First Post; Our Enemy; The First and Only Truth

"And therefore I say, whatsoever they be that with Simon Magus take upon them to work such wonders--by soothsaying, sorcery, or witchcraft--are but liars, deceivers, and cozeners; Sorcery, witchcraft, soothsaying, and dreams are but vanity, and the law shall be fulfilled without such lies."

Reginald Scot was a contemporary of Shakespeare's; a witch hunter who traveled the length and breadth of the British Isles searching for sorcerers and occultists that he might visit God's justice on them--but like Houdini four hundred years later, his critical eye and relentless desire for the truth turned his quest for the supernatural into an eye-opening marathon debunking session, and after seeing one too many innocent old women and petty con artists murdered by mobs, his conscience made a skeptic of him. His 1584 book, The Discovery of Witchcraft, not only refuted the existence of witches, but remains one of the foundational texts of both demonology and stage magic to this day.

And this is quite an achievement, considering that nearly every single copy of the book was burned in 1603, when James I quite literally criminalized skepticism of the paranormal rather than admit that there was no such thing as magic.

Skepticism is not a popular position--it never has been--but we have come far in the last century, and there are more atheists, materialists, and assorted free-thinkers in the world today than ever before. We are beating back the forces of pseudoscience and mysticism, and spreading the light of reason even into the darkest corners of the world--but if we falter now, if we let up our assault in the name of fairness or tolerance or respect for the dignity of quaint native superstitions, we will be devoured again. We cannot afford to pity the faithful simply because they have trouble adapting to the idea of a world without gods. We cannot let ourselves be swayed by transparent attempts to cry persecution at those who question their dogma. This, therefore, is the First and Only Truth, the one absolute that I will defend without reservation: All that is sacred must burn.

Do not make the mistake of thinking that we are evangelists spreading a noble truth--we are the uninfected on a planet of zombies. The enemy has no face, no race or sex--it is a memetic lifeform, a self-replicating pattern that will do anything to spread itself. The infection will attack you in the guise of the people you love most--it will corrupt your friends and family, and alter their behavior to make them spread it further. It will hijack our dearest moral principles and use them to motivate the infected--turning the act of contamination into a civic duty, a moral obligation, even an act of love--but it cares no more for such things than biological plagues care for wind, or water, or blood. This is simply how it propagates--how it has propagated since the dawn of time. It has no capacity for altruism. It does not care about the truth. It does not comprehend justice, honor, or mercy. It will take whatever form best allows it to spread, be it ephemeral lowest-cosmic-denominator mysticism or raving blood-of-the-lamb fundamentalism, and it will do whatever is necessary to make you part of it. It lives in darkness, in the gaps between facts, in the shadows of the human heart--wherever the light of reason cannot shine--but a lone candle, a single awkward question or stubborn fact, is enough to repel it.

And I have Prometheus Lucifer.