A Religion of Devils
Or, why I love my Demon so
from 
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How many different sorts of suffering are there in the world? And how many of them are innocent? I've no doubt there are many, and that asking how many forms can be described as innocent is akin to asking how many angels can dance on the point of a pin - not head, as is usually stated. A mathematical answer has been worked out (Link) but mathematics has no soul and can't be thought of theologically.
So be damned to it.
Participatory, sacrificial pain interests me. And the best, the most perfect, example of it is the suffering of Jesus Christ. But think about it. What does the story of the death of Christ tell us about God (as God appears in the Christian version). Mostly, it tells us that God is a mean motherfucker who'll torture his kid to death to prove a point. And yes, I can hear you saying "But the resurrection, the resurrection proves that God is really, really nice after all."
Except that Jesus continues to suffer even after his resurrection. After all, he was the Living Word, according to the Gospel of John, through whom all physical reality was made and in whom it subsists. Creation however longs for its redemption from corruption, it suffers the corruption that overtook the world when Adam fell and it suffers continually the redemptive agony of Christ (because Christ's redemption of the physical world has not yet manifested and so is ongoing).
As many a zealous Christian will tell you, every sin recrucifies Christ and every partcipatory act of innocent suffering (such as an animal under a vivesectionist's knife, or the random victim of violence, every child that starves to death, is tortured to death), is balm to his wounds and a step toward the coming Kingdom of God on earth.
Sure God's a nice guy. He made his kid the foundation of the universe, the substance of the universe - and then infected him with cancer. Then he made the boy a physical being and tortured him to death. And then resurrected him in a perfect imperishable body (a body made perfect for the reception of pain), a body that is still the substance of the universe, still cancerous, still suffering and constantly, endlessly crucified. Sure God's a nice guy. Sure.
There's another way of looking at it, of course. It doesn't involve Jesus at all - except as one more poor sod no different from the rest of us, apart from being more than usually afflicted by delusions of understanding (and in possessing the happy and useful knack of turning water into wine).
No, we're all God's kids in this version, just as we're all orphans, because this God has no more interest in us personally than any other artist does in the welfare or otherwise of his creations. Suffering is a color on the canvas, a thread in the tapestry, a note in the music. If the suffering of individuals has meaning it's only as part of some incomprehensible exercise in creation. And since such meaning is incomprehensible - then for us it doesn't exist at all. Certainly it doesn't exist in any sense from which we might draw comfort, or strength, or hope. In fact, to know that there is meaning, meaning that assuages, that satisfies, that redeems, but that we'll never know because we were made too dumb to understand it, could only ever be a source of despair. Better, by far, to believe that there is no such meaning - which is the root of all atheism, and the motivating terror behind deism, agnosticism, the cult of nature and the environment, and all such spineless, cowardly responses to any question involving God and suffering.
And any question that considers God and the world must involve suffering because there's just so much of it. Maybe not in your life, right now (though I'll guarantee almost all of you have suffered in the past and will again in the future) but in someone's life, somewhere. Go look at your TV. If you lick the screen you'll be able to taste the misery, like bitter honey, sweet in the mouth but foul in the belly....
Not God the child-torturer, the tormentor of a physical/spiritual universe, then, but God the Artist. Not indifferent to suffering but creating it according to an aesthetic impulse It alone understands. Not a nice guy, no, but not a bad guy either. In fact, not any kind of guy - an It that makes things, and prefers red above every other color.
Of course, there's another way of looking at things.
In this universe there's what you like, and there's what you haven't had enough of - but it has no moral dimension At least, not if morality is understood in terms of 'being good' (or 'saved', or 'justified by the blood of the Lamb') and equals going to heaven, while 'being bad' (whether that means extra-marital sex, or drugs, or whatever) equals going to hell. It has morality when 'morality' is understood as teleology - the fullest possible development of the individual in every way, and where the seeking of such development is virtue and refusing it is vice.
Not sin, vice. Because the God of this universe has no morality, no aesthetic, only Will. Will, Power, Knowledge. Perhaps it knows love - but if so it's love is as incomprehensible as its Will, and its loving attention is something best not aroused.
Unless, of course, you're prepared to look (the kind of look Burroughs meant when he called his best book 'The Naked Lunch', the look you give the meat on your fork when you see it as dead meat and not 'food') at what it is you like and what it is that you haven't had enough, and decide to pursue whatever you see with the implacable resolve to experience that thing to its most absolute extent.
That's the Universe I live in, now. I have a God, which has no name. I participate in its purposes without understanding them on the basis of desire and will, and having roused its loving attention I know I can't make it go back to sleep. Not that I'd want to: too much of horror and wonder has come into my life (though not yet to the full degree of what's been promised me) for me to do that.
If I suffer, I suffer because either I like what causes it or I haven't had enough of what causes it. I admit I'm my own worst enemy just as I admit I'm my own best friend. No one's coming to rescue me because the Universe and it's God are indifferent to whether I live or die - except insofar as I make myself most fully myself, and then only because in doing so I become, perfectly, one more fragment that makes up the perfection of the whole. And the whole is necessarily perfect, simply in virtue of being that thing that was willed by God. And as every good Christian (or Muslim, or Hindu, or Jew) will tell you, the will of God is perfect.
Why is this a religion of devils? Because love is not at its center, Will is, Desire is, Lust is - things not good nor bad in themselves but simply a part of me to be pursued and developed like any other part. And because, in me, Will, Desire, Lust - are all devilish in the objects to which they are directed.
Not so much as a conscious choice (just as I didn't choose to like vanilla ice cream above any other kind) but as a function of what I am - biologically, intellectually, spiritually. My Christ, if I was interested in having one, would be a negative Christ, the mirror image of the christian Christ, a combination of Baldur and Loki, a trickster who instead of dying for my sins died so that he could turn around and say "I died for you motherfucker. Now what are you going to do for me?" A God of exigent demands, and one who doesn't deal in rewards, or punishments - just in what we are, and what we want, and what we're prepared to do to get it.
But I have no interest in Christ anymore, not even in vilifying him, which was all that was left to me of my Christianity once I'd encountered the Angel in the sick greed of my lust, the Angel I serve with my flesh in rituals of sexual subjugation that I've only just begun to explore.
News Flash!! News Flash!!! News Flash!!!! Yes, people, the rumors are true!!!! Incubi and Succubbi really do exist!!!!!! And they make house calls!!!!
Like every good magickian I've traded everything I thought I was for the power that comes from knowing what I actually am (a moral monster and a theological lunatic). And it's in the converstion with the Angel that has grown from that realisation that I've begun the process that will lead to an unreason that, while it has lost the good of what it appeared to be formerly, retains the structure and appearance of what it was, and so still passes, among my friends and neighbours, for what they typically consider to be rationality. Like Mad King George I have discovered (or rediscovered) the power to seem.
In my religion madness and terror are the equivalent of love and good works, and salvation is not 'salvation from' but 'baptism into' a state of mind that while it's as exalted as any holy ecstasy, and as much an act of worship, is the antithesis of these things as they appear in the Christian story.
I'm a theological heretic, a post-christian Christian, in love with a Jesus of my own creation to precisely the degree that I'm able to murder him every day. Which is only to say that knowingly, in fulll complicity, and with the fullest awareness of the possibility of deception, I'm in love with the inevitability of my destruction.
Evil, be thou my good - vice be thou my virtue.
The only way I can imagine God now is as a blood-stained grin on the face of the Universe, lips parted a little, enough to show the crusted fangs behind them.
My religion is a religion of devils because it sees the necessity for a God who is the fullest expression of the reverse of the God most know in the forms of Islam, Judaism, Christianity. I am a disciple of the darkness that's at the heart of the light of God, and it's only a Devil who can see that darkness and appreciate its severe beauty. Not for nothing was Satan described as the most beautiful of all the first-born Sons of God.
It's the lips of the Angel (the Demon) I've come to know that have spoken these things to me. It's my virtue as a Magickian to understand that even though I believe everything I've learned to be true I also know it to be entirely false. The last thing is to realise that it doesn't matter. There's only what you want and what you're willing to pay for it. The more your willing to pay, the more you'll eventually have. And if you pay everything you can have everything - exactly what you want.
I want sexual terror without limit, suffered and inflicted, and an end to the World of Man - and I want to live long enough to see it burn.
Because a conversation is deceitful doesn't mean it isn't worth participating in and only an honest man will tell you beforehand that he's a liar, just as only a liar will tell you that he's honest. It's because my Demon (my Angel) is an honest liar and tells me that I will experience that terror without limit, will live to see the flames eat the world (all the while wearing that bloody grin, pale flesh gleaming and demanding in a darkness that's as much laughter and the presence of something else as it is the absence of light, as much treachery as it is satisfaction), it's because he speaks and tells me these things that I love him as I do.
So be damned to it.
Participatory, sacrificial pain interests me. And the best, the most perfect, example of it is the suffering of Jesus Christ. But think about it. What does the story of the death of Christ tell us about God (as God appears in the Christian version). Mostly, it tells us that God is a mean motherfucker who'll torture his kid to death to prove a point. And yes, I can hear you saying "But the resurrection, the resurrection proves that God is really, really nice after all."
Except that Jesus continues to suffer even after his resurrection. After all, he was the Living Word, according to the Gospel of John, through whom all physical reality was made and in whom it subsists. Creation however longs for its redemption from corruption, it suffers the corruption that overtook the world when Adam fell and it suffers continually the redemptive agony of Christ (because Christ's redemption of the physical world has not yet manifested and so is ongoing).
As many a zealous Christian will tell you, every sin recrucifies Christ and every partcipatory act of innocent suffering (such as an animal under a vivesectionist's knife, or the random victim of violence, every child that starves to death, is tortured to death), is balm to his wounds and a step toward the coming Kingdom of God on earth.
Sure God's a nice guy. He made his kid the foundation of the universe, the substance of the universe - and then infected him with cancer. Then he made the boy a physical being and tortured him to death. And then resurrected him in a perfect imperishable body (a body made perfect for the reception of pain), a body that is still the substance of the universe, still cancerous, still suffering and constantly, endlessly crucified. Sure God's a nice guy. Sure.
There's another way of looking at it, of course. It doesn't involve Jesus at all - except as one more poor sod no different from the rest of us, apart from being more than usually afflicted by delusions of understanding (and in possessing the happy and useful knack of turning water into wine).
No, we're all God's kids in this version, just as we're all orphans, because this God has no more interest in us personally than any other artist does in the welfare or otherwise of his creations. Suffering is a color on the canvas, a thread in the tapestry, a note in the music. If the suffering of individuals has meaning it's only as part of some incomprehensible exercise in creation. And since such meaning is incomprehensible - then for us it doesn't exist at all. Certainly it doesn't exist in any sense from which we might draw comfort, or strength, or hope. In fact, to know that there is meaning, meaning that assuages, that satisfies, that redeems, but that we'll never know because we were made too dumb to understand it, could only ever be a source of despair. Better, by far, to believe that there is no such meaning - which is the root of all atheism, and the motivating terror behind deism, agnosticism, the cult of nature and the environment, and all such spineless, cowardly responses to any question involving God and suffering.
And any question that considers God and the world must involve suffering because there's just so much of it. Maybe not in your life, right now (though I'll guarantee almost all of you have suffered in the past and will again in the future) but in someone's life, somewhere. Go look at your TV. If you lick the screen you'll be able to taste the misery, like bitter honey, sweet in the mouth but foul in the belly....
Not God the child-torturer, the tormentor of a physical/spiritual universe, then, but God the Artist. Not indifferent to suffering but creating it according to an aesthetic impulse It alone understands. Not a nice guy, no, but not a bad guy either. In fact, not any kind of guy - an It that makes things, and prefers red above every other color.
Of course, there's another way of looking at things.
In this universe there's what you like, and there's what you haven't had enough of - but it has no moral dimension At least, not if morality is understood in terms of 'being good' (or 'saved', or 'justified by the blood of the Lamb') and equals going to heaven, while 'being bad' (whether that means extra-marital sex, or drugs, or whatever) equals going to hell. It has morality when 'morality' is understood as teleology - the fullest possible development of the individual in every way, and where the seeking of such development is virtue and refusing it is vice.
Not sin, vice. Because the God of this universe has no morality, no aesthetic, only Will. Will, Power, Knowledge. Perhaps it knows love - but if so it's love is as incomprehensible as its Will, and its loving attention is something best not aroused.
Unless, of course, you're prepared to look (the kind of look Burroughs meant when he called his best book 'The Naked Lunch', the look you give the meat on your fork when you see it as dead meat and not 'food') at what it is you like and what it is that you haven't had enough, and decide to pursue whatever you see with the implacable resolve to experience that thing to its most absolute extent.
That's the Universe I live in, now. I have a God, which has no name. I participate in its purposes without understanding them on the basis of desire and will, and having roused its loving attention I know I can't make it go back to sleep. Not that I'd want to: too much of horror and wonder has come into my life (though not yet to the full degree of what's been promised me) for me to do that.
If I suffer, I suffer because either I like what causes it or I haven't had enough of what causes it. I admit I'm my own worst enemy just as I admit I'm my own best friend. No one's coming to rescue me because the Universe and it's God are indifferent to whether I live or die - except insofar as I make myself most fully myself, and then only because in doing so I become, perfectly, one more fragment that makes up the perfection of the whole. And the whole is necessarily perfect, simply in virtue of being that thing that was willed by God. And as every good Christian (or Muslim, or Hindu, or Jew) will tell you, the will of God is perfect.
Why is this a religion of devils? Because love is not at its center, Will is, Desire is, Lust is - things not good nor bad in themselves but simply a part of me to be pursued and developed like any other part. And because, in me, Will, Desire, Lust - are all devilish in the objects to which they are directed.
Not so much as a conscious choice (just as I didn't choose to like vanilla ice cream above any other kind) but as a function of what I am - biologically, intellectually, spiritually. My Christ, if I was interested in having one, would be a negative Christ, the mirror image of the christian Christ, a combination of Baldur and Loki, a trickster who instead of dying for my sins died so that he could turn around and say "I died for you motherfucker. Now what are you going to do for me?" A God of exigent demands, and one who doesn't deal in rewards, or punishments - just in what we are, and what we want, and what we're prepared to do to get it.
But I have no interest in Christ anymore, not even in vilifying him, which was all that was left to me of my Christianity once I'd encountered the Angel in the sick greed of my lust, the Angel I serve with my flesh in rituals of sexual subjugation that I've only just begun to explore.
News Flash!! News Flash!!! News Flash!!!! Yes, people, the rumors are true!!!! Incubi and Succubbi really do exist!!!!!! And they make house calls!!!!
Like every good magickian I've traded everything I thought I was for the power that comes from knowing what I actually am (a moral monster and a theological lunatic). And it's in the converstion with the Angel that has grown from that realisation that I've begun the process that will lead to an unreason that, while it has lost the good of what it appeared to be formerly, retains the structure and appearance of what it was, and so still passes, among my friends and neighbours, for what they typically consider to be rationality. Like Mad King George I have discovered (or rediscovered) the power to seem.
In my religion madness and terror are the equivalent of love and good works, and salvation is not 'salvation from' but 'baptism into' a state of mind that while it's as exalted as any holy ecstasy, and as much an act of worship, is the antithesis of these things as they appear in the Christian story.
I'm a theological heretic, a post-christian Christian, in love with a Jesus of my own creation to precisely the degree that I'm able to murder him every day. Which is only to say that knowingly, in fulll complicity, and with the fullest awareness of the possibility of deception, I'm in love with the inevitability of my destruction.
Evil, be thou my good - vice be thou my virtue.
The only way I can imagine God now is as a blood-stained grin on the face of the Universe, lips parted a little, enough to show the crusted fangs behind them.
My religion is a religion of devils because it sees the necessity for a God who is the fullest expression of the reverse of the God most know in the forms of Islam, Judaism, Christianity. I am a disciple of the darkness that's at the heart of the light of God, and it's only a Devil who can see that darkness and appreciate its severe beauty. Not for nothing was Satan described as the most beautiful of all the first-born Sons of God.
It's the lips of the Angel (the Demon) I've come to know that have spoken these things to me. It's my virtue as a Magickian to understand that even though I believe everything I've learned to be true I also know it to be entirely false. The last thing is to realise that it doesn't matter. There's only what you want and what you're willing to pay for it. The more your willing to pay, the more you'll eventually have. And if you pay everything you can have everything - exactly what you want.
I want sexual terror without limit, suffered and inflicted, and an end to the World of Man - and I want to live long enough to see it burn.
Because a conversation is deceitful doesn't mean it isn't worth participating in and only an honest man will tell you beforehand that he's a liar, just as only a liar will tell you that he's honest. It's because my Demon (my Angel) is an honest liar and tells me that I will experience that terror without limit, will live to see the flames eat the world (all the while wearing that bloody grin, pale flesh gleaming and demanding in a darkness that's as much laughter and the presence of something else as it is the absence of light, as much treachery as it is satisfaction), it's because he speaks and tells me these things that I love him as I do.
ignoring my prayers when it happens? Again, no.