On Occultism

[Gwaithmir]

Ha! You're a young person I take it.
Fucking awful film by the way. Well apart from Brit Ekland.

People are perfectly entitled to not like 'The Wicker Man'.  These people are, of course, wrong.  Terrific piece of work.

Boru

I didn't care for the ending much, but I loved the scene in which Britt Ekland was dancing naked around her bedroom. 

[mordant]

Actually, I've been browsing some occult forums recently and wow is this shit funny. You have all of these people who claim to have all of this magical power and they talk about how they shape reality around them and manipulate people and cast spells and shit. These people are really full of themselves. It's honestly sad lol.

I'm not sure if I feel worse for them or for their xtian counterparts.

What a strange, deluded sense of reality you must have to have to consider yourself this master of reality because you "practice black magic." Weird.

This is similar to hermeticism ("as above, so below", The Secret, etc) where you "create your own reality". The only difference is that hermeticism is more about thinking your way to the life you want and magick involves slathering a lot of ritual on top of that.

Both of those things boil down to getting your way via some formula.

Come to it ... how is Christianity or any other more "conventional" religion any different? Only the details change. You are still using your asserted brand of right-thinking, right-acting, and depending on your persuasion and personal leanings, ritual and community to get what you want or hope for in life.

[EgoDeath]

This is similar to hermeticism ("as above, so below", The Secret, etc) where you "create your own reality". The only difference is that hermeticism is more about thinking your way to the life you want and magick involves slathering a lot of ritual on top of that.

Both of those things boil down to getting your way via some formula.

Come to it ... how is Christianity or any other more "conventional" religion any different? Only the details change. You are still using your asserted brand of right-thinking, right-acting, and depending on your persuasion and personal leanings, ritual and community to get what you want or hope for in life.

Well, almost every philosophy for life espouses being a good person, even in the occult. Outside of some organizations like the Order of the Nine Angles, which is a "Satanic" organization (which is ironic because they barely follow any of the principles of Satanism) which promote Nazism and other deplorable ideas, most occult practices even support being a generally good person.

In that way, Christianity isn't much different than the occult. Which would make sense if some of the claims of Christianity being a copy of certain forms of Paganism were true, though I've heard that those claims are quite unfounded.

[The Grand Nudger]

Christianity would be occultism, by definition, even if it were invented whole cloth with no cultural development or preceding traditions to lean on as source material (credited or not).

It's just that that the cultural development and preceding traditions (vehemently uncredited) are embarrassing to christians in much the same way that terms like pixies are fairies are.  So, christianity as a tradition which is by definition an occult system...rejects that accurate classification as it does in so many other areas. Coming up with threadbare excuses as to why it can;t be what it is, what they strongly assert it to be.

Christians love the occult, they don't like the -word- occult. It's taken to mean the other guys supernatural influences, not theirs. One of the benefits of cultural hegemony is that you get to run the office of doublespeak.