 9th symphony is a hymn to rape. This made me think back to the "all men are rapists" Belief System (BS). Because previous parts of the book had been talking about conspiracy theories, I had this thought:

Feminists of that kind are a patriarchal conspiracy to make feminism look bad!

Now, I don't know whether or not I really believe that, per se, but I think this is a good example of how rigid/fundamentalist modeltheism reflects poorly on the model the zealot has so much zeal for.

Some people think they're being deep when they say "A red rose isn't actually red; it reflects red light and absorbs all the other colors of light."

But that isn't deep. I'll show you deep:

The red rose is not red because red light is not red. The real universe has no colors, smells, or anything else of the sort. It "is" colorless and odorless. It "is" just a bunch of particles/waves moving through spacetime. Your senses take readings, the same way sensors on a spaceship in Star Trek do, and relay that data to your brain.

The universe you experience with your senses "is" your brain taking that raw, limited sensory data and creating a hallucination based on that limited sensory data. The way things look to us "is" due to the brain's software. Red looks the way it does because our brain's software "is" programmed by a combo of DNA programming and environmental programming.

The human brain is like a computer; every human brain being unique, it's like if every computer in the world had its own operating system. But because we have to be able to communicate with one another, there are more similarities than differences between brain operating systems. Which is why we can all recognize red when we see it (unless we're color blind or something of the sort). (This is similar to how computers with different operating systems can communicate web pages and other files over the Internet, and understand one another most of the time.)

So, really, the only thing we can truly say about reality is that it exists. The rest is just our brain hallucinating. And because we're all wired more or less the same, that makes reality mostly a shared hallucination.

From a Facebook conversation...

(If you're wondering why I'm doing Me: and then Me: without any Lilla: between them,¹ it's because I'm marking the beginnings of individual Facebook comments.)

Lilla's original post: Read through all the optionses, there are some that are very specific *to* tolerance even though they are open to the option of *not* tolerating certain groups. Take a look. (Nazis etc.)

Me, commenting: Being a Nazi is not a religion.

Lilla: Actually, yes it is. The Neo-Nazi movement members worship Hitler as their God.

Me: I find this amusing, seeing as Adolf "Uniball" Hitler was basically the Polish equivalent of the "inbred Appalachian hick" stereotype, with the worst case of daddy issues ever. Freud would have gotten several dozen books out of psychoanalyzing Uniball's obsession with wiping out his daddy's whole race.

(Hitler's father was also his uncle; Hitler Senior married his niece and the result was little Adolf. Little Adolf was beat mercilessly but was always not quite right in the head. As an artist, he was mediocre. He would have died a mediocre artist, but he just HAD to get into politics.)

Me: The fact that the Nazis actually worship him is thus faintly amusing. But if Nazism has mutated into a religion, then this is one religion I wouldn't mind watching its practitioners being rounded up and locked away forevermore in Gitmo.

Lilla: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GCXApAp9XGg&skipcontrinter=1

"The ideological origins of Nazism derive from Romanticism, nineteenth-century idealism, and a eugenic interpretation of Friedrich Nietzsche's concepts of "breeding upwards" — towards the Übermensch ("Superman"). Such ideas, as espoused by the Ariosophical Germanenorden (German Order) and the Thule Society much influenced Adolf Hitler's world-view."

Me: NEANDERTHAL PRIDE! We are Neanderthals and damned proud of it! All you Homo Sapiens Sapiens can go back to Africa where you came from!

(I apologize for any insult to real Neanderthals.)

Me: Yes, and Nietzsche would be fucking PISSED AS FUCK and rolling in his grave at that fact, if he isn't already. Because he HATED racists. Here, I'll quote Cracked.com's article about it:

"If Nietzsche wasn't too busy being dead, he would probably have had a few words with Hitler about the fuehrer's liberal interpretation of his work, due mainly to the fact that Nietzsche hung around with entirely the wrong crowd. His sister, Elisabeth, and good friend, composer Richard Wagner, were both as Nazi as the goose-step.

After Nietzsche died, Elisabeth inherited the rights to his works and went about diligently re-editing them with a "kill all the Jews" subtext. It didn't help that Nietzsche's thought-baton was then picked up by the philosopher Martin Heidegger -- you guessed it: Nazi.

Nietzsche actually hated anti-Semites, having refused to attend his sister's wedding because she was marrying a Nazi, and even wrote that "anti-Semites should be shot." We have his sister to thank for the "blond beast" confusion. She, Hitler and decades of disapproving philosophy students interpret this as an allusion to the Aryan race. In fact, Nietzsche was just describing lions.

And as for the "superman" thing, rather than referring to some genetically pure German dictator, Nietzsche was just making a generic statement about people who believe in the subjectivity of morals and seek to find their own values in the world -- a concept wholly incompatible with just following the whim of some guy with a hate-boner for some specific race. Interpreting Zarathustra's message as a call to raise an army and purge the world of undesirables is something akin to believing that Animal Farm was really a warning about farm animals taking over the world."

http://www.cracked.com/article_18787_6-books-everyone-including-your-english-teacher-got-wrong_p2.html

Lilla: For those of the Romantic movement of philosophers, there were two things more revered than anything: The original pure state, as it was thought, of man's natural and innocent pre-urban days (artists during that period include the pre-Raphaelite artists like Gabrielli, cite it in a bit, lol) and of nature's pre-urban, pure state. The NAZI party was (and the Neo-Nazi party is) partly socialistic, (a political *and* social school of thought) partly social Darwinism, and the same idealism much nicer people during the Romantic period than the Nazis or Neo-Nazis ever were as a whole.

Me: Gods, I hate social Darwinism. Whoever thought of that shit completely missed the point of Darwinism. True social Darwinism would focus on cooperation and helping thy fellow man, because "survival of the fittest" means "survival of those who are best equipped in a particular environment to survive," and in humanity's case, it was cooperation, compassion, and our social networking skills that got us to the top of the food chain. Anyone who thinks humans are better off competing "dog eat dog" is a complete waste of oxygen.

Lilla: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PtS1G0F7wT4

Me: Hitler as a Nazi made no fucking sense anyway, since he was more than half Jew himself (due to his mother being his father's niece) and looked about as Aryan as Osama Bin Laden did. Furthermore, the whole "Aryans are white" business is complete rubbish, seeing as the Aryans came from India.

As to my earlier "Neanderthal pride" comment... I was only partly joking. There is strong evidence that Caucasian humans only came to be from the black Cro-magnons mating with the "white"-skinned Neanderthals. But if the racists ever think of using this to say non-whites are another species, well, the bad news for them is that all modern humans are related to both Neanderthals and Cro Magnon, to some degree. And the fact still remains that, due to a genetic bottleneck 10,000 years ago, there is less genetic diversity separating the blackest African from the whitest European than there is between short-haired Chihuahuas and long-haired Chihuahuas.

1 = For example...
Me: Blah blah blah
Me: Blorch glarb fnorch

as opposed to...

Me: Blah blah blah
Lilla: Blah blah blah
Me: Blorch glarb fnorch

Survival of the fittest does not mean what most people think it means. It is NOT just about competition, of tearing others down, nor is it necessarily about who is most physically fit. It's especially important to know this because too many people try to apply survival of the fittest to social stuff, and economics, without understanding the most important implication: Human beings got to where we are today, dominating the planet, because we co-operate.

Yes, people. Sometimes the fittest species are the ones that cooperate. Not just with others of their kind, either. Look at symbiosis, things like lichens where two or more different species combine into one. Hell, if it weren't for cooperation, we wouldn't have multicellular organisms. Or even single-celled organisms as we know them today! (Mitochondria, among others, were originally seperate organisms.)

So I'd say, from that point of view, cooperation is FAR more important than competition. By several dozen orders of magnitude.

      Anton LaVey's version of Satanism is rather brutal, plays off the whole concept of dog-eat-dog survival. But to stoop to that level, the level that most people already stoop to whether they know it or not, is the path of fools. Humans evolved sentience, sapience, and cooperation to better their chances of survival. One would be a fool to throw it away or waste that potential. Despite the fact that right-hand paths like Christianity tend to go down the crapper after enough time, there is an underlying - and valid - point to them: compassion and kindness are not weakness, even Lavey knew this. I may be a bit unique amongst Satanists in this view, but I do believe in making an attempt to appeal to people's higher nature. Of course, like any Satanist, I know that if someone refuses to take kindly to your offer of compassion and peace, don't push the matter. But so many Satanists tend to radiate the "leave me alone" vibe, and I admit I have a tendency to do that too. But kindness and compassion can be very useful tools, as well as feeling good when reciprocated or appreciated.
      But I know for a fact that persistence can pay off. When I was a child in Shenandoah, Iowa, I was bullied a lot by a neighbor kid Who I will simply call JR. And many Satanists may call it weakness, but I tolerated his bullying because I have naturally leaned, throughout my life, towards compassion and patience. And my patience paid off in his case. Apparently impressed that I did not run away or whine or cry or even fight back, he finally desisted. This did not work with any future bullies until high school, and even then it worked poorly, but I believe that to be the result of other factors that did not exist that first time. At any rate, though, I believe this to be the origin of my interpretation of Jesus's "turn the other cheek" - a Satanic interpretation: when you are seemingly unaffected by a blow, or are affected but you stand back up anyway, even if they kill you they cannot defeat you. Bravery may not always be condusive to survival, but I think there are enough times when such a tactic would work that it justifies the risk.
      Still, the world is not about absolutes, and ultimately what tactics you use in survival situations depends on the situation. Take, for instance, a mugging. Now LaVeyan philosophy, if you take it too literally, would seem to suggest to take the option of force to defend yourself. But if the robber is masked, and is a stranger to you, the best course of action is cooperation; it is unlikely in such a case that the robber would have any reason to harm you. If he is unmasked, of course, this means you can identify him, and so he will probably kill you either way if he is to get away with his crime. So in that case, do whatever necessary to do whatever necessary to defend yourself.
      Satanism is, ultimately, a practical and intellectual religion, and therefore I do not think LaVey ever intended anyone to become dogmatic about Satanism's philosophies - because there are always multiple answers to any riddle, and the whole point of life seems, given the lack of Answers, to be a chance to make your own mark on the world, to create your own answers.
      And getting back to the point, one of humanity's answers is cooperation. Kindness and compassion are parts of that cooperation.