Hr. Vad of the Prometheus Grotto embracing science and technology

 

What makes Satanism a "Scientific Religion?" While I’m honored to be the subject of a week or so of coursework, I’m also a little disturbed to be in the same grouping as Raeleans and Scientologists. I consider these more science-fiction religions than anything else. So, what makes Satanism a scientific religion?

science and religion

Science and religion both serve the same basic needs in humanity. Science and religion are both quests for truth, a way to explain the unexplained, and a way to define humanity and the world humans live in. The difference between the two is that science rarely gives us statements of should. Religion, as a rule, provides guidelines and regulations for behavior. Where the two go hand in hand is in explaining the universe. As Science increased our provable knowledge of the universe, old faiths had to adjust.

religion and science

For centuries, Christianity dominated the souls of the Western world. It stifled the exploration of facts through an elaborate system of taboos, and repressive measures against those who would challenge dogmas. Where the Popes of Europe could make and break kings, anyone who challenged the dogma the Church laid out challenged not only God, but also the authority of both the secular and religious governments.

novus ordum seculorum

Far too much has been made out of the "Rebellion" side of neo-Satanism. However, in the last few centuries, our world civilization has transformed. In many areas of the world, hereditary bloodlines still have power. In most places, these families are but figureheads to the elected government. Other places, especially in the New World, do away with these bloodlines completely.

The western conception of God, brought to us from the City States of Mesopotamia over 5000 years ago, has always support the idea of God as Monarch. That places the “King of King and Lord of Lords” in a tricky situation. These days, we decapitate kings. During the American Revolution, atheists and deists came out of the woodwork. In ages past, they would have died under the weight of Catholic or Protestant orthodoxy. The French Revolution took things even farther, declaring priests to be willing accomplices in the oppression of the people. Communist revolutions in the 20th century succeed where the American and French revolution fail. They bring religion to a standstill in the countries they liberate. While the hearts of people are not easy to win over, over generations the old religions of Europe fell to Christianity, even as their customs lived on. Over generations, faith mutates.

In the countries where the Glorious Lessons of History teach the value of the people defying authority, how does the tale of Lucifer sound?

 deism and the scientific God

The idea of God as a Person is a common idea in Western culture. While the idea of God as a Principle isn’t new, it’s not common, even in the realm of Scientific Religion. The problem with an Omnipotent, and active, God is that God can over-rule any Law of the universe. This leaves us with a world we cannot possibly make sense of. The entire purpose of science as an organized discipline is making sense of the universe by discovering how it works. Deism is more in line with the scientific paradigm, as Deism posits a creator who creates rules. These rules define a self-sustaining system. Rather than a "God of the Gaps" to act as a catalyst in things we cannot understand, this God simply makes rules. He doesn’t save cats for trees. He doesn’t bless nor damn souls. He just is.

Is morality a science?

If God is a Principle, then what defines Right and Wrong? Rather than an orthopraxy defined by priests, one is left to the confines of the law and the conviction of one’s own conscious. This puts God on some shaky moral ground. I will not go into details, as Satanism is not dependent on Christianity. When one goes from a legal structure, set down by a holy book, to a more scientific basis for morality, one must go beyond an act in and of itself being right or wrong to look for universal principles. For example, shooting someone in the head is usually considered "wrong." However, there are conceivable situations where shooting someone in the head is "right". For example, threats to ones life, loved ones, or property. Those who would argue that it is morally wrong to defend one’s property through use of deadly force prove my point – there is a universal lying behind their moral views. In this case, the sanctity of human life.

When one posits moral laws, then those laws are the supreme authority. Theists can make a week argument that God created those laws. But, if that is the case, then all moral laws are arbitrary, or at least arbitrary to the whims of the theistic God.

Beyond this is the question of why evil exists. Psychology has done a lot to go past arguments of Original Sin and Free Will, into the idea that certain people are aberrant. More on psychology later.

My own views of Evil are Satanic in nature. That is, evil is a human, or perhaps animal, invention. A storm is not evil. A plague is not evil. They are simply disasters. They are not sent to vex us by either a cruel and punishing God, nor by his antithesis. This is not what the primitive peoples of Christian Europe believed. Having no concept of science, but simply believing everything told to them by the monolithic church, they accepted that any bad thing that came to them came from Satan and his witches.

Jeffery Burton Russell, author of "The History of Heaven" puts the dichotomy into clear light. He said, "Either you accept the scientific world view and deny the existence of a devil, or you deny the scientific world view in which case you may certainly continue to believe in the devil. As science became more powerful, the belief in the devil became less widespread.".

the science of the cosmos – astronomy

One reason China never accepted Christianity is that China has always been about 100 years ahead of the Occident, up to the point of the Industrial Revolution. The traditional Western Religious view of man’s world is that as man is the center-point of God’s creation, so should his planet be. While most people knew from Aristotelian orthodoxy that the world was round, they also "knew" the planets and the sun all move around a stationary earth. The world of Copernicus, Galileo, and Newton created a new view of the universe itself. No longer were there the perfect spheres of Aristotle, but rather the world is quite accidentally the third of nine planets orbiting the sun.

While this may seem a trivial matter, Copernicus believed he would burn if he did not keep his knowledge secret until death held no fear for him. It was not until the 1920’s that the Catholic Church officially forgave Galileo for his crime: being right.

My interest in the stars shaped much of my religious views as a child. Religion, I concluded, was a poison of the mind. It held back truth in the name of orthodoxy, for the religious cannot bear to be wrong, lest their entire existence be proven to be predicated on lies and self deception.

religion, science, and the human animal

"I am not an Animal, I am a human being!" While a powerful statement in the play The Elephant Man about dignity and the power of the human spirit, it is about as scientifically correct as saying. "I am not a rectangle, I am a square!" The Christian who invented our modern system of binomial nomenclature, Carolus Linnaeus, would doubtlessly have been shocked to be called a homo sapiens.

The Patriarchal creation myths all involve the idea that a male alone created the world, through design out of nothingness, or through violence to a female. Marduke slays Tiamat and creates the world out of her corpse. Prometheus steals fire from the Gods. Jehovah molds Man in His Image. Evolution is far more of a threat than saying God didn’t create man. There are many who would believe that something less supernatural created man – but they still believe that human being were created. The difference between creationism, either divine or space-opera, and evolution lies in that evolution takes place within the body of the mother. Now, this is a bit crude, as many life forms on earth do not have sexes, but in regards to the only animal the religious person considers important, it’s accurate. The idea that we as human beings are just another animal may be the basis for Satanism, but it’s also an affront to those who believe in the dignity and divinity of human beings over that of other life forms.

Psychology does as much for the mind as Evolution does for the body. Jung reduces Gods to archetypes – primal manifestations of human emotion given form and shape. Skinner reduces the idea of man’s free-will to nothing more than a series of learned responses, doing away with the religious notion that what separates man from animal is that man, and only man, possesses a free will. Chemicals show the mind is a physical object, and with judicious application of LSD, the most profound religious experiences are easily duplicated. Neurology also trashes the last bastion of the soul. The brain is not an antenna for the mind – which exists in the soul. The mind is part of the body.

science and pseudoscience

The difference between science and it’s ugly cousin psuedoscience is that psuedoscience takes the place of religion in telling us what we should do. Science is the pursuit of truth. Psuedoscience is the pursuit of an agenda. Take sociobiology for example. The basic premise is your genes are the real "you." Your body is unimportant save as a carrier for your genes down through the generations. If you are a student of religion, you should instantly see the metaphor between the genes and the soul as being the "real you." Furthermore, the idea that individuals cooperate based on their genetic similarities fits with the agenda of racial separation. I would wonder, though, why dolphins even bother looking at a human being struggling to survive in the water, let alone save them. And while it explains why a male lion will kill the offspring of another male, it doesn’t explain why bats not only do not do this, but also will actually risk their lives to save children unrelated to them.

Many of the religions called "Scientific" are more accurately pseudoscientific. They use science as their springboard into the realm of the mystical and political. Satanism follows the scientific method of always checking policies and assumption against facts. Carducci called Satan "the spirit of progress of every age," and we of the Temple of Lylyth understand progress means that the only orthodoxy that can exist is that no orthodoxy get in the way of the quest for truth.

And what about magic?

Can magic be scientific? Magic has been called the gray area between religion and psychology. There are two ways to look at the phenomena of “scientific magic”.

The easiest way is to say that magic by its very nature produces irreproducible results. This is the argument I make in my paper on NLP. Putting a person into a trance depends on what methods the subject responds to.  Because of this, it is impossible to make a controlled test for the validity of hypnosis.  According to many modern occultists, magic is putting one’s self into a trance, and therefore has the same pitfalls as hypnosis.

The more complex explanation takes this a bit further, and ads historical background. The unscientific view of magic is that if you were to find a Wizards Spellbook, and use the Magic Words, you would have the Wizards power. It is the Aristotelian view that certain things have "occult properties" in and of themselves. E.g. I could make a love potion out of rose blossoms boiled in pure spring water under the new moon, as roses are the flower of love. The scientific view of magic pioneered by Austin Osman Spare is that nothing has an occult power in and of itself. Rather, the Black Flame of the individual reacts to the symbols of magic in a symbolic way. The advanced practitioner supercedes the need for ritual by being able to enter the magical state at will. Such a person could cast a "love spell" simply by magically “calling” to another individual at any time. Additionally, there are those who cannot enter the magical state. (Basically anyone with blocked charkas).  For these individuals no amount of rose blossoms will ever produce a love potion.

I must also point out the difference between Magic and Prayer. The difference is largely theoretical. A magician could conceivably achieve a magical state through prayer. The real distinction between magic and prayer is magic does not require an entity beyond the magician and the subject. That is to say, Magic does not require demons or angels to do one’s work. Rather, it is a direct imposition of the will of the magician onto the nature of reality. Prayer is a request for some one, such as a God, angel or demon, to act for you. While the verbiage of a Satanic ritual may look as if this is happening, no Satanist would tell you he really believes that some entity is actually responding to him. Rather, the words are to raise the Black Flame within. Chaos Magic, especially in the books of Frater U.D., goes even further than Satanism to remove magic from the context of religion. Satanism preserves religious ritual within magic because humans need ritual. Religious individuals might argue that God put this need there. We know that it is the need that put God there.

For another look at Science of Magic, I encourage the reader to look at Crowley's Postulates.

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by Herr Vad