Hi Aldair,

I thought about seriously responding to your post on How Chaos Is Going
To Kill Us All for a little while. Then I had some better things to do
(like torture babies and drown kittens) than perpetuate the stale old
Church vs Chaos thread, so I threw it on the back burner, which I'm
cleaning out now. A more discerning reader might have noticed that in my
post to my then-novice Eloi, I took care to leave out any mention of
your church, because frankly my dear, I don't give a damn.

If it makes you feel shiny, happy and special to think that you are
saving mortalkind from Certain and Horrific Doom, then by all means go
for it. Hey, have a good time! But really, spare me the rhetoric about
how you are the saviors of mortalkind. My post had nothing to do with
your church, and I certainly wasn't inviting you to drone out a
long-winded, bombastic justification of its existence. Gods know why you
felt it was necessary, we've all heard it all before.

Of course we Occultists know that our work with chaos is dangerous. WE
are the scholars of chaos; we have studied it for generations, whereas
the extent of your church's contact with it has been trying to kill its
scholars and burning our tomes. (As you say, you are no scholar, or you
wouldn't have tried to argue that our travel to the Chaos Plane brings
more chaos into the multiverse, since it should be clear to any scholar
that the Chaos Plane is one of the many planes of the multiverse and not
a part of the realm of chaos.) You're so against destruction - I would
love to see you create something rather than try to choke it to death
with your dogma.

For the umpteenth time, you quote the Logos's words to the effect that
chaos _could_ destroy our small part of the multiverse. Of course this
statement has been twisted to fit your church propaganda to where that
means it _definitely will_ destroy our part of the multiverse unless
your church stamps out all study of it. Which to me is similar to
saying, "Well, this child COULD grow up to become a murderer so we
better just kill him now." For all your talk about lighting a candle
than cursing the darkness, etc, it seems that it is we Occultists who
have the courage to "play with fire" that would bring us illumination in
the form of new knowledge and untapped potential.

On a tangential philosophical note: The metaphor of FIRE has been raised
several times throughout this thread. I find that interesting because in
my studies as a youth, delving into the dusty tomes in the Library of
Nicator, I chanced to read of a Tsol'aa philosopher who was a
contemporary of Piraeus. (Epicurus claims to have known him, but you
know, Epicurus says a lot of things when he's got his hookah.) FIRE was
an integral part of his ontological worldview - he even went as far as
to say "Everything is fire."

He used the metaphor of a candleflame to explain both the appearance of
stability in the phenomenal world (the flame's form is stable) and the
fact of change (in the flames, everything changes). He wrote that
reality is composed not of static, immutable things, but of a process of
continual creation and destruction. I don't really know what this has to
do with the rest of this post except that I found his thoughts
fascinating. I'm getting old, and my mind tends to meander, but I find
interest in the way it meanders so I suppose that's alright.

Cheers,

Shakti Devi.

"People do not understand how that which is at variance with itself
agrees with itself. There is a harmony in the bending back, as in the
cases of the bow and the lyre." - Heraclitus.

Penned by my hand on the 22nd of Chronos, in the year 308 AF.