Mailbag: Why I Am Not a Supernaturalist

Following my predictable banning from the Fruitcake Factory (aka The Temple of Thelema forums), a relatively new regular engaged with me briefly in private message correspondence regarding my lack of belief in the supernatural (by the way, to be fair to Eshelman, he tolerated the presence of critical questions on his forums much longer than I thought he would, even if he refused to answer them. So, credit where credit’s due. I definitely made my point).

In the thread right before the banning took place, I was explaining how I didn’t start off life as some rabid materialist: for a time, I even believed in supernatural things. And, as I said on the thread, one of the reasons I don’t believe in this stuff anymore is that I wised up and realized that daydreams and subjectively trusting how it all feels to me doesn’t demonstrate the actual existence of “powers” or “other worlds.

This prompted a question from my interlocutor: “How did you go about ‘wising up’? What was your process of ‘realization’?

He follows this up with speculation about me, musing that perhaps I was “not able to manifest results and so [I] determined that results are not manifestable.” Ah, classic believer script "you aren't doin' it right!"...

The question he asked, though, is a really good one, and one I’m not sure I’ve written about on the blog before. My response to him resembled an answer I gave to a similar question elsewhere on those forums, so for this post, I’m editing my responses together to give as comprehensive an answer (and hopefully as instructive an answer) as possible.

Read on for my answer to this question.

Dissenting Opinion?...What Dissenting Opinion?

There are some things that are just inevitable: death, taxes, the tides, the seasons, and…Los having his relevant and insightful posts rejected from religious blogs. Earlier this week, I got into a mini-exchange with occult author Donald Michael Kraig on this blog entry here. It forms an interesting extension of the discussion I had with him on his blog earlier this year (which you can read here).

It’s not terribly enlightening to go through my argument there in much more detail: my point is abundantly obvious, as is the rather pathetic way Kraig immediately directs the conversation away from the substance of my post and onto irrelevant, distractionary nonsense (in this case, equivocating on the meaning of a common word and then trying to turn the discussion into speculation about *me* and not engagement with my *arguments*).

Feel free to read through our exchange. My final post of the exchange – rejected by Kraig – will be published below.

But first I wanted to take this opportunity to point out a trend I’ve noticed among religious believers online: they seem to have an aversion to an open discussion of their claims and are quick to shut down discussion (or simply prohibit it outright).

Read on for more.

Name That Fallacy!

A reader recently posted a comment to this post of mine – regarding my lengthy debate with Donald Michael Kraig on his blog – that contained the following point, attempting to draw an analogy to claims about magical “results”:

I have never seen Paris.  All I have is admittedly massive amounts of anecdotal evidence that it exists. You could, I am sure, tell me how to get there, and if I followed your directions, and they were correct, and nothing unforeseen interfered, I could go to that location myself.  However, if I had decided beforehand that it did not exist, I might not see it then, even if it were there.

What this commenter is arguing, essentially, is that he (and everyone else who has never personally seen Paris) is accepting the claim “Paris exists” on the basis of anecdotal evidence. For that reason, the implied argument here runs, it is inconsistent to accept one claim (“Paris exists”) on the basis of anecdotes (lots of people who claim to have seen Paris) yet deny another claim (“Ritual magick can cause coincidences to happen”) on the basis of anecdotes (lots of people who claim to have had ritual magick “work” to cause coincidences).

Perhaps I’m overstating the argument. The commenter might not claim that it’s “inconsistent,” per se, but he is suggesting that most people accept a large number of claims not on the basis of personal experience but anecdotes. Therefore, it is at least unfair – if not completely inconsistent – to object so strongly to a claim that only has anecdotes to support it.

Well, I’ve done my best to give this argument its due. Needless to say, it’s a very flawed argument, so it’s time to play…

NAME THAT FALLACY!

See if you can figure out what’s wrong with the argument. Read on for the correct answer.

Gems from the Forums II: Leggo My Ego

This gem comes from a series of private messages I exchanged with someone on the forums who was new to Thelema. During the course of our exchange, my correspondent asked me:

While reading some stuff I always come across the term "ego" (from a magickal perspective obviously) and I guess the ego represents those "layers of crap of the mind" you mentioned? )the percieved separate "me" by the rest of the people. Is the ego that actual element which we have to "get rid of" in order to reach or discover our will? I am a bit confused overall with the "true self" as opposed to the "ego" (and ofcourse that choronzon-that represents that most harsh parts of it?

My response follows:

A Wild Ghost Chase

Following an exchange with occult author Donald Michael Kraig on his blog, I briefly corresponded with him via e-mail about some of the points I raised in my last post, particularly the point that his approach to evaluating magical claims was an example of confirmation bias and incapable of properly evaluating the claims. In his response, he continued to assert that his method was “true skepticism.”

This post will reproduce part of my answer to him – which gives a more thorough example of the way that confirmation bias works – and will follow this with an example of confirmation bias and a lack of critical thinking that I chanced across the other day: namely, a gullible Thelemite claiming in public that he has “objective proof” of the supernatural thanks to his brother’s handy “Ghost Radar” (a toy that can be bought for $0.99 on an i-Phone).

Read on for more.