An Age for Lucifer

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An Age for Lucifer

Postby StuntPope » Fri Jul 01, 2011 9:35 pm

I have been searching this board for both this title and the author (Robert C Tucker) and find it hard to believe it's never been mentioned here.

I can't remember why I bought this book, it sits on a shelf in my library and quite frankly, I'm afraid to read it. It unsettles me whenever I flip through it. Although I have recently plowed through the introduction and realize that it has been written from a research / theoretical perspective, as opposed to an "endorsement" angle. The author worked in Toronto for many years researching and counseling victims of cults through COMA (Council On Mind Abuse), and working with severely behaviorally disturbed children (young psychopaths).

Until finally, he came up with this:

This book explores a strange new spirituality about to enter into competition with other established religions. My purpose here is to convince you that its emergence is probably, if not inevitable.

I begin this exploration with an unproven assumption based on Darwinian evolutionary principles: a new predator will appear on our planet, an evolutionary prototype designed to prey on humans. Another assumption then follows: this predator will evolve gradually and incrementally from humanity, just as we apparently evolved from lower forms to prey on them. A further assumption suggests that these predators have already appeared as evolutionary prototypes, as new humans with advanced methods of survival and new forms of spiritual expression and religious organization designed to support and advance their predation.


Tucker admits that he has no know direct knowledge of such a movement existing or being organized, the book is "part imagination, part prophecy, part conjecture" and may be some "strange hybrid of fiction and fact".

In the wrong hands, I regard it as being a step-by-step handbook to becoming a sociopath.

Personally, I don't subscribe to malevolence in the world as much as I suspect ignorance "never ascribe to conspiracy what can be explained by stupidity". But from time to time, I find myself doubting that, or questioning if maybe there is some, directed, malevolence active in the world. If Tucker were right, it may explain a lot.
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Re: An Age for Lucifer

Postby stefano » Tue Jul 05, 2011 4:23 am

I think it's pretty clear that predatory capitalism itself is that pernicious religion; it doesn't have any spirituality to it, which is why it will lose its appeal, but its dogmas and priestly structures and the fervour it inspires in its followers make it the belief structure I think Tucker was looking for.

Some of this is pretty lazy science though:
I begin this exploration with an unproven assumption based on Darwinian evolutionary principles: a new predator will appear on our planet, an evolutionary prototype designed to prey on humans. Another assumption then follows: this predator will evolve gradually and incrementally from humanity, just as we apparently evolved from lower forms to prey on them.
That's not quite right: he's conflating social evolution with biological evolution. For starters we don't prey on the species we evolved from (people only eat apes when there's nothing else to hunt), and we aren't predatory in the same sense as other large mammals (a healthy human diet doesn't contain all that much meat). So there's no reason to think that what evolves from us will prey on us, except I suppose the reason that there are so many of us.

I don't subscribe to malevolence in the world as much as I suspect ignorance "never ascribe to conspiracy what can be explained by stupidity".
What?! That's a deliberate choice not to understand what's going on, don't do that.
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Re: An Age for Lucifer

Postby Simulist » Sat Jul 23, 2011 3:04 pm

"An Age for Lucifer," eh? Lucifer (mythological though he may be) keeps getting tarred and feathered as "the bad guy."

I don't think all that tar and all those feathers have been applied justly at all.

The chap often referred to as "Lucifer" (in the bible, Lucifer was actually a Babylonian king) rebelled against a psychopath with delusions of godhood, and then encouraged other people to question that pompous nutter as well. Seems to me "Lucifer" deserves an honorary mention, at least.
"The most strongly enforced of all known taboos is the taboo against knowing who or what you really are behind the mask of your apparently separate, independent, and isolated ego."
    — Alan Watts
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