"Doubt come from the devil, certainty of truth comes from God."Satan has always been a more attractive character than God, because rebels are cool and God is such an asshole. Aside from suborning genocide, getting all bent out of shape if he's not worshiped sufficiently, and other assorted Biblical atrocities, just look at the people he has speak for him on Earth. Who wouldn't want to be on the opposite side from such people? Perhaps in the old days that would have put you on the side of Satan, these days it just puts you on the side of sanity.
-- Fritjof Schuon
"œI slept with faith and found a corpse in my arms on awakening; I drank and danced all night with doubt and found her a virgin in the morning."
-- Aleister Crowley
The reason Milton wrote in fetters when he wrote of Angels & God, and at liberty when of Devils & Hell, is because he was a true Poet and of the Devil's party without knowing it.
-- William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
"I am of the Devil's party and know it."
-- Philip Pullman
"œLest we forget at least an over-the-shoulder acknowledgment to the very first radical: from all our legends, mythology, and history (and who is to know where mythology leaves off and history begins -- or which is which), the first radical known to man who rebelled against the establishment and did it so effectively that he at least won his own kingdom -- Lucifer."
-- Saul Alinsky, Rules for Radicals
The mind is its own place, and in it self
Can make a Heav'n of Hell, a Hell of Heav'n.
-- Satan, in Milton's Paradise Lost
I was looking at Schuon since he's a primary source for GB. He's a theologian with a cult following; a member of a group of "pereniallists" who disdain New Ageists because...well, I can't tell you, they seem about the same to me, but what do I know. Maybe there's some value to his work. But that quote above is a sure recipe for mental disaster. It is almost a parody, a distillation, of the self-reinforcing parasitic brain worm model of religion. No wonder G. Bob et al and I have nothing productive to say to each other. Their entire modus operandi is to reinforce some sense of certainty that they locate in religion, whether it comes from personal experience or elsewhere. They cannot be wrong, by their own rules. Whereas in the world of the intellect, where I like to locate myself, everything is open to question. Conservatives complain that the academy is left-wing; but it seems as if thought itself is left-wing, so it's really not that much a surprise.
I haven't quarrelled with the Gagdadites over their metaphysics or spirituality, just their politics. If they want to hold certain spiritual truths to be as certain as mathematics, well, maybe, I've had thoughts in that direction myself. But apparently even to disagree with their politics is to be in league with the devil.
