charli@cylixd.UUCP (Charli Phillips) (01/01/70)
In article <5530@fortune.UUCP> brower@fortune.UUCP (Richard brower) writes: >It is true that some of us chose to >happily engage in homosexual activities rather than remaining in unhappy >little closets called acting hetro or remaining celibate. And all schools >should teach that for homosexual children, there definately is that option. > >Richard A. Brower Fortune Systems >{ihnp4,ucbvax!amd,hpda,sri-unix,harpo}!fortune!brower Excuse me, but if you want to send a child to a school that teaches that homosexual activities are a legitimate option, you should send him to a private school. If you are a member of a minority group with respect to beliefs, morals, and the like, you cannot expect the majority to pay to teach the options you prefer. The best you can ask is that the public schools remain neutral. I intend to send my children to private schools because I want them to be taught traditional Christian (traditional, not fundamentalist) values. Because these are minority views, I do not expect the public schools to teach them. However, if I cannot afford to send my child to a private school, I will insist that the public school be neutral. I do not want the school to teach my child that homosexuality, premarital sex, and the like are acceptable alternatives. You probably don't want the school to teach your child some things that I believe in. So let's just have the public schools teach grammar, biology, chemistry, and the like. (They're having enough problems doing that well!) charli
tim@k.cs.cmu.edu.ARPA (Tim Maroney) (09/14/85)
Thanks, Laura; rather weird that you beat both me and Owen (the two Thelemites here) to Crowley's defense, but it's appreciated. I posted Crowley's "The Message of the Master Therion" as sent to me by Josh Gordon, when I was sending the New Age mailing list digests to net.religion a few months ago (before fundamentalist flak convinced me that it was a bad idea). This explained "Will" in fairly clear terms. Now I'll post part two of my "Introduction to Thelema", still in production, which deals explicitly with "Will" as a basis for a moral system. Or, as Bruce Smith would say, "Would you like some Thelemic literature? Would you like to buy a flower?" Thelemic Morality ================= The fundamental tenet of Thelema is that the supreme moral principle is "Do what thou wilt." First, look at what this is not. Governments and monotheistic religions adopt a uniform approach to morality, that of a list of taboos. Although the Mosaic Law is rather different in content from the U.S. Penal Code, it is identical in approach. A subset of all possible actions is set down in writing and forbidden. The worthlessness of this approach should be clear: no such list can exhaust the possibilities of immorality, and any attempt to make it do so creates an impenetrable document. The common man will never be able to do more than scratch its surface; only a few scholars or lawyers will be able to apprehend its entirety. Thus the list of taboos forms no real moral guide. It is to virtually everyone just an ambiguous source of possible punishment, an unknowable and impersonal force demanding fear and respect. On the surface of it, "Do what thou wilt" is just as bad, or worse. It would seem to mean that one should do whatever one pleases, without regard for morality. However, the Book says more than "There is no law beyond Do what thou wilt." Allow me to quote briefly: "The Word of Sin is Restriction.... thou hast no right but to do thy will. Do that, and no other shall say nay. For pure will, unassuaged of purpose, delivered from the lust of result, is every way perfect." Clearly this "will" is rather different from the animal will, or that which is normally called "force of will" or "will-power". It is a divine, a transcendent, Will which is referred to. All "Sin", all "wrong", is but the Restriction of that divine Will. The relation to Taoistic concepts in the latter sentence is apparent. So now consider a society in which all keep to "Do what thou wilt". None imposes an obstacle to the Will of another; each seeks to know and do her or his own Will to the fullest. No one is content to sit all day, rotting the mind with passive stimuli, kissing ass at work and squelching any individual thoughts that may arise by mischance. (We have all seen the ostracism that afflicts those who dare disagree with their neighbors, and would never dare incur that or abstain from its infliction, would we? Such is the cry of the middle classes.) No one lives by deceiving others or by violating their will to own property; no one kills, rapes, or commits other crimes which restrict the Will of another. In short, the completeness of morality, both all aspiration to Godhead and all worthwhile taboo, is expressed in that one phrase, "Do what thou wilt". Of course, such a society will never exist, but morality is inherently quixotic. (Why will it never exist? Because institutions devoted to the lists of taboos exist, and under "Do what thou wilt" it would be immoral to destroy them by force, provided they do not directly attack our freedoms.) Society can never reach perfection; interpersonal morality consists largely of determining what that impossible perfection would be like, and conforming one's own behavior to it as much as possible. There is a real psychological difference between the Law of "Do what thou wilt", and the list of taboos. To verify this, try to explain "Do what thou wilt" to a fundamentalist Christian, an Orthodox Jew, or some other who is emotionally or dogmatically attached to one of the lists of taboos. The person will prove simply incapable of understanding non-taboo-based morality in most cases. The difference is what Crowley liked to call the Sin-Complex. The taboo-monger cries "Not my will but thine be done!" He sees himself as a cringing worm, bereft of all virtue and capable of good only when under the control (or at the least guidance) of some force outside himself. This attitude is useful to religious and political leaders, and thus its predominance. Who understands and follows the Law knows that, though subject to a myriad ignoble attractions and repulsions, she or he contains the divine spark that redeems all the rest, awaiting only the Work to bring it to light. The psychological benefits of realizing that one's core is good, not evil, are immense; in fact, there is a school of psychoanalysis, the Rogerian, which deals with nothing else. Thelema is the foe of all sexism. The third verse of the first chapter (a rather prominent position!) is "Every man and every woman is a star", thus explicitly denying all sexist ideas. Furthermore, the cosmological model involves the uniting of the goddess Nuit with the god Hadit to form the hermaphroditic Ra-Hoor-Khuit, rather than a male god spurting out the Universe in an act of masturbatory genesis, or a female goddess who parthenogenetically birthed all life. The Universe is the dynamic union of male and female, not the creation of either alone. Numerous parallels from Hinduism and Buddhism will no doubt occur to the East-inclined reader. The only "evil" is not direct restriction of the Will. The release from restriction can create an unbalanced response which is not in conformity with the Will. Rather than returning to the Will, one may swing to the opposite extreme from the former restriction. For instance, a slave who seeks to enslave his or her former masters rather than seek equality for all, or a person who reacts against religion dominated by a single gender by forming a religion dominated by the other gender rather than a sexually egalitarian religion, or someone who reacts against hypocritical standards of "good" by identifying himself with "evil". These are extreme cases; the unbalance involved in reaction against Restriction can be far more subtle. One predominant feature of morality is the carrot and stick aspect. Why should you follow an inconvenient moral code? In the list of taboos approach, the answer is simple: you will be punished if you transgress, and rewarded if you keep to the straight and narrow. The Hindu idea of karma and its variants such as the Law of Three are similar. There is no "official" Thelemic position. It seems evident that seeking to know and do the Will will lead to a less painful and restricted life. Crowley himself believed in karma in the literal reincarnatory sense; I don't believe in the afterlife, but I do feel that acts of deceit and such carry their own psychological penalty which is immediate and self-inflicted. I don't mean guilt, which fails to effect many people; I mean paranoia in its overt and subtle manifestations. Most people are insufficiently introspective to see that their enjoyment of life is dwindling when they increase their use of deceit, but the negative effects are no less real for that. The crooked businessman, the liar, the thief, the murderer: all are always on the run, always looking over their shoulder to see who's either trying to do to them what they have done to others or found out about their misdeeds. The attitude of these people is always that the world is "dog eat dog"; they can never reach any real contentment or rest. Recently, an attempt has been made to improve upon "Do what thou wilt" by prepending "An it harm none". I ask that anyone devoted to this formula realize that I am only speaking what seems to me the truth, the result of sincere analysis. I formerly accepted this formulation, but came to see that it was seriously flawed. The "Wiccan Rede", as the modified version of the Law is usually called, misses the point of "Do what thou wilt" from both the negative and positive perspectives. Negatively, the Law is non-interference, not non-harm. The will to harm is valid in unusual cases. For instance, an Allied soldier in the Second World War should not be called "immoral" for removing Axis soldiers from incarnation: the Nazis were deliberately engaged in an enterprise whose goal was to thwart the wills of all Jews, and any others who disagreed with the Nazi party line. Yet under the Rede that Allied soldier could not have pulled his trigger, because it is harming someone to injure or kill him. It is no use to object that under the Rede the Nazi would be likewise restrained, because such situations do arise in the real world and must be dealt with. Under the Law it is clear: the Nazi is not acting in accord with his will because he acts to block the wills of others, and therefore it is not a violation of his divine will to force him to stop this interference. Certainly causing harm is something any sane person seeks to avoid whenever possible, and most obstacles can be gone around instead of destroyed. But to elevate non-harm to a primary position in one's morality is to ignore the reality, that harming is not only justifiable but necessary in some cases. At the turn of the century, many occultists and theosophists staggered under the burdens of the right wing, such as anti-Semitism and fascism; as the next century approaches, many occultists and witches stagger under the burdens of the left, such as pacifism. Both must be transcended. It is also possible to interfere with another's Will without doing any "harm" as far as the person interfering is aware. To pick another extremely clear-cut example, Soviet psychiatrists honestly believe that to oppose the state is a mental illness. They are thus, as far as they know, not harming someone by removing such opposition. All "harm" short of the infliction of physical injury is a subjective judgment, so the actions of the brainwashers are in accord with the Rede. Under the Law, however, no such fallacy is possible: that this is interference with the person is an undeniable, objective fact. A closer-to-home example of "harmless" interference, and of how it is permitted by the Rede, is provided by the president of Covenant of the Goddess who told me she would like to see violent sports made illegal. Of course, it is possible to define harm in terms of interference, but then why not just use the original version? Still, I can't see anything wrong with the Rede under that interpretation, except that it is still only the negative, the forbidding, half of morality. The positive perspective on the Law is that one is to learn and do the divine Will. This is wholly lacking in the modified version. The Rede can be paraphrased as "Do whatever you feel like so long as it doesn't hurt anyone." The mere human will is the only thing mentioned: at least, I have never seen any Wiccan commentator take the Rede in any other light. Where is the aspiration in this? Where is the moral obligation to realize one's fullest potential? Morality is not simply to refrain from evil, but to do good; but you would never know that from the Rede. I have spent so much time on this because pacifism is a serious fallacy, a Restriction of the Will of the same order as a taboo against premarital sex. In fact, if one examines the beliefs of the leading original exponents of pacifism in this century, such as Gandhi, their sexual priggishness is obvious. This is not a coincidence. Remember always that to strike is as blessed as to stroke, provided only that it is the true Will to do so. -=- Tim Maroney, Carnegie-Mellon University, Networking ARPA: Tim.Maroney@CMU-CS-K uucp: seismo!cmu-cs-k!tim CompuServe: 74176,1360 audio: shout "Hey, Tim!"
baba@spar.UUCP (Baba ROM DOS) (09/18/85)
Wow! Could it be that that libertarianism has roots in Satanism? ;-) Baba