Religious
Fundamentalism
Religious fundamentalism has spawned a tyranny of thralldom in the world of men and women. Fundamentalism in religion is pathological, yet the tenets of such absolutists are prevalent. Modern history is on the threshold of experiencing a dire ordeal of a most dreadful and insidious nature, invoked by an ecclesiastical authority disassociative of secularism. The inherited malediction and pestilence of the Old World Order evokes abominations of political anarchy, religious fundamentalism and the ruin of the Race. Fundamentalist ideology develops as a reaction and defence against secularization and religious pluralism. Religious Fundamentalism is a militant effort to impede Scientific Illuminism, and the Arts of the Arcane Sciences. The militant defence of religious institutions is the sine qua non of obsession in religious fundamentalism; it is the bane of religious science. Fundamentalism reconstructs particular elements of religious orthodoxy, predominantly doctrines that isolate puritanical conformity from religious plurality. Conforming to pre-determined doctrines initiates a fatal divorce from the sacred and the secular. Agenda and dogma are cohesive in orthodox religious conformity.
Prohibitions of the right and licence to complete freedom in matters of religion and theology inevitably lead to prohibitions imposed upon all unorthodox spiritual practices and beliefs. Prejudice of moral certitude when fundamentalist audiences engross their interests, legally permissible and morally acceptable though they may be, into the political arena leads to a public hostility and malice to less ‘mainstream’ religions. Uncritical responses by ecclesiastical authorities to the beliefs and actions of fundamentalists lead to a complacent acceptance and prominence of any fundamentalist belief system, however noxious to the socio-political climate. Religious fundamentalism, be it Protestant or Baptist, Hindu or Islamist, is the transplantation of orthopraxy through conformity. Orthodox attitudes toward sectarianism (Southern Baptist aversion to Catholicism, Sunni and Shiite malice toward the other sect, and noticeably, the aversion in associating Edward Alexander Crowley with the Thelemic literary tradition) are used in terms of vilification. A sect is often misconceived as a breakaway or segregated religious body within the culture it exists. Though fundamentalists are justified in attaching the cult stigmata to certain "New Age" religious movements, the prejudice of orthodox sectarianism is distinct in Thelema, the Gnostic tradition, Freemasonry, Islamist attitudes toward Sufism, and "Golden Dawn" lineage disputes.
Initiated by centuries of ecclesiastical failures, fundamentalism is the segregation from religious science and plurality, a divorce from spiritual elevation in the human condition. At the level of religious institutions, separation from the secular world results in an adversity to free expression that is often well enshrouded in fundamentalism. Fundamentalism always will exist as a cultural phenomenon, asserting its collectivist slave-values opposing all forms of modernity, nonetheless promoting eschatological fantasies of the end of history. Religious fundamentalists exist where science and art are segregated, intelligence is divorced from Will, and the "dogs of reason" acquire a slavish character in mystifying religious with secular Life. The pathological model of religious fundamentalism is the schizophrenia of the Old Aeon, it is the secular being mistaken for the religious and the religious intruding upon the secular. Fundamentalism is the abolition of plurality in religion and liberty in government. The inerrancy and infallibility of sacred scriptures and ordered institutions is a distinctive mark of obsession in religious fundamentalism; it is the suicidal mentality of the herd-consciousness.
The futility of the world's ordered religions has been progressively more identifiable; fundamentalism becomes the bane of religion, and a cancer of intelligence. The destitute of will and intelligence are apt to slavishly cleave to ordered religion; these tepid postulants become the madness of reason, and view post-modernity & pluralism as enemies of their fundamentalist faith. Religious diehards view assimilation as a detriment to the inerrancy of their sacred scriptures and anti-individualistic ideals. Many ultra-orthodox religious adherents substitute religion for science, believing that they alone in the entire world are preserving their exclusory faith from extinction and cultural assimilation. Such fundamentalist outlook and unenlightened behaviour is the prevailing sentiment of our apocalyptic age. Ordered religions at present fail to uphold revolutionary Liberty, substituting fundamentalism for Scientific Illuminism. The claims of inerrancy by the slaves of obsession are the primary cause of insidious world wars between ordered religions at present; it is swiftly becoming the shatter point of society.
The term fundamentalist denotes a schizophrenic worldview of fearful eschatological and imminent culmination of history. The reactionary-slave claims of religious infallibility uplift ordered religion with the madness of reason, as reason is the phantom-voice that lures intelligence away from the True Will. Religious fundamentalism is the corpse of science; it is the mire of mass-consciousness whose principle is faith. Now we must not assume ordered religion to solely be opposed to religion, nor to absolutely rely upon Reason. Hermeneutics, states of gnosis, noumenon of the "True Will", and all such implications of metaphysics and magic(k) are independent of Reason. If the noumenon of "True Will" and mystical gnosis appeals to the Mind alone, which is the engineer of petty logic and reason, religion becomes for the low-men a system of segregation from the sacred and secular. Mental and emotive interpretations of mystical states alone warrant a dependency upon logic and superstition in the Occult. Ordered Religion is swiftly at present becoming an inner-enslavement rather than enlightenment. The term fundamentalist is a politically charged word often used as an epithet of infamy particularly in league with religious wars. Religious fundamentalism by its very nature is in direct opposition to the revolutionary Liberty of post-modernity; it is the antithesis of a pluralist culture.
The history of the label 'fundamentalist" stems from a series of Protestant christian volumes entitled "The Fundamentals", published in e.v. 1909 by two Protestant laymen and oil magnates Milton and Lyman Stewart. The tenets of christian fundamentalism were first formulated at the Princeton, New Jersey Presbyterian Theological Seminary, becoming widely known as the "Princeton Theology." The christian fundamentalist doctrines espoused in "The Fundamentals" literature summates five major attitudes: inerrancy of scripture, deification of Christ in the "Virgin birth", substitutionary redemption of human sin at the "crucifixion," the literal resurrection, so-called, of the Christ, and the return of the Antichrist-Christ in the Apocalypse. The application of the term "Fundamentalist" to other enclaves of ordered religions begs the question to the extent of whether or not the beliefs of the religious are more archaic and anti-pluralist, than progressive and reformist. The term fundamentalist often denigrates men and women whom have a passionate religious perspective, and recklessly is associated with the term "terrorist" as if invoking the inner-passion of True Religion inevitably leads to ruin and violence.
The incessant war of the fundamentalist against what is perceived as false faiths and doctrines insurgent to the socio-cultural "norm" is full of pity yet devoid of love. Secular agencies are alarmingly complacent in aversion and malice toward the occult when religious and scriptural warrant for condemnation of the occult is the sole justification offered. Discriminatory sneers of the skeptic, the madness of reason and often-barren logic of "magicians" promotes atmospheres of prejudice and hatred as much as credulous fetishes of fundamentalists. Religious fundamentalism stems also concurrently from negative reaction of theologians and Christian denominational leaders to the intellectual currents of the later nineteenth century, the fascination Charles Darwin’s theories of evolution, the application of critical analysis to Biblical texts, and liberal theology issuing from German collegia. Resurgences of religiosity in the present insidious world wars between socio-religious factions reverse the once global trend to secularization. Such an expansive gap between the sacred and secular in societies less developed according to "Western" Judeo-Christian measures will have serious consequences in cultures seduced by reversal of secularism in lieu of religiosity.
Many fundamentalists view themselves as besieged minorities in a secular and corrupted world. The world of men and women today has experienced a dynamic upsurge in the passion of ordered religiosity. Evangelical movements overall appear to be swiftly expanding rather than fundamentalist brands of Christendom and Islam. The southward expansion of evangelical Christendom into South America and Africa has more profound repercussions than the upsurge of Islamic fundamentalism. The onset of Christian Evangelism into Latin America and Africa will only serve to inject into such cultures attitudes of altruism, religious segregation, and anti-modernism, the very plagues that perpetuate the Old World Order. It is the separatist philosophy of Evangelism and Fundamentalism that expand their cancer-like influence in free societies around the world rather than the liberal religious whom seek to accommodate secularism, and the "method of science." In, the New World Order, the "aim" of ordered religion is a "Thelemic" perspective. It is the response to religious science that will determine whether such archaic attitudes of fundamentalism succeed or become the corpse of inner-slavery in the dead Aeon.
Objectives of the Islamic fundamentalism do not lie in territorial-cultural disputes as antiquated as the Bible, or in socio-economic inequalities. The insidious goal of Islamist recruitment bewitches the barren and desolate of hope at high schools and universities. At present, the Islamist fervour succeeds so well because the fundamentalist zeal addresses issues as poverty and unemployment, the growing gulf of economic inequality, inadequate government, political and judicial corruption, perceived government subservience to American demands, preconceptions of American Imperialism and the hedonistic lifestyles of American and European culture. The Islamists deal with these issues through a comprehensive critique of modern life in the Islamic world, invoking zealotry and imagery of Khalifah. Islamist fundamentalism argues persuasively that a return to core religious values would bring social justice, righteous government and a moral certitude putting Muslims in touch with a resurgence of renaissance. Religious fundamentalism is a monolith, and a shatter point in our society.
It is evident in "Thelema", that fundamentalist attitudes subsist amongst Initiates whom fail to see the unity between the "Method of Science", and the "Aim of Religion." A growing number of initiates in Thelemic organizations disassociate from their life substituting real Qabalistic and psychological work for the frivolous comfort of Internet forums and World Wide Web sites. Such tepid men and women immerse themselves in the mire of their own delusional cybercosm, those who "need to be needed" proclaim a noumenon of "True Will" by lack thereof. Those whom conform and rely upon established doctrine in religion are termed orthodox, or fundamentalist in a pejorative manner. In reference to ordered religion, doctrine is thus; "a body of principles presented for acceptance or belief, as by religious, social, philosophical, or political group; agenda and dogma."
Thelemites are charged with understanding our own principles, formulating our own interpretations of Liber AL vel Legis (Book of the Law). A universal interpretation of the Book of the Law swiftly can evolve into an established body of principles of "Thelema", and eventually manifest agenda and dogma. To rely alone upon a method of Religion in the application of living "Thelema", presents religion as the corpse of fear in the abandonment of Scientific Illuminism. Ordered religion is the problem as it preserves dogma, institutionalizes mystick arts, and prostitutes arcane disciplines. The parent of science and religion is Magick. In "Thelema", collective consciousness exists in Thelemic Orders and groups, even in "Thelema" as a whole. Orders are a valuable asset to the Great Work of Initiation, yet it is the individual that is the soul of every religion, the mystick engine of every Order and its magickal Work upon the earth. To the Book of the Law is ascribed the scientific solution to all problems of philosophy and religion, it is an ecumenical remedy for enclave-based ordered religions with reactionary and inerrantist precepts. Ultimately, the struggle of fundamentalists whom segregate intelligence from religion is against post-modernity, education, and secularism.
The prevalent spread of religiosity and zealotry is a consequence of sociological changes and a permanence of unchanging moral fervor. Revivalism of religious fundamentalism in lesser-developed societies goes hand in hand with the culture of communalism. This aura of zealotry transcends strict geography in favour of universal religious identity, which, in fundamentalist revivalism degenerates to impoverishment of secular Scientific Illuminism. Nevertheless, theologians and other defenders of faith cannot remain somnolent to a postmodern "enlightenment" that invokes libertarian political architecture, cultural diffusion, predatory economies, and a hierarchical international order. Postmodernism, as the name proposes, invokes a progeny of modernism, a vanquishing of the modern mind-set dominated by an Osirian search for universal claims of scriptural and ideological truth. Conservative religious movements fear secular academia as a mode of relativism. Alternatively, a global leviathan of religious diffusion promises to demolish the secular Enlightenment found in the thrust of the University setting. Postmodernist apologetics in religious fundamentalism take aim at the naturalist methodology and worldview of science. This enlightened propensity seems to make room for a sort of ‘theistic science,’ or a ‘sacred science’ that openly invokes what Initiates of the O.˙.A.˙.I.˙. term "religious science."
Religious fundamentalism is an ideological phantom of political schizophrenia. Christian evangelists and Islamic revivalists in the middle east exult in their reactions to reconcile theocratic affinity with a pariah of American hegemony, two drifts that give them as defenders of faith a new lease to inject their zealotry in American culture. Zealots of religiosity and revivalists alike feel a disenchanted view of nature popularized in the Age of Reason has been discounted in theistic science, and the drive of secular academia. In place of ‘sacred science,’ modern science has given way to the passionate relativist view of the individual, effectively demolishing modern science’s claims of objectivity. Such a predilection of a "God’s eye view" of reality and the laws of nature is much to the lament of religious orthodoxy, quickly being discarded in favour of nihilism and total relativism. Dr. Bruce B. Lawrence defines fundamentalism aptly as: "the affirmation of religious authority as holistic and absolute, admitting of neither criticism nor reduction; it is expressed through the collective demand that specific creedal and ethical dictates derived from scripture be publicly recognized and legally enforced" (Lawrence; 1989: Harper & Row). Armed with this definition, we can view fundamentalism as a religious ideology, a phantom "voice of reason."
Religious idealism, especially in "Thelema" serves as the foundation of cult-like communalism and ontological certitude. Religiosity as an ideological phantom has no historical antecedent. There is an imminent fear amongst Islamic and Christian fundamentalists about what they feel as the erosion of religion and its role in government and legal systems. All fundamentalists, regardless of religion, exhibit a form of Manichaeanism and a disposition toward inerrancy of belief. The latter is common pathology amongst Thelemites, and those who profess themselves to be so, whom substitute agape for gross aggrandizement in an Abyss that does not exist to be crossed. Fundamentalists see society as having strayed from cultural and moral moorings toward a fetish of relativism and nihilism. It is the privatization of religious experience that invokes popular religiosity. To counterbalance phallo-centric tendencies of religious fundamentalism, and evangelism, Woman as the ‘Black Concubine’ (see "Edfu Revealing" copyright © 2004 Joshua J. Seraphim) should transcend the domestication of religion to grasp a personal religiosity more powerful than any force of the empirical world. To avert gender bias of religious fundamentalism, and the patriarchal threads of the Western Mystery Traditions, private religiosity is integral to self-definition of the Whore of Woman.
The term fundamentalist is pejorative and carries no political inferences, as most religious nationalists are concerned with the logic of theocracy, and redefining the political role of religion in a government that "shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof". Anti-secularist and politically committed religiosity is the basis for establishing a civil religion. A civil religion is antithesis to plurality in a multi-religious state such as the United States of America. The term ‘civil religion’ first was used by Jean-Jacques Rousseau in "The Social Contract," as an Eighteenth century reference to the religiosity of a polity. A civic faith, such as Protestant Christianity in the United States is a bond of religio-political aspirations that forges a sense of nationalism and broader religious identity. In the United States, the notion of a virtuous Republic outweighs a moral certitude that conflicts with concepts of laissez-faire government, which the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution originally implies. A civic faith is far different than judicial decrees that "prohibit the free exercise of" religion. The Masonic and Rosicrucian Initiates that parented the United States posited the notion that a free Republic was, and is, a prime agent of the divine in the human epoch.
The basis and soundness of any civic faith must be measured in terms of reaction to cultural pluralism in particular and religious pluralism in general. Subsequent to the Scopes Trial of ce 1925, the ridicule evoked against Protestant fundamentalists did little to foster a compromise between conservative elements and secular liberals in American society. In Western nations under the guise of Judeo-Christian civic faith, deregulation of the media (while necessary to libertarianism and democracy) has allowed religious conservatives to project their noxious creeds, while decentralization of government permits targeting of local and provincial elections by well-organized zealots. It is debatable whether the latter has cause the religious periphery to edge closer to the centres of political and economic power. Only in materialist American culture, can evangelists openly flaunt their wealth and yet present themselves as pious servants of G.O.D. Christian evangelism appeals to personal religious experience. There is an upsurge in our society of such a phenomenon that appeals to personal emotion.
Evangelism is a zealous invitation to enlist spiritually in the Christian community and experience an epiphany of a new religious life, to be ‘born again’ in the spirit of the Christ. The term evangelist occurs no less than three times in the New Testament books of Acts, II Timothy, and Ephesians, used in substantive form. In a telescopic society of information technology, televangelism has experienced an upsurge in advocacy, and popularity. Televangelism is attractive widely to a large conservative Christian audience, and as a ritual performance, is telecast to a broad specter of culture. Secularism in post-modernity does not challenge religion; rather it reconciles the "Method of Science." or theistic science, with the "Aim of Religion." Fundamentalists subtly recognize this when they dissent against cultural willingness to accept, and tolerate, exotic religions. The issues of post-modernity and religiosity are fundamentally a conflict between ecclesiastical authority and the scholars of academia. Ecclesia that is averse to religious plurality and secularism loses the "Dionysian" element that religiosity actually preserves; in the end, the "Kantian" ideal of "religion within the limits of reason" is the most tepid "aim of religion" as it neglects the element of imagination in human nature that is impervious to the "dogs of reason." Popular religiosity in its anti-collegiate, folkish, and emotive manifestations often invokes in human nature what the academic fails to see. Theocratic societies in the Asian subcontinent and the Fertile Crescent increasingly foment a nationalist gospel against economic and cultural westoxification, with such reactionary zeal often taking the guise of Islamist fundamentalism.
A fetish of fear is the common denominator for religious fundamentalists. Religiosity has its derivatives from natural antecedents, whereas criticism of sacred scriptures is a study from an existential, theistic scientific method. Religiosity in the cloak of fundamentalism is the credulity of blind faith; it is not the faith in self that comes only when Self is forgotten. Humanity does not destroy itself and commit to ruin by a virtue of faith. Ideals of the infinitude of a genetrix-demiurge, divinity of the soul, and unity of humanity’s actions with the Holy, are conditions of faith elaborated in the secret depths of the Soul. "Those who move not forward on their path, stand still in the past. Faith Will Not Slaughter Humanity, Religion Will." Faith is a measurement of the Heart of ones Will. Tainted with overzealous cleaving to religiosity, faith becomes a talisman of cruelty and appeasement. For many Thelemites, the monotone chant, "Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law" has become a rallying cry of fanaticism, psychosis, and monomania. Those whom cannot measure the Heart of their Will cleave to an abomination they call "True Will." Faith in ones own soul must be affirmed with piety and humility upon the altar of religious science.
Religion is justified in invoking faith. Secular culture is saturated with religiosity, slowly at present degenerating to religious hysteria (to which even Thelemites are not innocent of) by knavish fanatical adherents of a New World Order. Such actions and weak-willed, innocent, and corrupt zealots tend to fall prey to overemphasized truth, cleaving slavishly to their "paths" failing to mimic the loving steps of the Fool. Religious fundamentalism breeds only fetishes of fear, strewn about in the soul by exulting ones Path and religion so much that a "path" becomes void of Love. Those whom cannot Love profess it a religion, a Law, or their essence of their Magic(k). There is no Law, love as thou wilt. Religion so idealized produces a fetish of fanatic faith and invokes a frenzy of belief where the madness of reason becomes the cry of jihad. The cry of religious jihad is produced by an emotive and metaphysical fog that inhibits any approach to religious science with homogeneity, or the rage of reason. Religiosity and secular culture exist in a tandem codependent relationship. Contrary to obsessive raves by pathological religious fanatics, a balance between the sacred and the secular will not destroy religion. Such a cultural balance will shift authority away from religious institutions allowing a more licentious expression of new religious movements and libertine philosophies.
The medieval Roman Catholic Church, the self-proclaimed gatekeeper of the soul’s afterlife was in essence, an institution of its time that blinded the polarity between the sacred and secularity. Such a sacralization of society touches upon religious sensibilities intermixed with academic libertarianism. In "The Outsider," (Wright, Harper & Collins, 1953) Richard Wright, writes "…Religion was once an affair of the church; it is now in the streets in each man’s heart. Once there were priests; now every man’s a priest." In regards to the sacred and the secular, a synthesis we must adopt toward religiosity as a personal function and an institutional tribal affect. Ecclesiastical ambition and a lust of dogmatic rule must not be allowed to taint original innocence. Piety is a mask of faith and the inner force of religiosity, of dogmatic fundamentalism, is tribalism. Unbalanced devoutness is zealous fanaticism, when not ecclesiastic agenda. Religious fundamentalism is a theopathic condition of unbalanced severity. The zealot of religious purity is often embosomed in a monotonous mania of metaphysics and psychological fog. The contrast between this theopathic mania and religious piety is akin to the 9th Symphony of Ludwig von Beethoven and the beating of Zulu war drums. Stasis on the Middle Pillar of the Qabalah leads to inertia, one must Go, and rest always in equilibrium after the secret horrors of the paths. Suffering, piety, penitence is the measure of all ordeals, be they of Love, knowledge or emotion. The spiritual remedy for this malady is the full initiation of the soul into the immemorial Mysteries of life, death, and rebirth.
With such a dark contemplation of religion comes a vast and silent hermitage of the soul that is at once reciprocate and averse to the masses of zealots cleaving to fundamentals of religion. In the abyss of wisdom and horror, the soul drinks in what it can from religion, often finding the rotted nectar of Love and compassion. A soul at peace with itself in the desert of religion experiences a spark not of love-Lust, but of primal Love, which is Nothing. It is where the true Adepti have sat at the edge of the banks along the river Styx, where Seraph and Snake abide side by side and have spoken, "I Am Not, I am nothing." Religion and the failures of life’s ordeals become as excrement in death; they are finite and passing. Religiosity is a creation of Mankind, an excitement upon various Qabalistic levels of the isolate Soul. Death is but the mutation to the next birth, and religion the boat in which the Soul travels across the chthonic, immaterial threads of the æthers. Thelemic fundamentalists in the experiences of this writer often exhibit a theopathic disposition toward a popularized spiritualism, cleaving to notions of valid initiatic lineage, popularity of fraternities and teaching figures, and illusory titles. "Do what thou wilt" is a religious conceit masqued in Gnostic-Christian sacrality. "Love, and do not hate what you do."
Religious fundamentalism is a malady of a Machiavellian world. The promises of every ordered religion are bankrupt in the standpoint of fundamentalism. Under the lucent Light of Scientific Illuminism, men and women initiate into the immemorial mysteries of life, death, and rebirth seeking to escape the samsaric shackles of religious obsession. Theopathic fundamentalism is the bane of religion, it is reason divorced from reality and will become the shatter point of the soul, of Liberty and religious pluralism. Unbalanced religiosity has inherited a new lease in the world. Living religiosity presents to the world, to the arcane Orders, and to our individual lives the Light of Art, Intelligence, and Magick. Religions are predetermined creeds to explain our Souls, and are self-declared gatekeepers of the afterlife. Religious fundamentalism is beggary of ones soul. The human condition has not yet fulfilled nor unveiled any limit. Religion is at once a bane and beatitude of the human spiritual condition. Nonetheless, the innate value of religiosity to women and men is grave. The majority of historically institutionalized religions avow the Buddhist First Noble Truth, that all existence is sorrow and suffering, thus mortifying magic. Without a religious science of faith, a sound personal theology becomes unbalanced religiosity, a ghost in the mists of Mankind. A synthesis of the "Method of Science" and "Aim of Religion" will grow and reform as a Rising Tide of Rebellion in the New World Order.