To preacherman:
I agree with you, as I have all along, that I am devoid of your Christ and the Spirit of your God, your Christ. You will tell me that your Christ is the Christ. And I will tell you again, as I have many times already, that your Christ (the Christ I once loved; once, you and I would have been brothers) does not exist, has never existed, and cannot possibly exist because your faith rests on what is essentially a typographical error, a misunderstanding of what happens when you place the vowel sounds for 'adonai' around the tetragrammaton (YHVH). The entire theology of Jesus the Christ, Son of YAHWEH, Savior of men, is sprung from that single misunderstanding. It is the foundation-stone of all Christian theology, the basis of Christian interpretation of the Old Testament and of the entirety of the New Testament. And it is wrong. Jehovah, the God of Israel, does not exist, and cannot have ever existed, because that Name of God is a gibberish produced by that misunderstanding. And for precisely that reason YAHWEH has never existed, and cannot ever have existed. It too is a gibberish.
The Christian interpretation of the Bible is entirely and utterly wrong. It is not a record of the dealings of YAHWEH with man, but an interpretation of the dealings of something that cannot be Named with man - and if it cannot be Named it cannot be completely understood so that every document dealing with these things, every sacred text, is not flawed but incomplete, only a partial and interpretive document.
Even as a Christian I looked about me and saw both Chaos and Order, Malice and Love, everywhere at work. And it never seemed to me proper or enough that It (God) should be worshipped only for that which seems to us proper and right. It seems to me that God is the author of all, father and mother to the Light and the Dark of life - because otherwise we deny to God that supremacy over everything that is (and therefore responsibility for everything that is) which is one of the characteristics of Godhead that is able to be deduced by unaided human reason.
I do not in any sense deny the existence of God, nor do I deny that the Bible, the Koran, the sacred texts of the Hindus, or any other account of the dealings of God with man, have validity. But none of them -none - are faithful to the immeasurable fulness of that Nameless and unknowable Thing that lives forever in imperishable light, forever beyond the comprehension of so feeble a creature as man.
I have come to believe that there is only one sin, one transgression worthy of infinite damnation: the belief that there is any sense in which God can be known to man.
Which is not to say that acquaintance with God is impossible, only that it is impossible that one may comprehend the purposes of God and deduce from them a way of life.
That simple error, the equation of the ineffable, unnamable, Creator of the Universe with the God of the tribes of Israel is the basis of every letter written by Paul, and the other Apostles. It is the first and most basic source of all Christian doctrine, that God has a Name that is knowable by man, and as such is capable of relation with him, even of direct intercourse.
Only to Moses did God reveal himself directly, at the Mountain in the desert - and even then, Moses saw only God's back. No man has seen God and lived to tell the tale, and no man has a monopoly upon the fulness of God, to prescribe the limits of what God may be, or of how God may be, of how It may reveal Itself to a man.
Like all believers in a particular dogma or doctrine, aeryck and preacherman define their faith primarily by what it is not, by what their faith forbids, rather than by what it positively makes possible in their lives. They aren't alone in doing that. Most of their co-religionists, most Muslims, most of those who profess faith of any kind, do the same.
Myself, I don't presume to know what God is, what Its plans and intentions are. I know It can be approached - because I have approached It. And what was sent to me in return was the presence and the power of my Holy Guardian Angel, who is no pretty boy in flowing robes with a halo and white wings, but something much more akin to a mountain, or an earthquake, or some immense storm at sea. A natural force, awe-inspiring, and as indifferent to the hopes and aspirations of common humanity as is any of those phenomena.
What I have perhaps not made clear in any of these words is the means by which approach is possible. Trust me, I am of the firm conviction that, in general, God has no more interest in humanity and its ultimate fate than I have in the ultimate fate of a virus. My God is an artist, an aesthetic nihilist, and both viruses and men are of equal importance in whatever Grand Design God may have for the universe. Which is to say that both viruses and men have importance only insofar as they are parts of that whole. It is the whole that gives to both of them whatever importance they have, not they that in any way are important to the whole.
Imagine that you are God, and that countless billions upon billions of organisms throughout the Macrocosmic All are busy petitioning you at any and every given moment, for any and all benefits. Always supposing that God answers prayer (something which I begin to doubt) what makes any particular prayer worthy of receiving attention?
Who can say? When I was a praying Christian (and when I was a Christian I prayed fervently and often) I received answers to prayer that never showed any consistency, pattern, order or logic. They were answers produced by an intelligence that was and is incomprehensible to me, serving purposes that are entirely unintelligible to me - just as they are to every other human being.
Now that I am no longer a Christian, now that I am a Ritual Magickian, now that I no longer pray but instead invoke, I receive answers to my invocation that bear the pattern of my will, my desire. The overall intent behind such responses is no more intelligible to me than it was before. But I no longer concern myself with such an overall intent, having recognised that "My thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are my ways your ways".
Instead I concern myself with the perfect expression, in Ritual, of my will, my desire, and it is only through Ritual that I have received acquaintance with God - not directly, but through the agency of a ministering Angel. And that, to me, is in perfect conformity with the depiction of God's relation to man as revealed in the Bible, and through other sacred texts such as the Koran. God never deals with man except through the intermediation of the Angelic Orders, and It deals with man not on the basis of his understanding, not on the basis of his (man's) righteousness, but on the basis of what it is that he (man) wants, and the degree to which he can express this desire clearly through his will given form and expression in those Rituals which, throughout century after century, have codified the longing of man for God.
I have no idea why this should be so. But it is so, and I know it to be true because I have direct, real-world experience, of the efficacy of that truth in bringing into my life those things that I desire.
I am a Ritual Magickian for a reason, and that reason is simply this: it works.
