• Episode 1: Secular Transcendence and the (un)Holy Spiritual Experience •
• The Hosts ~ Shea Bilé & Matt Johnson •
– On this 1st episode of Deferred Gnosis:
We discuss the Spiritual/Transcendent experience –
- Meet the hosts: Shea Bilé & Matt Johnson
- What is a spiritual/transcendent experience? What do they mean to an atheist? What do they mean to a Satanist?
- Does atheism have room for spirituality? Does Satanism?
- Is there a spiritual world? The necessity for evidence.
- The fallacies of religious mythology – is there a silver lining? Is there a place for religion in an enlightened world? For spirituality?
- We draw a line in the sand…
– Musicians, Writers, Poets, Painters – Artists of any kind:
Send us a link to your work – deferredgnosis@gmail.com – or use the comment section below. We will devote a segment to showcase your work along with a short interview with the artist.
– Listeners, Artists, Commentators, Fellow travelers on the fringe:
Send us your comments, thoughts, suggestions, topic ideas for future podcasts to – deferredgnosis@gmail.com – Or use the comment section below.
‡ Intro Music: Invocation of Nothing by Shea Bilé
‡ Outro Music for this episode – Romania by Roboton
‡ https://www.deferredgnosis.com
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8 comments on “Episode 1: Secular Transcendence and the (un)Holy Spiritual Experience”
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Love you Shea!!
Good day gentlemen. I’d like to say first I liked very much your podcast.
I’m an atheist and my experience with satanism has begun 8 years ago. The thing I most liked about it was the freedom of choice and no dogmas to which we have to be bonded.
I’m LaVeyan satanist and I think satanism must be freed from the idea of spiritual experiences for it’s nothing more than a biological phenomena. We’ve come a long road to go back to blood sacrifices, invocation of demons and stay head to head with theist philosophies.
Theism and spiritual phenomena must be removed from satanic core, for it’s the only way we can extricate us from the past and emerge like the real knowledge.
Thanks for your attention and keep the great job.
Many thanks for the listen, commentary, and kind words. Considering your position regarding Atheism/Satanism, we would be interested to hear your input regarding our investigations and discourse explored in Episode 2 and 3. If you feel so inclined, please give a listen and let us know your thoughts.
Ave. Hails.
Bravo, gents. I enjoyed the show. I always enjoy the topic of atheistic spirituality.
As a side note, you almost lost me when you started talking about quantum mechanics – that’s an area that is often misappropriated and misinterpreted for religious/spiritual purposes, when in reality, the theory makes no comment on, nor does it indicate anything spiritual, or even above or beyond the pure physics of particle interactions.
Khandnalie,
Many thanks for the compliments. You are right, although it does provide an interesting referential platform for esoteric discussion, the Quantum Mechanic/Quantum Physics has become an overused meme amongst many subcultures. I must admit, I am guilty of implementing that into the discussion above, because it sometimes seems like one of the more poignant routes to take when trying to explore subjective/magical experience. However, I will make an active attempt to explore a different metaphor when approaching these topics, lest I fall into the same meme-camp as many of my colleagues.
Hails, and thanks for the listen (and the commentary!)
~ Shea
No problem man, and I hope to hear more from this podcast – I find it very interesting, and look forward to seeing what y’all decide to debate next.
And hey, come visit us over at SIN, I’m pretty sure there are plenty of folks over there who would enjoy your podcast as well.
You are right Quantum Mechanics is often used by the spiritual community in general to try to explain certain phenomena when in reality quantum mechanics proposes nothing at all in those subjects. However, I find it interesting now that the Institute of Noetic Sciences is arriving at very interesting observations. For example, the did their own version of the double slit experiment with the difference now being that they replaced the physical “observer” with, I might say, a metaphysical observer meaning they put someone to meditate and concentrate on the photon and imagine that they were there observing the experiment. What they found out was that the photon behaves similarly as if it had been physically observed.
Cross-posted from Facebook by request:
A few observations on the podcast:
1) These are conversations that need to be happening everywhere.
2) Would it change the context of the conversation to swap the term “religion” with “the principle of Faith – belief without or in spite of evidence?”
3)What you seem to be trying to iron out is the significance and general relevance of one’s individual/personal experience (what Setians call one’s “subjective universe”). I’ll suggest that understanding where the subjective and objective universes begin and end respectively goes a long way toward avoiding the pitfalls of each.
In other words, truths discovered through subjective experience (e.g., dreams, visions, etc.) are not valid to scientific inquiry because that’s not how science works. On the other hand, scientific materialism starts tripping up when it tries to talk about things that are neither scientific nor material.
For instance: dreams, visions, and similar spiritual pyrotechnics have changed countless people’s lives and worldviews, causing tremendous, observable, indisputable change throughout human history. So to say that dreams and visions are “not real” or “just chemical reactions in the brain” misses the obvious: they may not be what they seem, but they are nonetheless capable of exerting influence into the materially quantifiable dimension.
With this in mind, my own bias in favor of Setian philosophy hopefully makes sense. It acknowledges both the objective universe and the subjective universe as “real things” while keeping each in their respective lanes.
Resolving this division – which conventional religions have botched so horribly for so long – is the key to making peace with terms like “spirituality” and “transcendence.” It’s not that these things are bad or obsolete; quite the opposite. It’s just that the wrong people have held a monopoly over them for millennia, and now that we’re taking them back, we’re still sorting out what to do with them.
Thanks for sharing. Xeper, Remanifest, and Reyn til Runa!