I need someone to hold me while I wait for something more

Faith is necessary. The object of faith is irrelevant. It is the power of the faith itself - the overriding of all the "what ifs" thrown up by the intellect and the ego - which makes the impossible possible. The idol is made by the genuflector, not the craftsman. This is why all initiatory paths which have real power call for total devotion to the Ideal or to a particular Master who embodies the ideal. (The truly enlightened never claim to have spooky powers, but sometimes the disciples will tell stories about the Master's spooky powers. This is a sign of their faith which is not discouraged by a true Master.)

(ETA: There's a wonderful piece in the Doctor Who story The Curse of Fenris. For those who haven't seen it: it's World War Two and the Doctor et al are fighting vampires, for some reason, and of course a traditional way to fight off vamps is with a crucifix. A Red Army soldier who happens to be with them protests that he doesn't believe in Christianity; the Doctor asks him: "What do you believe in?" and he answers "I believe in the Revolution". So - get this - he takes the hammer-and-sickle badge off his cap and fights the vampires off with that. Even faith in the cynical bureaucratic murderer Joe Stalin can move mountains.)

For all we have criticised the Leninist sects, you must admit that their belief system gives them incredible powers to face ridicule, to stand on street corners selling badly-xeroxed papers, etc., for an entire lifetime. The problem with some of them is that they don't teach "loving-kindness", or in other words, integrity - instead they have a half-assed belief in "Bolshevik ethics" which, in practice, boils down to the same kind of Might = Right nonsense that we rightly despise when we hear it coming from the fascists (and would make Trotsky spin in his grave). The problem with others is that they've given up actually changing things in the Big World and have become nothing but a substitute religion.

But are we to say that they have no right to exist or to participate in the movement - that they would be better off individually giving up and getting some bourgeois job? Surely they can be annoying, but is that a problem with them or a problem with us? I'm reminded of secular atheists who curse religious believers for "relying on a crutch". The implication is that secular atheists are both ethically and psychologically superior. But what do they do with that superiority? (Can someone point me to hospitals, schools, charity drives etc. started by humanist organisations? I'm sure there are some.)

"Atheism" and "secularism" are both negatives - no religion - but why do you stay alive in the absence of any metaphysical meaning? Is the answer nothing but "pure hedonism" - or, more likely, "live the capitalist dream, earn money to buy leisure commodities, have a good time, then die?" Many people would rather stay in a cult than accept a lifetime of nothing more than psychic masturbation. As Seven of Nine put it before she was reverse-assimilated, "WE DO NOT WANT TO BE LIKE YOU".

The point is: don't be so quick to tear down someone else's faith before examining your own. And yes, you have one, even if it's not in God. I am increasingly thinking Fripp was right when he said "any act based on principle is a good one".

May Day

Chaos Marxism stands for separation of church and state; and of the personal and the political. Not in the sense that they have nothing to do with one another - on the contrary, there's a strong dialectical interrelationship between the social microcosm and the social macrocosm, because that's what we're talking about on this blog. But don't confuse the levels.

Frank Zappa said "You can't run a country by a book of religion". Well, it might be objected that the early Islamic ummah did reasonably well for a few centuries, but that wasn't being run entirely on the basis of the Noble Qu'ran, but on the personal authority and example of the Prophet, peace be upon him and all that. That gave the system an essential flexibility and humanity that is lacking from all dogmatic structures - and from arbitrary personality cults, at the other extreme. There are good forms of religious-inspired political activism which realise this, and bad forms that just want to show a particular legalistic interpretation of the Bible or the Qu'ran or the Collected Works of V. I. Lenin or Quotations from Chairman Mao down your throat. That crap will last a few decades and collapse, at best. (Unless, sadly, it's sitting on a buttload of natural resources. We need to understand exactly what the House of Saud have been up to for the last few decades - simultaneously schmoozing with the worst scumbags among Western capitalists, and spreading an interpretation of Islam which is pretty much all sword and no heart on a global scale.)

At the other end of the scale of trying to use your personal religious beliefs or identity as a means for social organisation or activism, of course, lies the trap of using your political activism as a substitute religion or identity. This is of course what we've been cursing out on this blog for ages - the essential solipsism of sitting at home polishing your soul while the world falls down outside, while engaging in "play-politics" to make yourself feel better. One way lies heartlessness - the other, uselessness. Marx and Lenin never gave any indications for how you should live your life, nor should they have. Find one that works for you and is consistent with the principles of the new world they wanted to build.

The poet Rumi said: "Faith is one whereever you go, but beliefs are many", or words to that effect. So, a social movement which might have a chance of actually building a new world has to be completely firm on certain basic principles of action/communal effort, but completely tolerant on exactly how those principles might be expressed. The middle road - the best combination of the rational and irrational, personal mildness and firm principle, ends and means - is what any healthy and progressive social system needs. If you ask me, modern capitalism has gone all the damn way towards the irrational, which is why it breeds dogmatic cults such as fundamentalist Islam and Christianity as a counterbalance.

This is the principle of the united front applied to macrocosmic social organisation as well as to how we get on with our neighbours and friends. In Islamic terms, it is the fusion of the "greater jihad" of personal ethics and the "lesser jihad" of striving for social justice. From the Thelemic standpoint, we might distinguish the "lesser magick" of fighting back against the memetic bombardment of the current industrial deathculture and creating symbols and egregores that will serve us, and the "greater magick" of becoming the kind of people who will be fit of living in a new and better Aeon. The Prophet Muhammad and V. I. Lenin both got the job done because they knew how to make this combination, which is why they changed the world, each in their own way.

Communities

Communities of faith are not healthy. Healthy communities are based on real things - like social fellowship, work, common struggle, and play. But once you start drawing the defining lines around you on the basis of abstract concepts of belief and professions of faith, you are in the sect mentality. Nothing comes out of a sect except more sectarianism - it is a dead end of the spirit. Of course, a community can be part a sect and part a healthy community, in which case our struggle is to maximise the proportion of "healthy".

ETA: Yeah, and that goes for identity as well as faith. Chaos Marxism declares struggle against the idolatry of faith and identity.

Truth is always concrete. The world has had enough of religion - that is, the drawing of lines around us on the basis of how we think or even what words we use rather than what we do. However, we must also realise that a religious or spiritual impulse is built into our species being as humanity. Our challenge is to (a) accept all spiritualities (and anti-spiritualities like atheism) which reveal themselves in healthy and positive action in the World As Is; (b) work towards the unity of humanity around a new way of life which will abolish distinctions between the material and spiritual realms altogether.