AUTHOR’S NOTE: I was more than a little surprised at the intensity of religious fervor in the r/occult reddit community when the subject of Christianity came up in the form of trying to “awaken” someone from its less-credible mystical assertions. I didn’t originate the thread, only observed it, so I didn’t dare say a word to avoid being browbeaten by the gatekeepers. I had thought that, as critical thinkers, they would be largely immune to the Christian mythos and much more focused on Hermetic Qabalism than they seem to be. (I guess I’ve been exposed to Aleister Crowley for too long.)

As an occultist since the beginning of the 1970s, I’ve always been an “enlightened skeptic” about anything to do with metaphysical practices and experiences. But as a non-religious person (not, I hasten to add, a confirmed atheist or agnostic) I was a “renegade skeptic” regarding orthodox sectarianism for a couple of decades before that era (for which I blame – or thank – my father, who took the family to a strict authoritarian church that goaded me into rebellion).

At its most oppressive, religious fundamentalism strikes me as incipient mental illness that warrants therapy and not encouragement, while in its more modest cultural manifestations it closely resembles assisted auto-hypnosis. “Pop-spiritual” aspirations have even crept into some government and corporate business models, and I recently came across a discussion of the conceptual shift from the early meditative types of yoga to the athletic yoga-industrial complex* approach of 21^st Century studios. In his 2013 book Supernormal, a thorough examination of ancient and modern yoga, parapsychologist Dean Radin notes that, at least since 2002, theologians have been cautioning against the “dangers of contemplative spirituality” to the sanctity of the faithful, the performance of which (but not the irrational fear of any blasphemous hazards that might attend it) I heartily endorse precisely because it erodes mindless group-think. These days I reserve most of my cynicism for the circus that is online divination.

One of the strangest psycho-spiritual experiences I ever had happened when I was working in the nuclear-power industry, of all places. For some reason (probably because they were duped by a corporate morale-improvement sales pitch), the company president and human-resources staff thought it would be a good idea to take the entire 300-employee population in small groups into a room with yoga mats on the floor and have us lay down on our backs under dimmed lights, then close our eyes and silently commune with our inner Yoda for 15 minutes. As technicians and engineers. all we could do was scratch our heads and wonder what the general public, who were already terrified of nuclear power, would think of these antics. Anyway, it didn’t seem to do any good for esprit de corps and was never repeated in the 31 years I was there. These self-styled efficiency experts come and go with their “empowerment” shtick, so it was on to the next management “flavor of the month.”

Another instance occurred during my first year of high school. Throughout elementary school in my small dairy-farming community it was expected that we would recite the Pledge of Allegiance before the day’s classes began. But in the early ’60s that was suddenly forbidden because it had “God” in the oath, running afoul of the “separation of Church and State” dictum. So some brilliant mind in the Health, Education and Welfare agency decided that school administrators across the country would instead allow a “minute of silence” at the start of the school-day for students to do whatever they wanted as long as it wasn’t spoken aloud: pray, meditate, catch a few winks, fantasize about the kid at the next desk (in my case it was a shy female cousin who never spoke to me, so I just looked the other way and counted down the minute of non-engagement each morning).

I don’t have to prove to anyone how devout or otherwise spiritual I am, and I’m not going to abase myself before any altar as a way to affirm that I’m something I’m not now and will never be. When he was accused of being a Satanist, Crowley replied “In order to be a Satanist, one must first believe in the existence of Satan.” We could turn that around and say “In order to be a Christian, one must first believe in the existence of Christ,” as distinct from the mission of promoting ethical behavior that the Church took upon itself. I’ve seen nothing to convince me of the former, although I have no problem with (most of) the moral principles attached to the latter even if I don’t go looking for them in sacred texts or from the lips of ecclesiastical minions.

I stop short of “turning the other cheek” since all it does is give us scars on both sides, instead preferring the adjuration of the old “fire-and-brimstone” sermon to “chastise them according to their desserts,” even though I seldom have to invoke it because I manage my social contacts accordingly. Chalk it up to 78 years of cumulative disappointment in human frailty (my own included), which is not much better globally than it ever was although I’m constantly working on mine.  But in an essay about skepticism I would be remiss if I didn’t once again quote myself: “I’m a student of human nature, so of course I’m a cynic.”

My attitude is not hubris, merely prudent dubiety that comes down on the side of “seeing is believing,” and religious screeds written by men two thousand years ago don’t qualify as anything more than pious speculation since they are no longer – if they ever were – eyewitness accounts after so many editorial rewrites and scholarly re-translations. Besides, as philosophers and pundits have long said, “Believe only half of what you see,” and since we don’t possess visual “retro-cognition” and weren’t bequeathed documentary films of the purported events, there is no chance of confirming even that much. (I wrote a similar essay in the Spring of 2025 titled “The Meditative Mind” that covers similar ground with even more acerbic invective.)

Given the lack of reliable evidence, Pascal’s Wager isn’t enough to give me pause either. I’ve always subscribed to Israel Regardie’s wise observation that humankind is “only potentially immortal,” we have to sublimate our consciousness to get there. If we choose not to make the effort, blind faith is not enough to excuse the excesses of a self-serving clergy in trying to lead us to salvation with its own brand of sanctimonious cynicism. While I was in college in 1967, one of my room-mates wrote a scatological poem about another room-mate (whom we didn’t like very much) that ended with the affirmation “There is some shit I will not eat.” Amen to that.

*A dismissive epithet attributed to Robert Love by Dean Radin as an example of “the Western-inspired genius for repackaging traditional wisdom into profit.”