Abusing God

And other Christian pastimes.

Aleister Crowley wasn’t a Satanist. I appreciate that to a Catholic or Protestant everyone outside their own ideological faction can become a Satanist in the blink of one disapproving eye, but this does not make it true. It just makes the person saying it sound like an idiot.

It’s no different than the far left calling me (an a-political centrist who has never voted for president) a right-wing extremist from 2019 until last week because I “believed in” certain conspiracies. I’m sure those same fundamentalists who call Crowley a Satanist see me as one too, for leaving offerings to the land spirits, feeding my ancestors, and bowing to a faerie queen. Never mind that I love Jesus, and never mind that none of these beings are gods exactly, the simple fact that I don’t adhere to their extra-biblical pop-dogma somehow grants them the right to usurp my own hard-won worldview, insisting that anything other than Jesus or an angel is the devil himself.

This not only breaks their own dogma of not adding-to the word of God, but it strays rather far afield from anything the Bible tells us. This kind of projection not only minimizes my own complex cosmological reality, but it removes agency from those spirits whom I honor - This is an attack, not only upon myself, but upon the agency and reality of the spirits with whom I am entangled. It’s an ontological projection which has no foundation in reality.

The modern idea of Christianity is a washed out folk religion which is usually quite divorced from the reality of the book it calls holy. It is as plain as bread that monotheism does not exist in the bible. Yahweh specifies to not worship other gods before him. This is not monotheism as in the belief in exclusively the one god; It’s monolatry: The belief that out of all the gods that do exist, one of those should be worshiped, specifically, above the rest.

This cognitive dissonance gives me a headache, especially when one realizes that according to the Bible El was originally the head honcho, and Yahweh his son. It’s fairly straightforward in Deuteronomy 32:8–9. Never mind the archaeological evidence which points to Yahweh coming from farther afield than Canaan even before he was considered a son of El, that is, one of the Bene Elohim, known in Enoch as the Watchers. This mean that Yahweh worship best falls under the category of watcher cult. A watcher who required blood sacrifice, at that. Interesting. None of my spirits require violence.

You can see this same sort of selective truth at play when it comes to Satanism and the pointed fingers of churchgoers. Satan is a landfill for unexamined fears and those who have such a willfully narrow view of the spirit world would probably sound a bit less ignorant if they simply read a book once in a while, even if just their own book and the influences upon it from the cultures in which the Hebrew people were enmeshed. Fat chance, though. So here we are, on the cusp of another witch hunt, another Satanic panic. The email may blatantly say “Moloch” but it still turns out Satan after a run through the wash.

I find it funny that Catholics, of all people, are somehow finding they have the high ground to point fingers from, especially when it comes to systematized, ritualized, conspiratorial abuse of children. Have they no memory? By their own reckoning, their church is full of Satanists. Let he who is without sin cast the first stone, but it’s never he who is without sin who throws stones, is it? It’s they who fear sin so acutely that they themselves become slothful in their ontological acuity. They impose their worldview upon others like a curse. They run from sin and they find it. They throw stones.

In Eastern religions there is this thing called non-dualism. It doesn’t mean that nothing is good or bad, it means that one refrains from projecting a black and white, good and evil duality on everything. This does not suggest that there should be no differentiation between kindness and cruelty, or suffering and health, or what is appropriate and not appropriate. In fact, it seems to remove dogmatic noise and allow a person to see precise effects more than the general hue of a lens. Individual details more than broad brush strokes.

Without Good vs. Evil there is room for nuance.

A deity such as Kali Ma, mostly known in the west for being the scary goddess whose name is chanted by scary brown people in the scariest scene from Temple of Doom, is obviously Satanic to an American Christian. Aside form the gross misrepresentation in the film, which is unfortunately the primary cultural conception the west commonly has in their minds regarding this holy goddess, she does in fact appear terrifying. This is not because she is evil, but because Vedic religions are complex and capable of a maturity we have all but lost. Misunderstanding her is a sign of this retardation.

When a Christian reduced another person’s manifestation of God to their own scapegoat and devil, as if they somehow know better as an outsider merely glancing in, they take a shit on an entire culture and their superior ability for nuance, and in doing so prove that their own unexamined folk-Christian indoctrination is objectively inferior, obtuse, and ideologically captured. It is ill-equipped to handle complex ontological tension. It is ill-equipped to approach God in varied forms, the number and nature of which are limitless. To suggest that God only appears to one culture, one people, and in one way, is quite frankly ridiculous and genuinely racist. Peruse Epstein’s use of the word “goyim” and you’ll clock what I’m talking about. That is the final form of this kind of arrogance when it continues unchecked and well-financed. It always ends in the dehumanization of others, and often violence. Whether those acts of violence draw the blood which Yahweh enjoyed regularly before Jesus amended the pact or not, I can only speculate, but certainly the usurper was not overjoyed at the change in the arrangement.

The hubris involved in the Christian’s ability to impose ontological limits upon their own supposedly supreme, limitless, and infallible God without even realizing they have done so is such an abysmal sin that I almost want to pray for them.

God is beyond your ideas of what God is. How dare you suggest otherwise.

Any Christian who imposes their strict idea of God or their reductionist ideas of the devil onto anyone else or their culture is not a Christian at all. They are a tyrant. A tyrant whose uses Jesus Christ to judge others. A tyrant whose priests are, at least in part, just as sick as the folks on Little St. James Island. A tyrant who equates friendly pagans with monsters simply for disagreeing about God.

You would think that all this fear and anger might be better directed towards the Godless atheists of the world, who believe that your mind can be reduced to lines of code, that your body is a machine, and that your soul is an illusion waiting to evaporate. How are these dangerous, dehumanizing worldviews which blatantly worship human superiority and embrace arrogance somehow less Satanic than the pagans who worship God’s creation and commune with the spirit beings who live in the forests, being who were also created by God according to the Christian pop-folk doctrine of all-encompassing authority? Are the ancestors who are literally flowing through your veins and embedded within your bones also devils?

The bottom line is this: If God created everything, then worshiping anything within creation is worshiping God. If there are gods which should not be worshiped over another, which is what the Bible actually states, there is still no issue. It does not say to never worship other gods. It simply says not to put them before the big G. If anything within creation is somehow not of God, then you have to admit that your God did not create everything. Either God made it all, and it is all holy, or God did not make it all. The two cannot coexist. And whichever route one takes, amendments to a worldview are in order. Either that or amendments to the Bible.

As often happens, I find myself writing to an audience who will likely never read, or take seriously, my thoughts. Those who do read (I love you all) are the choir to whom I preach. But perhaps the medicine is not in turning hearts and minds, but rather in publicly voicing a refusal of consent to the abusive impositions of the blindly religious. Perhaps the cosmic proclamation of non-compliance is the point.

This re-wilding of Christianity, this mission to remove the imagined borderline between the Christian pantheon and the rest of Creation and allow it all to coexist without judgement, is something I’ve been affectionately calling “Christianimism” for some time now. Reaching for Biblical nuance is the breeze that blows the house of modern day Christian cards across the front yard. They land where they belong; In the dirt and the weeds. In the wilds where roots are strong and borders are obscured.