Thelemic Jihad
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@kuniggety said
"What our forefathers did to insult their forefathers is the same as if we did it to them. ."
Umm, should we be indulging them in such primitive thinking - or are the towel-heads just too dim for us to expect them to be able to live up to the standards of universalist humanism like the rest of us?
There's a lot of PC "liberal" tosh being spoken about Islam here. I agree that the OP is mostly tripe, but some of the mewling pro-Islamist stuff being spoken here is pretty mindless too.
It ought to be unnecessary to say (therefore, perhaps it should be said) that nobody's got any beef with those famous "ordinary, decent Muslims". (And oddly, for all the warnings from the chattering classes about "backlashes", there haven't really been any.) The problem is with the small minority of Muslims who are plainly fascistic nutcases, and should be treated with the same contempt, and despatched with the same celerity, as the "ferocious fascists" and "cackling communists" of yore. Unfortunately, since there are a *lot *of Muslims, a statistically small minority still amounts to a *lot *of nutjobs sequestered in amongst all those nice, ordinary, decent Muslims. Which makes it tricky.
As for this stuff about the Koran being some wonderful text full of light and love. I too once decided to sit down and try to get to grips with the Koran (this was long before the current foofaraw), but I had the opposite experience from Edward (whose opinons I normally respect). There I was, quite willing to give Islam the time of day, thinking it was going to be something like the Bible - a bunch of tribalist tosh mixed in with some profundity. Imagine my surprise when I found it to be one long, appalling, vile, vicious rant, with hardly any redeeming qualities. It made me quite ill to read.
But if you think about it, that's not surprising, since, contrary to Islamic propaganda, the thing is a politicized compendium of God knows what priestcraftly nonsense from several hundred years after the supposed death of the supposed "Mohammed", based on Christ knows how much or how little of what that supposed someone called "Mohammed" might have said - if he even existed. (Really, the origins of Islam are fully as murky as the origins of Christianity - certainly, it looks like there was no "Jesus Christ", and I wouldn't be at all surprised if there was no "Mohammed" either.)
There's a tendency amongst "liberals" to rag on Christianity but give Islam a free pass because of ideological reasons ("the enemy of my enemy is my friend" - another bit of tribal tosh, come to think of it). "Liberals" need to wake the fuck up about all this. Islamofascists are a zillion times more the enemy than any Republican or God-fearing, but thankfully somewhat tame Christian in the West. It took a lot of effort to tame Christianity - do you really think we want to go through the whole rigmarole again with Islam? Oh, what's that you say - how could Islam possibly get into such a situation of power? Well, it's what the Islamofascists want isn't it? Or haven't you read any of their rants? And if nobody's going to stop them ... where does the strange sense of confidence that they couldn't get what they avowedly want (a new, worldwide Caliphate) come from?
But of course, as good "liberals", we will prefer to wait to the last minute and ensure that many more soldiers and military people, not to mention civilians, die defending our freedoms, because we left it to the last minute. They're only military nuts anyway - and probably Republicans to boot!
In all seriousness, at the end of the day, true salvation is actually with all the ordinary, decent Muslims. As Christopher Hitchens pointed out long ago, the whole Islamofascist spectacle is not directed at the West (it's not all about us) but at their fellow, moderate Muslims. We are just the tools, the useful idiots, of Islamofascist demagogues' drive to intimidiate moderate Muslims, and build numbers. The main idea is to use terrorism to goad the West into extreme measures (standard tactics for small, weak, but militant and highly motivated, highly ideological organisations). However, the West has acted pretty restrained on the whole, and targetted its responses fairly well (given the difficulty inherent in war), and we now have some semblance of a functioning democratic Islamic state slap bang in the middle of the Middle East, to hopefully serve as an example of how ordinary, decent Muslims can get on with their lives and have some everyday stability and prosperity, like the rest of us. It is the moderate Muslims who will clean their own house - by awakening to the very universalist, humanist principles that the Left and "liberalism" have left behind, in the sleepy, decaying half-life of socialism.
Thelema shares a *lot *of ideology with liberalism (and even with modern-day American "liberalism"), and it even shares a bit of ideology with socialism (at least with the nice *intentions *of socialism), but it most emphatically does *not *share the self-loathing so prevalent amongst "liberals" and Westerners today, that would have us roll over and play dead to some asinine mediaevalist revivalism.
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@gurugeorge said
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@kuniggety said
"What our forefathers did to insult their forefathers is the same as if we did it to them. ."Umm, should we be indulging them in such primitive thinking - or are the towel-heads just too dim for us to expect them to be able to live up to the standards of universalist humanism like the rest of us?"
The have a cultural difference in views and I'm just saying that if one takes the time to try and see it from their viewpoint, it is possible to get a glimpse of where they're coming at. I never said I agreed with it - I am helping fight the extremists after all.
My views on violent extremists from any religion, no matter if they're Christian, Muslim, etc. is the same. My only argument was the OP's seeming characterizations of all Muslims, just by being Muslim, are all in the same boat as the extremists which is hardly the case.
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Crowley said in one his writings(probably in more), MTP I believe, something of fools. I do believe you fall under the category that he lists as the worst kind of fool, Tarotica.
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Gurugeorge, 93,
"There I was, quite willing to give Islam the time of day, thinking it was going to be something like the Bible - a bunch of tribalist tosh mixed in with some profundity. Imagine my surprise when I found it to be one long, appalling, vile, vicious rant, with hardly any redeeming qualities. It made me quite ill to read."
I didn't have that assumption. I already knew that the text, incessantly, threatens the unbelievers with hell-fire. I expected a difficult read, and it was. But I already had evidence from someone I'd come to trust (that is, that doesn't like wars, even against nasty infidels, and with whom I could exchange forbidden CDs of western music) that she found peace in reading the text. That was what nagged at me, so I knew I had to cut out any *critical *thinking processes (which would have told me "This is grim-minded crap") and approach it from a different starting point. Hence, my comment about a prayerful approach. I was performing an experiment, not kow-towing to Islamofascism. You know, method of science and all that.
Somewhere in The Vision and the Voice Crowley speaks about how in reading the text for one Aethyr, the words began to take on the exact opposite meaning to the literal one. In reading the Koran, for me there was, unexpectedly at a certain point, a 'kick up' into Briatic awareness (I shouldn't say "consciousness"), and I was able to relate to what Muslims mean about the peace of their faith. There's a brightness there, and a stilling of the fever of fear, anger and the mad absurdity of life. That remained with me to some extent through the rest of the reading, and altered what I found. I think very many Muslims have understood this in some way since the beginning.
I'm not ignoring the darkness of what *political *Islamic is doing or has done, even if I find monitoring the various tides in the fundamentalist groupings wearying (I used to do this, studying their hate-rhetoric and reported cross-allegiances). I don't welcome the armed/nuclear clash, but I expect it. I just don't think it will resolve very much. You can't militarily defeat what people still insist on calling 'the Taliban' and you can't change a billion people's minds because you bombed or shot at them. Or rather, you do, but not in the way you intend. (I cite the Afghanistan/Pakistan situation as my proof, and rest my case). All you can do is displace some of the dogmatic military regimes that mis-rule various Islamic polities.
Something else has to happen to achieve the fundamental shift in mentality.
I guess my real point here, shorn of the "What really is Islam?" stuff, is: We in the West (using a rather vague generic term) don't get to make the decision about how the world is eventually going to come out of all this, any more than does some mullah in a cave who manages to heist a couple of Pakistani nukes. We're far more the pawns than we are the players moving them, and we don't seem willing to grasp that. Whatever is changing the level(s) of consciousness operating on this planet is not Muslim, nor democratic/post-Christian, nor politically correct, nor liberal, nor Palin-esque, nor Hitchensian, nor Islamist in 67 flavors, even if these things are all factors in play. The Aeon is still in the process of being established, and whatever deep psychic forces are being resolved in the violent interplay will use what is to hand, not what we who are on one side of the picture want. I don't necessarily like this, but I don't see how else it's all going to work out, so I essentially accept it.
What Tarotica posted on his blog, doesn't offer much, any more than does a Jihadist video. Most so-called Thelemic solutions offered so far don't seem to be about much more than a regurgitation of commonplace phobias with a Liber L gloss.
If we survive the next century, and I'm passably sure we will, then what I glimpsed in my Koranic reading is going to be much more of a determining factor than calls to arms against the rag-heads, or the fair-skinned infidels, or the Zionists. The political solution, the ground-level solution, will flow out of that. If, as it did in Arabia thirteen centuries ago, it flows only partly realized into a situation of inter-tribal violence, albeit this time on a global, not regional, scale, then we'll have to wait for the following Aeon for resolution, assuming anyone's still around. If we can begin moving on past Islamoparanoia and all the other xenophobic reactions we've stuck ourselves with, then there's a different outcome on the way.
Liber L doesn't tell us to turn the other cheek, or to be 'fools for Christ," which is essentially what a lot of politically correct liberal 'solutions' seem to require. It does teach that we should not fear "any power in heaven or upon the earth or under the earth." (III, 17). But, taking the reference to the "strength, force, vigour of your arms" in that verse to be simply a reference to better and more frequently deployed weapons systems rather than to using more magical means seems, to me, to miss the entire point of where we're bid to be headed.
93 93/93,
Edward
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Great responses from both Kuniggety and Edward. Sorry about my little belch, but I felt just had to make clear that this is a Thelemic forum, not the f*****g Huffington Post
One thing I'd note though, the Emperor Palpatine approach ("Kill them - kill ALL of them"
), while it doesn't always work, *sometimes *does work: I call to my witness Germany and Japan. (And to forestall the obvious "liberal" remark at this point, I haven't noticed any particularly strong tendency of the generations of Japanese and Germans since WWII to avenge the deaths of their errant forefathers via acts of terrorism, since said forefathers were well and truly stomped into the dust.)It may be somewhat undignified playing whack-a-mole with Islamofascists, but after all, that approach results either in absence-of-moles, or well-behaved moles.
Edward, you are more sanguine about the prospect of taking two steps back or sideways before we move on than I am. Perhaps that's because I'm particularly engaged in the study of the history of the "Great Sorcery" at the moment (aka Christian origins), and weep for lost opportunities.
Or maybe it *is *just fear.
However, in response to that, I'd say that whether one whacks moles fearfully or cheerfully, they still need to be whacked - it is their lot in life to be whacked. Certain ideas just cry out to end up in "history's dustbin of discarded lies" (or whatever the hideous metaphor was), and the notion that humanity should be ruled by a bunch of woman-and-homosexual-hating closet homosexuals waving improvised explosive devices in one hand and a copy of some 1,200 year old book full of mindless (albeit perhaps mysteriously elevating) ranting in the other, is most definitely one of them.
And, *pace *the OP, I'd say the same thing about the concept of randy rock gods waving ray guns in one hand and the spaced-out (albeit perhaps mysteriously elevating) literary remains of an English poet in the other
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I can’t say that I would call it a juvenile flight of fancy, but I would call the thoughts behind it base, narrow, and unrefined. I would think that there were several meanings to the text, including the spiritual metaphor. I also believe that there are life lessons involved in it, one of which is the willingness to fight for freedom. In my life experience(and I’ve been through many life and death situations), it comes down to a matter of courage, valor, and ideal. You can be boxed in, and forced to fight, but there is also the willingness to step into the box. Belief in the self is a big deal, whether you win or lose. Most people are not willing to step into the box, preferring the safe comfort zone. I see this alot visiting up here in Canada. There is alot of big talk, but when it comes time to walk there is no one, or few, in sight.
For assumptions, you make many of them. You make the assumption that there is no war going on behind the scenes; maybe not a physical one for the most, but a war nonetheless. You make the assumption that there are few Thelemites willing to fight and die. The majority of the Thelemites I personally know have been through hell and back, in the military and prison. Then, in your case, that most Thelemites are hippies, druggies, and other such degenerates; in my case, we might assume that most Thelemites have and/or are capable of killing, have been trained to do so in one way or another, and really aren’t the kind of folks that you want to be on their A-list. You make the assumption that all Thelemic leadership are fat, out of shape, bad-singing DuQuettes(and for the record, he really cannot sing--I would tell him to keep his day job, but am not much impressed with that either), when that is another stereotype, another assumption. You also make the big assumption that you are the only one to have thought this out, and something like a member of the noble class of the Thelemic movement.
Actually, since you like to follow Crowley’s writings so much, I do believe that diversity is the right of every Thelemite, and in their own right are all right. If you have an issue with that, then maybe you should take that up with Crowley.
Your error in the article in narrow-minded, unrefined thought and assumptions.
One of the things that those “new” to the path often do is to fool themselve into thinking they have actually done something. Your words that you’ve read Liber AL with an open heart and mind(aside from the tine, as if you are the only one) ring so loudly of this. I suppose next you’ll tell us that you are the son of To Meta Therion, or Crowley himself reincarnated, or maybe the next prophet?
Out of curiosity, Tarotica, have you actually spoken to anyone in Islam? Spent any time around everyday Muslims, talked to them, learned anything of them? You ought to go to Iraq or Afghanistan. Might be a good learning experience for you.
I am also curious where you get out of Liber AL anything of child sacrifice? Do share.
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Gurugeorge, 93,
"Edward, you are more sanguine about the prospect of taking two steps back or sideways before we move on than I am. Perhaps that's because I'm particularly engaged in the study of the history of the "Great Sorcery" at the moment (aka Christian origins), and weep for lost opportunities. "
Sure. But I find it hard to see history as progress, in the conventional (19th Century?) sense. On the other hand, I can equate it comfortably to evolution. Sixty million years of dinosaurs, which are then all exterminated over about 30 months? No problem. Mammals can wait, let alone primates, while that's done with.
Which doesn't mean that I like evolution. But it seems to be the way things worked out until now - scattershot, full of diversions into blind alleys. Human evolution seems to be happening on the scale of centuries, and possibly decades, and we are the first species (that we know of) to accelerate its own movement. Despite myself, therefore, I'm an optimist, even if I wince at the thousands of people burned and tortured by Christianity, and the tens of millions oppressed in subtler ways."Certain ideas just cry out to end up in "history's dustbin of discarded lies" (or whatever the hideous metaphor was), and the notion that humanity should be ruled by a bunch of woman-and-homosexual-hating closet homosexuals waving improvised explosive devices in one hand and a copy of some 1,200 year old book full of mindless (albeit perhaps mysteriously elevating) ranting in the other, is most definitely one of them.
"No argument on that score. I keep seeing signs of hope, though, such as the incipient feminist movement in Saudi Arabia, cautious Koranic re-interpretation by women in Egypt and Jordan, the unquenchable push towards wider human rights in Iran, or the fact that, before she was assassinated, Benazir Bhutto had a fighting chance of effecting some change in Pakistan. Which is how I got involved with the woman who coached me through the Koran. She didn't want to forsake her faith, but she didn't fit the mold of 'a good Muslim girl' at all. She was expressing something much more than that, so I pushed to learn more. She pushed back, and I found something of what motivated her faith. She fought, therefore, as a brother, and the way she pushed/fought underlined for me how there's a Thelemic impulse operating in places other than western democracies.
Freedom and self-realization are memes active in all parts of the world. It's just state-dominated media that try to make sure these things are seen only as brief flickerings.
93 93/93,
Edward
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@Edward Mason said
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No argument on that score. I keep seeing signs of hope, though, such as the incipient feminist movement in Saudi Arabia, cautious Koranic re-interpretation by women in Egypt and Jordan, the unquenchable push towards wider human rights in Iran, or the fact that, before she was assassinated, Benazir Bhutto had a fighting chance of effecting some change in Pakistan. Which is how I got involved with the woman who coached me through the Koran. She didn't want to forsake her faith, but she didn't fit the mold of 'a good Muslim girl' at all. She was expressing something much more than that, so I pushed to learn more. She pushed back, and I found something of what motivated her faith. She fought, therefore, as a brother, and the way she pushed/fought underlined for me how there's a Thelemic impulse operating in places other than western democracies."Yupyup, and by now there have been quite a few times where Muslims, sickened by Islamofascist doings, and ashamed to be associated with them, have publicly dissasociated themselves from extremism and marched in protest - that kind of thing. Also, since the West has in fact reacted in a measured way on the whole, but has also done as much mole-whacking as it can meanwhile, Islamofascism has often looked weaker than it would wish to appear, and support for extremism has actually gradually diminished, statistically, amongst Muslims (IIRC - it's a while since I looked into it).
Yes, I'm hopeful on the whole too. And in fact, if the Koran is as you say, that's what we should expect. (And the same thing happened with the Bible of course - Christians seldom took the more barbarous parts of it seriously, and mostly *preferred *to interpret it nicely and in a liberal fashion.)
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93,
I think the key concept here is "Let my servants be few and secret; they shall rule the many and the known." The actual numbers involved are relatively unimportant once the impulse that forms the concept starts to penetrate mass consciousness. The strongest army gets weary of war at a certain point, the wall of resistance to civil rights changes starts to crumble, or something like decriminalizing gay sex, a ludicrous (and shamefully immoral) notion when I was a kid, has now become law in many countries. These things will come later to Africa and Asia, and not easily, but they will come. The old men who resist all this may fight till they die, but die they will.
I don't place much faith in opinion polls showing, let's say, how many anti-American, pro-Jihad people there are in Jordan or Lebanon. Such things are good general indicators of current conditions, but they can't measure the consciousness shifts that are operating and developing behind outward attitudes and beliefs.
Of course, paranoid rants against rag-heads can slow things down, and they will. But they're against the overall current of the Aeon flowing through. Looked at a generation from now, they will be seen to be the shadows that pass and are done. Which doesn't mean there won't be more shadows, or that some hidebound Islamic nations or communities won't be troublemaking diehards. I can't see Afghanistan outside of Kabul changing much in my lifetime, for example, nor some of the 'Stans that used to be part of the USSR. But my lifetime isn't the correct yardstick anyway.
93 93/93,
Edward
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**Tarotica:
Liber AL doesn't encourage it. It commands child sacrifice, and Crowley plainly said this was the case.**
The only thing I see plainly is the author of Liber AL has a sense humor and wit, having set up a grammatical trap to see how many fools he could get to cry "Child sacrifice!" The sentence is verse III:12, referenced in your nasty little piece on the subject as a sentence that could have several meanings, and in this thread you plainly state the verse in question commands child sacrifice, even though the rules of grammar strictly limit the possible interpretations. A colon is used to separate two independent clauses, or an independent clause and a fragment where one element elaborates on the other, depending on the arrangement. In the case of this statement: "Sacrifice cattle, little and big: after a child", the only possible function of the incomplete clause is to elaborate on the complete one, and based on its structure is limited to informing when the cattle should be sacrificed, expressing no other idea. To claim that verse III:12 encourages child sacrifice is a certain sign of ignorance of the rules of English Grammar.
What I recall Crowley stating plainly about verse III:12 is that it foretold the death of his first child, which is a correct grammatical interpretation of the sentence.
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From what I can see the Muslim faithful are in deep denial about the historical facts of Mohammed's life. He was born into a clan of desert caravan raiders. His entire life story is an almost uninterrupted series of aggressive military exploits. None were defensive other than the Battle of the Ditches. The story that Islam was spread peacefully along trade routes is pure fantasy.
The Koran is filled with exhortations to war. The perfunctory response is usually, "have you read the Koran...entirely?". (Just like born-again Christians on the Bible). To those who respond "yes" a common reply is, "oh, so you read classical Arabic?" It continues ad absurdium.
I have seen the quote here, "Ye shall know them by their fruits".
There is only one major culture in the world today that teaches that it is okay to strap bombs around their children and send them onto buses and into restaurants or airplanes to blow up unsuspecting innocents. Even in the USA 24% of the Muslim teenagers openly admitted that they believe suicide bombings can be justified. (!) Those are just the ones who admit it. You can imagine what the numbers are outside the USA. This notion that the problem is a small percentage that has hijacked Islam doesn't hold water. If so why does the vast majority stand idly by and do little or nothing about it. The deafening silence from Islamic leadership after 911 was noteworthy.
As far as I know, Crowley never went to war, never fought a single battle.... The revolution he speaks of appears to be metaphorical.
The similarities between the Islamic apologist's claim to Jihad being an internal individual struggle and the Thelemic struggle may be valid. But the external reality that the world needs to face up to is that roughly 90% of all violent conflicts in the world since WWII have been Muslims against someone else.
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"Those making progress in The Work learn discrimination and do not cling to bigotry and are not easily duped by the mass-media hype thrown their way, every day."
Some wise words there.
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Av, that quote was from a completely separate thread. Care to explain your point?
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That even you know that blaming Islam, or Muslims, for 90% of the violent conflicts after WWII (in addition to being untrue) is a diversion from any real progress in either the realm of managing human conflict or The Work.
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That even you know...?
?hmmm
Say we adjust to post 1974 conflicts.
Would you admit that the 90% estimate is reasonably close then? I mean, just look at the facts, from Bali to Baghdad, from Kashmir to Kabul, just look at the facts. From Bosnia to Grozny to the Paris suburbs... on and on....Put all the politically correct mass media nonsense aside.
"real progress in either the realm of managing human conflict..." (?!)
what the!?Is there such a realm?
Whoever that manager is must be out to lunch.
(or seriously deluded) -
Nice try. I'm not here to get into a debate with you.
People can google the facts*. I don't have any great revelation, or info that the next person lacks.
*Here's a googled resource for facts: users.erols.com/mwhite28/warstatx.htm
I just know a phony 90% when I see one. And I know you know it's phony. But your advice from the other thread was great, and even if you ignore it, I think I'll follow it, and exit this conversation for now.
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Av, your warstat site lists deaths from past wars which is totally irrelevant. I see this a lot - some completely irrelevant reply based on tangential connection at best. For those who wish to remain in denial it is apparently an effective coping mechanism.
My point stands. It is not bigotry to observe a picnic table with a watermelon on it and say, "there is a watermelon on that picnic table". It is a simple observation of fact. If the object on the table is a religious icon, somehow the term 'bigotry' starts to get thrown around.
I see this a lot. People lose objectivity when religion is involved and especially when a politically incorrect comment is made.
Let's test my observation with some data;
www.religioustolerance.org/curr_war.htmThis site lists 26 recent violent conflict hotspots of the last few decades. When I add Uighur province it is 27 and only 3 of them are NOT involving Muslims. That is 89.9% (reasonably close to my 90% estimate). And note that the Iran, Kurdistan, Turkey conflicts are all glommed into one event called Iraq which artificially averages down the actual count. Similarly one grouping is simply called "Middle East" which is also multiple conflicts. The persecution of Christians in Lebanon is completely separate from the Jerusalem and Palestinian issue.
So, my comments are well supported by historical fact and present reality. No bigotry there.
I have wondered at how Crowley came to make certain observation concerning Mohammed and I think I recall that his formal education was completed in 1897 when really, very little was known about Islam in general and also his subsequent contact in India may have been with the Sufis and in the Middle East with the Druze. These are both mystical sects that are obviously heavily influenced by early Christian Gnosticism.
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You keep changing your parameters. You've yet to show any substance for your claim that "roughly 90% of all violent conflicts in the world since WWII have been Muslims against someone else."
I'll repeat: you made it up, and you know it's not true.
You're more like a guy at the picnic who says that 90% of the tables have watermelons on them, and keep changing which tables you're counting.
Separately, even though you have a new list in which nearly 90% of the items involve muslims, counting conflicts as of equal weight is misleading. It's like the guy in the joke who claims his rabbit stew is "50/50 horse and rabbit. 1 horse, 1 rabbit"
For some perspective:
The number of people killed as a direct result of the invasion of Iraq - high estimate - 500,000.
The number of people killed in the Second Congo War, 1998-2002 - 5,400,000. No Muslims involved. -
Who is changing parameters?
Again, how many times need I repeat it? Your reply of numbers killed is totally irrelevant! It has nothing to do with my point. (you could post it or a discussion of how Stalin and Mao were the biggest mass murderers in history as a separate topic or thread but it might possibly be moved to the off-topic list). My point is relevant to the Thelemic 'Jihad' discussion. Your reply about numbers killed in Congo war is totally irrelevant. Can't you see that?
What do you mean I made it up?! what?...? I made a simple observation and supported it with directly relevant data that wholly and directly supports what I said! ?? What are you talking about? Nothing was made up... the data is right there... this is simple. Are you saying the conflicts reported in that link are "made up"? If so you are in deeper denial than I supposed.
I changed no parameters beyond adjusting to your original challenge of my point from WWII to post 1970's... there is nothing wrong about that. It is simply narrowing the boundaries to make a demonstration of verity more doable. My observation and main point stands and it is supported with facts that those who are able to confront reality can recognize.
Now, if you would please reply to the data or logic behind my valid claim.
(oh and your repeated claim, "you know it's not true" is presumptuous, false and a minor violation of Spiritual Law)
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