Well, I never meant to imply that you would. It certainly wouldn’t damage my opinion of her if she put a curse on Bob Barr; only enhance it or affirm what I already like about her.

I am undecided about the reality of the Divine. I have seen no evidence that magick works in the obvious way, and most practitioners of magick I have known have been ignorant, naive, dishonest, emotionalist and/or delusional. This does not mean that they lack any human virtues. If magick does work, the best model I’ve ever encountered for an explanation is C.S. Lewis’ defence of the efficacy of prayer, which borrowed from Boethius to conclude that supernaturalism works ‘through’ and ‘behind’ existing causality. This is, of course, an unfalsifiable proposition and an insulated theory.

I have, however, had some very strange experiences in my life. One of them led me to practice Paganism intensely for three years, and I can still not decide whether to call it madness or ecstasy. I had a rather loose relationship with reality during that time, with seriously bad side effects. But I also felt things, and experienced things, with a level of inner fire which makes mundane life seem slightly bleak by comparison. I can’t have these experiences without throwing myself off into a magickal space. And I have personally experienced things which break the rules, as have some other very rational people I know.

The center of Pagan spirituality (I agree with diZerega on this) is direct religious experience. One forces or allows oneself to live life as poetry and open oneself to inspiration. If Paganism is right, the essence of this process is communion with the Divine, which we can reach through stories that ‘ping’ back when we take them as real.

Gus believes that one thing we must discover in this process is a transcendent morality made imminent in any genuine experience of the sacred. This is false- I think it can be shown to be overwelmingly false by an unselected review of the often terrible history of religion. Love, lust, friendship, community, intoxication, war, death, and torture have all been part of Pagan and shamanic rituals and have all been part of paths to the Divine. The Divine, if it exists, is therefore as amoral as nature. This is largely because Pagan methods precisely are a conscious evocation of the prerational elements of human nature (they are in fact the same elements upon which many conservatives and fascists build their politics). Everything that makes a story compelling can be a path to the gods.

The gods are not moral. But *we*- human beings who need to discover how to flourish in life and live among each other- *we* do need ethics. And since Pagan experience means casting oneself free into a story and lose ourselves in the experience (and, supposedly, nudge reality as a result), the spirit and images we invoke can deeply effect us. The reason not to strangle people in service to Kali is not a problem with God but a problem for man. But the intensity of spiritual experience raises the seriousness of the matter significantly. To invoke Satan is to become Satan or at least Satanic for the space of the ritual.

I don’t see any evidence for the magickal law of return. I completely agree with you that it is usually just the occultist’s this-wordly version of Hell, with the intention of scaring its audience toward ethical or “moral” action. That said, I’m hesitant to use black magick for precisely the same reasons I would hesitate very strongly to use mundane violence: hurting other people does awful things to you; it leaves spiritual scars which one has to live with for life. In this sense, the law of return is a formulation of the virtue of integrity, in its social application. (authentically) Harmonious and forthright dealings with others makes clarity within oneself easier- once you harm someone you are placed in a position of confronting or evading a jarring memory every time you try to integrate your values or apply those values socially to another. If you shoot someone you will have something very dark and weighty to confront in yourself, and the same principle applies to hexes and curses. Except that the psychological danger is increased if you put yourself in such a heightened state. An obviously if you think that you are touching the Divine, the impact of such a heightened experience can be overwhelming. And to *this* you add the fact that the occult just doesn’t make sense and trying to think in an occult way is inherently damaging to reason and perhaps sanity… well, I think black magick has the rep is does for a reason.

And I’m not entirely certain that the alleged effects of a ritual are not worth worrying about. There is some evidence for thiongs which step into the paranormal. Near death experiences seem fairly well documented, including independently verified remote viewing of objects (i.e., being able to repeat specific details concerning the dress of people when one has one’s eyes covered by a cloth on an operating table). Acupuncture has a better than placebo effectiveness, if not the level of effectiveness traditional Chinese medicine claims for it. I swear that at times I’ve felt energy/ki/prana. I’ve had tantric orgasms and have seen men multiple-orgasm by the same method… and I haven’t been able to have them since I stopped practicing. And while I don’t really know what is going on, but I know that when I threw myself into goddess space it did *something*. And I’ve gotten out of a few really bad situations which by rights I shouldn’t have.

This is, singly or together, proof of anything- but when conjoined with overwhelmingly powerful personal experience is gives me much pause. I am very torn between a desire to live a completely rational life and the desire to embrace experiences which seem so inextricably part of myself Thankfully, I think the time is not far off when I’ll be able to settle this issue in myself conclusively.

“It’s not Angela Keaton, is it?”

I would never say anything that might damage the reputation of the charming Angela Keaton.

I’ve experimented with hard drugs myself. I believe in trying everything once. I quickly decided they were a *bad* idea (actually, cocaine wasn’t so bad, it’s just not even close to worth the price). But I prefer to make decisions based upon my own knowledge and experience rather than trust in the authority of police and parents, who have proven wrong on so many other issues. Therefore, I’d also appreciate if you would stop threatening to put *me* in a cage as well.

Please come down off your control trip. Aren’t there more rewarding experiences in life than ordering people around?

a) Stealing votes away from the party they most closely resemble is not necessarily an ineffective strategy for changing the major parties; see this old piece of mine here.

b) Working within the major parties does not look obviously easier than running a third party against them. In both cases one tends to be consistently outvoted by statist majorities. Clearly what’s needed is education to make people less statist; and third parties at their sanest see their function as educational rather than actually trying to get elected.

c) There are strategies for achieving liberty that don’t focus on electoral politics. See, for example, Sam Konkin’s here (which bypasses electoral politics entirely) or Kevin Carson’s here (which combines electoral politics with direct action).

d) I agree with you on immigration, but disagree strongly on most of the other issues you raise. Drug prohibition, in addition to being unjust and ineffective, is one of the chief engines driving both violent crime and the growth of the police state. Re guns, the right of self-defense is the most basic one there is. Re treatment of criminals, I favour an emphasis on making criminals compensate their victims, rather than an emphasis on punishment. Re welfare, we should abolish the thousands of laws that make it harder for poor people to rise out of poverty.