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Taylor Ellwoods work is some of the most unique and innovative stuff out there currently. He is a prolific writer and is generous with his contributions... and I've also seen many of his excellent works in numerous other quality sites and journals
You sound like his mother. Are you?
when his work and ideas are some of the freshest and most unconventional concepts to come out in quite some time.
Does that make them exempt from criticism? The last time I checked, barbelith was a discussion forum. A place where ideas are discussed, picked apart, examined, and closely criticised. A recent subject that has garnered a lot of heated discussion around here, provoking strong feelings on either side, is the debate around fictional entities compared to older Gods. It's an interesting subject. There has been loads of threads about this over the last three years or so, which have got absolutely nothing to do with Taylor Ellwood's recent book that also looks at these ideas.
This thread is really just an extension of this ongoing debate, which was taking place here before Mr Ellwood showed up and will continue after he leaves. The fact that someone has recently written a book about this subject is fairly inconsequential to the debate as a whole. These are not particularly new or innovative ideas, at least not around here, and Mr Ellwood certainly doesn't have ownership of them.
You don't have to understand it, accept it, do it, agree with it, or like it... but give the guy a fucking break! I think he deserves a little better than the treatment he is getting here, if only for the courage to take you all on in this little gang bang.
I think people did get a bit out of order in attacking the ideas in 'Pop Culture Magic' without having read it - but it's a subject that people are passionate about, and you have to expect that sort of thing if you're going to publish. I think Mr Ellwood has handled the criticism his ideas have received here brilliantly and impeccably. Although we may have to agree to disagree on certain points about magic, I hugely respect that. I think he's displayed a huge amount of integrity by calmly and reasonably explaining his ideas in the face of some pretty heated criticism - and deserves big props for that.
But at the same time, the various opposing viewpoints are also entitled to their platform, and I think that if you cut away the strong language, some really excellent posts have been made on both sides, and some very interesting points and perspectives have been presented. This is a good thing. Discussion and criticism should be the fucking lifeblood of forums like this, if we're to collectively learn anything about the processes of magic by talking about it here.
The whole "my god is better than your god" mentality is somewhat surprising. Do you folks realize how silly it is to be arguing over which diety is more authentic... Gede or a character from Buffy/Star Trek?
Since you never bothered to read the entire thread - presumably due to spontaneous possession by the dread spirit 'Outraged of Tunbridge Wells" - you can be forgiven for completely failing to grasp the broad thrust of the various opposing arguments to Mr Ellwood's proposed conception of deity.
The opposing argument is a damn site more sophisticated than "my God is better than your God". Read the thread. It has nothing to do with "authenticity", whatever that means. Several practitioners have observed an experiential difference between working with pop culture entities and working with Gods from older magico-religious traditions. This point has been raised and a number of working theories have been proposed that try to describe why that might be the case. Read the thread.
If something works for you, do. If not, than find something else that does. But why negate what works for someone else?
Yes, for fucks sake, we all know that. Nobody is "negating" anything. Do whatever the fuck you like, I couldn't give a toss. But if you're bringing your ideas into a discussion forum, then don't be surprised if some people think those ideas are way off the mark and proceed to tell you so. Wear a helmet.
For my part, the experiences I have had with a living magico-religious tradition that has thousands of years history behind it have been vastly different to my fairly extensive experiences of working with fictional and pop culture entities. Would you rather I just kept quiet about that? My personal experiences seem to contradict the widely accepted chaos magic dogma concerning the egalitarian nature of all things we can invest belief in. As far as I'm concerned, the most valuable thing chaos magic did was encourage personal observation over received dogma, and I think it's useful and constructive to try and convey our own experiential understandings of magic where we can. I think that's all that anyone is trying to do in this thread. |
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