True, there is a major semantic problem, and when the alt.satanism
crowd sneers at devil worshippers who do the sort of stuff they say
a real satanist wouldn't do, and Michael Aquino in The Church of
Satan
refers to "occult themed crime" it is evident that this stuff DOES
happen, it is just defined out of existence as relevant to the
mainstream
satanism.
Sort of like materialistic Christians who worship money and power
at the heart level, pretending that Christians who are less social
presentability minded and more environmental and help the great
unwashed and unclassy and stuff like that aren't really Christian
because they aren't in the Society Blue Book Episcopalian Agnostic
and quasi Calvinist wealth proves worth scene.
the term Aquino uses, however, "occult themed crime" with a tweak
to shift to include stuff that may not be criminal by being illegal
but which make an atmosphere in which illegal stuff can more
easily happen, could solve this problem of semantics.
My take is that there are some people doing stuff that is occult
themed crime, and that enough of them have been using thelemic
category of occult theme, to get attention thrown on the OTO
whether it as a group is guilty or not.
But to find these people, you want to look among those who
have studied the OTO stuff, and may or may not be members,
perhaps a tiny minority of the members. So clean your own house
instead of posturing about your innocence?
Consider a household in a neighborhood where there is a large
family and two or three of the siblings are acting like a gang in
the neighborhood, unknown to some other siblings and one of
the parents.
The neighbors complain to the parents, one of whom is getting
hits off the take, one is innocent, both protest innocence. The
whole family is tarred with the same brush in the public mind.
The actual guilty parties are something like a quarter or less
of the whole family.
Mary Christine
In a message dated 2/25/2008 11:32:36 P.M. Pacific Standard Time,
[log in to unmask] writes:
There is also the problem of what some Christian groups define as
Satanic. Given that this can include Tarot card readings or even Halloween
divination