Prophet 451
Prophet 451's JournalWho would you pick for president?
This one's just for fun. Pick whoever you'd like for president. And I mean anyone. Living or dead, electable or not, fictional or real. Literally anyone.
But....
You have to make a case for why they'd be a good president.
No problem
Do you believe in the Lucifer of the Bible or a different version?
Difficult to explain. Essentially, you've heard teh expression that the victor writes the history? That's how we see the Bible, as a propaganda version of events that only tells god's side of things. So, while the Lucifer I pray to is the same one as the one in the Bible, the Bible version is incomplete and comes from his enemies.
If the Biblical one, do you see him as equal to God?
More or less. That's still to be determined. Essentially, while Revelation predicts that god will triumph at the end of time, that can be ignored as more propaganda. No-one really knows how it will go down.
If not, isn't your quest to defeat God doomed to failure?
I don't believe so but even if it was, doing teh right thing is more important. Better to be right than "saved".
Do you believe in demons evil spirits possession or summoning?
Um, sorta. Demons: There were those who followed Lucifer and fell with him. Most of them still exist and people have written about them through the years. They occupy a similar position as saints do in Catholicism.
Evil spirits: Well, in addition to the celestials, there are also natural spirits, the energy of a place or an event that attains a sort of crude consciousness. They can be nasty but they're rarely evil in the sense of making a moral choice, more crude and lashing out because they feel threatened.
Possession: Not exactly. No spirit can take possession of you or anyone else. They're not designed the same way. It would be like Hulk Hogan trying to squeeze into your shirt. What I have heard of (but never personally experienced) is a way that a demon can co-share a body. Not taking control of it but taking a back seat in the mind to experience physical being again.
Summoning: I'm undecided. I've heard of it but never seen it myself. I would have thought it was insulting to the being in question and so, I wouldn't do it either.
Do you wish to harm others i.e. Christians or Atheists?
No, absolutely not. There's a couple of Christians that I have a personal beef with but that's not because of their spiritual path, that's because there's heat between us personally. It is more important for people to choose their own path than for our paths to agree. Lucifer's fall, his war that I've chosen to be part of, was about the right to moral self-determination. The right of a thinking, feeling species, to choose it's own fate, to go from "thou shalt not" to "I will not" without the threat of hell hanging over their heads. Thus, it would be wrong of me to try and choose a path for others or to harm them (unless in defence of self or others). It is our job to minimise suffering. Since we have been fucked over by the Big Beard, it's imperative not to add to it by fucking each other over. We should instead aid others and not just through prayer, but by getting up off our knees and getting our hands dirty, "If the lot of man is to improve, the seer must become the do-er".
Finally, a quick debunking of common myths that you were polite enough not to ask:
- I don't sacrifice babies, children or animals. The only thing I sacrifice is a small pinch of herbs which symbolise Lucifer's sacrifice that I choose to share with him.
- I do happen to own a black cat but she's not a familiar, she's a pet and the only reason she's black is because she was teh one who needed re-homing most urgently. She and her marmalade sister are adored and spoiled rotten.
- I do happen to have a small alter. It's not actually necessary, I just like teh formalism of it. It has candles, a small statue, an offering bowl (for those herbs I mentioned) and an incense burner (no occult reason, it just makes the place smell nice) and I pray in much the same manner as most people, I go to one knee (the other is too wrecked to kneel on now), clasp hands and close my eyes.
- I don't take recreational drugs (I barely even drink because it reacts badly with my meds) and there are no orgies or, at least, no-one's even invited me to one.
So very sorry
I know that it's never easy to lose our babies. Our first two were Jelli and Mac, named after Jellicle and Macavity. They're long gone now but I still cry when I think of them. Got me crying now. But they'll be there, Jelli and Mac, Sandy and Suki and your Grace, up, up to the Heaviside Layer and we'll see them all again, in the place where no shadows fall.
DU religion survey
Pretty simple, just check the one that applies to you.
EDIT: Yes, I know it doesn't include Muslim. It was there earlier but a couple of people were offended that I didn't include an option for Hindu. I couldn't remove any of the others because people had already picked them so I removed Muslim as that hadn't had anyone click on it and replaced it with Hindu. It's not intended as a slight, it's just that there's only 10 slots.
Different kind of Satanist
Essentially, Satanists come in four flavours:
- LaVeyan Satanists are atheists who have a philosophy that's essentially Objectivism with neo-mystical bolt-ons. Called "Satanist" largely because Anton LaVey liked annoying Christians.
- The Temple of Set don't consider themselves Satanists but everyone else does. They don't worship but do revere Set as an example of "willed self-evolution". They have a very complicated philosophy that I confess I don't fully understand.
- Luciferian Satanists (that's me) do believe in Lucifer and do worship him. We see him as the righteous rebel against a tyrannical god. We're an experiential faith, meaning no holy book in the normal sense and no dogma (beyond the duty of each of us to make our world a better place). Each worshipers individual take on the faith is constructed through personal gnosis. We're the smallest of the three main branches and completely lacking any kind of organization.
- Finally, there are the punk kids. Diane Vera (an influential occult writer) calls them "Black Circle Boys" after the film of the same name. They're the ones who smash up graveyards, torture/kill animals and use our signs and symbolism without any understanding of the belief system that underpins it. The rest of us loathe them, for fairly obvious reasons.
Should Churches Be Taxed?
So I finally got Star membership and thought I'd celebrate by uploading my own avatar (same one use on everything) and creating my first poll in ages.
Simple question: Should churches be taxed?
Quick Survey - How's Your Internet?
Curious about what kind of net service my American friends get. If you don't mind sharing, how's your download speed and what do you pay for it?
Here (British Midlands), I pay roughly $50 a month for 150Mbs, no cap.
Would You Vote For Hillary?
Would be a poll, except I'm not a star member so I can't post polls. Straight yes/no question. Assuming Hillary gets through the primary and is the Democratic nominee in 2016, would you vote for her (holding your nose if necessary)?
If you want to add your reasons why/why not, feel free.
Why People Vote Republican
Crossposted at suggestion of another poster:
Firstly, remember that 19% of the US population thinks the sun orbits the earth. A fifth of the electorate are dumb as dirt, in other words.
Then you have to allow for a media that is, on the whole, right-wing. Contrary to the mantra that the public have been brainwashed into believing, all US media (outside of three hours on MSNBC in the evenings) tilts right to a greater or lesser degree. And that's a direct result of the fact that almost all broadcast media is owned by a small number of corporations and corporations tend to be conservative.
That's important for two reasons. Firstly, the human mind is incredibly susceptible to repetition. Hear it often enough and you will believe virtually anything (and I do mean anything). The RW media acts as an echo chamber that constantly reinforces the Republican message and doesn't call out Republican's outright lies. Secondly is the phenomenon known as "incestuous amplification". What that means is that, when you keep people getting their information from sources which agree with them, their beliefs tend to get more extreme. Take a few guys who think W was an ok president, lock them in a room for a while and they'll come out thinking that W was the best president ever, the sun shone again on his watch and he should be on Mount Rushmore (and yes, this has already happened with Reagan).
Media is also what shapes your ingroup and outgroup. Put simply, your ingroup are people like you or who you aspire to be and your outgroup is everyone else. All of you automatically and unconsciously discriminate in favour of our ingroup and against our outgroup. That's automatic, happens even in the very young and has been shown to operate even when the assignments to groups is explicitly random. Through the corporate media have trained people to always kick downward when they are dissatisfied. Trained them to resent the poor shmuck on welfare, not the corporate suit making millions (and that's in addition to the fact that I have never known a country that hates it's poor like the USA).
The rural population also identifies Democrats with cities, with hated elites, with minorities, with the modernity they hate and fear. Obama caught hell for saying that the rural people, scared of a changing world, cling to their flag, guns and religion but he was entirely right. They also identify Democrats with abortion. In the western world, abortion is only an issue in the US and Ireland and Ireland is virtually a theocracy. Consider also that the USA is one of the few countries where being intellectual is widely considered something to be hated and resented. Egg-headed elites who think they're better than us shitkickers. Education and intellectual achievement are not only not admired but actively resented.
People used to tell me that the USA was a classless society. That was bollocks. The USA is even more classist than my own UK, it's just that your classes are trained to only hate those on the rung below them. So the people on welfare are despised most of all. The average citizen has been trained to regard every cent spent on welfare as a dollar stolen from him personally. And the USA venerates greed. Only in the USA is libertarianism, a philosophy which boils down to "people should starve rather than taxes supporting them", still a thing. Only in the USA and UK do people still think of poverty as a moral issue, that the poor are poor not through teh vagaries of the employment market or increasing company consolidation or even just because the capitalist system requires winners and losers and requires a certain level of unemployment to keep wages down. In the US and UK, the unemployed are blamed for their own poverty. The PtB still think in Dickensian terms of the "undeserving poor", that the poor are poor because they drink or do drugs or "don't have the habit of work" (our demonically evil DWP minister).
Consider also the cognitive bias that means if we hold a wrong belief, not only will we resist correction, we will hold the belief even more strongly and resent those who tried correcting us. When your Republican brother-in-law sends you some chain email about how terrible Democrats are and you mail back a correction, he doesn't change his beliefs. He holds them even more strongly and resents you for trying to correct them. Maybe you should skip Thanksgiving this year.
Consider that fundamentalism, a theology that, in Weird Al's words "I'll be laughing my head off, as you're burning in hell", a theology that essentially exists simply as a revenge fantasy that promises everyone the believer dislikes will burn, is a powerful political force and Republicanity is now the dominant Republican faith. Republianity is a mixture of lip service to Jesus (while jettisoning virtually everything he actually taught), Nieztchian will-to-power, Randian beliefs to justify psychotic anti-tax zealotry, Nazi-level nationalism and worship of the military and Rapture beliefs that were invented wholesale out of a few twisted-from-context Bible verses about a century ago. It has it's own high priests (Pat Robertson, Limbaugh, Beck), it's own messiah figure (Reagan), it's own devil figure (Obama although really, it's whoever the most high-profile liberal of the time is), it's own designated scapegoats (liberals) and it's own versions of history, economics, psychology, theology and jurisprudence. And a lot of your countrymen have been brainwashed to believe that fictional view of the world. They even have a museum and "university" to promote that faith.
In addition, the US still have a race problem. A big one. African-Americans are arrested and imprisoned at vastly disproportionate rates. And the response in much of the USA to that is not to suggest that there is something deeply wrong with the way law enforcement is doing things but to think that African-Americans are disproportionately likely to be criminals and that criminality is not attributable to their environment (such as poverty, the single most reliable indicator of criminality) but to something about black people in themselves. This is an example of what's called the "fundamental attribution error", a psychological bias that says, when we do something wrong, we will attribute it to outside factors but when someone else does something wrong, we will attribute it to them as a person.
Finally, the Southern US still votes Republican almost as a block. And in much of the Southern US, the education is almost laughable, includes much "USA, best country in the history of ever!" triumphalism and the Civil War is still viewed as the "war of Northern Aggression" and it totally wasn't about slavery, dammit!
It is not difficult to manipulate humans. Humans are instinctively obedient, Milgram proved that. Humans are instinctively conformist. Asche proved that. Keep the lie simple enough, repeat it often enough and people will believe it. Hitler proved that.
Many reasons
Firstly, remember that 19% of the US population thinks the sun orbits the earth. A fifth of the electorate are dumb as dirt, in other words.
Then you have to allow for a media that is, on the whole, right-wing. Contrary to the mantra that the public have been brainwashed into believing, all US media (outside of three hours on MSNBC in the evenings) tilts right to a greater or lesser degree. And that's a direct result of the fact that almost all broadcast media is owned by a small number of corporations and corporations tend to be conservative.
That's important for two reasons. Firstly, the human mind is incredibly susceptible to repetition. Hear it often enough and you will believe virtually anything (and I do mean anything). The RW media acts as an echo chamber that constantly reinforces the Republican message and doesn't call out Republican's outright lies. Secondly is the phonomenon known as "incestuous amplification". What that means is that, when you keep people getting their information from sources which agree with them, their beliefs tend to get more extreme. Take a few guys who think W was an ok president, lock them in a room for a while and they'll come out thinking that W was the best president ever, the sun shone again on his watch and he should be on Mount Rushmore (and yes, this has already happened with Reagan).
Media is also what shapes your ingroup and outgroup. Put simply, your ingroup are people like you or who you aspire to be and your outgroup is everyone else. All of you automatically and unconsciously discriminate in favour of our ingroup and against our outgroup. That's automatic, happens even in the very young and has been shown to operate even when the assignments to groups is explicitly random. Through teh corporate media have trained people to always kick downward when they are dissatisfied. Trained them to resent the poor shmuck on welfare, not teh corporate suit making millions (and that's in addition to the fact that I have never known a country that hates it's poor like the USA).
The rural population also identifies Democrats with cities, with hated elites, with minorities, with the modernity they hate and fear. Obama caught hell for saying that the rural people, scared of a changing world, cling to their flag, guns and religion but he was entirely right. They also identify Democrats with abortion. In the western world, abortion is only an issue in the US and Ireland and Ireland is virtually a theocracy. Consider also that the USA is one of the few countries where being intellectual is widely considered something to be hated and resented. Egg-headed elites who think they're better than us shitkickers. Education and intellectual achievement are not only not admired but actively resented.
People used to tell me that the USA was a classless society. That was bollocks. The USA is even more classist than my own UK, it's just that your classes are trained to only hate those on teh rung below them. So the people on welfare are despised most of all. The average citizen has been trained to regard every cent spent on welfare as a dollar stolen from him personally. And the USA venerates greed. Only in the USA is libertarianism, a philosophy which boils down to "people should starve rather than taxes supporting them", still a thing. Only in the USA and UK do people still think of poverty as a moral issue, that the poor are poor not through teh vagaries of the employment market or incresing company consolidation or even just because the capitalist system requires winners and losers and requires a certain level of unemployment to keep wages down. In the US and UK, teh unemployed are blamed for their own poverty. The PtB still think in Dickensian terms of the "undeserving poor", that the poor are poor because they drink or do drugs or "don't have the habit of work" (our demonically evil DWP minister).
Consider also the cognitive bias that means if we hold a wrong belief, not only will we resist correction, we will hold the belief even more strongly and resent those who tried correcting us.
Consider that fundamentalism, a theology that, in Weird Al's words "I'll be laughing my head off, as you're burning in hell", a theology that essentially exists simply as a revenge fantasy that promises everyone the believer dislikes will burn, is a powerful political force and Republicanity is now the dominant Republican faith. Republianity is a mixture of lip service to Jesus (while jettisoning virtually everything he actually taught), Nieztchian will-to-power, Randian beliefs to justify psychotic anti-tax beliefs, Nazi-level nationalism and worship of the military and Rapture beliefs that were invented wholesale out of a few twisted-from-context Bible verses about a century ago. It has it's own high priests (Pat Robertson, Limbaugh, Beck), it's own messiah figure (Reagan), it's own devil figure (Obama although really, it's whoever the most high-profile liberal of the time is), it's own designated scapegoats (liberals) and it's own versions of history, economics, psychology, theology and jurisprudence. And a lot of your countrymen have been brainwashed to believe that fictional view of the world.
In addition, the US still have a race problem. A big one. African-Americans are arrested and imprisoned at vastly disproportionate rates. And teh response in much of teh USA to that is not to suggest that there is something deeply wrong with the way law enforcement is doing things but to think that African-Americans are disproportionately likely to be criminals and that criminality is not attributable to their environment (such as poverty, the single most reliable indicator of criminality) but to something about black people in themselves. This is an example of what's called the "fundamental attribution error", a psychological bias that says, when we do something wrong, we will attribute it to outside factors but when someone else does something wrong, we will attribute it to them as a person.
Finally, the Southern US still votes Republican almost as a block. And in much of the Southern US, the education is almost laughable, includes much "USA, best country in the history of ever!" triumphalism and teh Civil War is still viewed as the "war of Northern Aggression" and it totally wasn't about slavery, dammit!
It is not difficult to manipulate humans. Humans are instinctively obedient, Milgram proved that. Humans are instinctively conformist. Asche proved that. Keep the lie simple enough, repeat it often enough and people will believe it. Hitler proved that.
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