And cognitive dissonance is maintained at a high level as you’re forced to invest outrageously large sums of money for the actual content that they deliver to you. Twenty dollars for twenty pages is a sucker’s play, any way you look at it.
Someone who falls for that ,especially spending money on multiple bits of information, will be much more likely to convince themselves that “there’s something to it!”
And as I pointed out, as it does follow the basic method for Western (and some Eastern) mysticism, it does ‘work’. The same way some Scientology of Christian Science or Positive Thinking ‘work’.
Give proof or retract. Which claims are true, and how have you verified them? Instead of, for instance, invoking a ritual to contact the Undead, have you tried to attend a Gnostic Catholic Mass, for example? In other words, have you varied the ritual trappings in order to determine if it was using a ritual, any ritual, to tap into the human psyche? Or do you believe that there is some sort of existential reality behind the claims of ‘magic’?
False analogy.
The goal of self help books, etc… is to make money for their authors.
Religions (we are told) are not supposed to be about making money for the leaders. And yet, the Vampire folks seem much more interested in making cash on horribly overpriced pamphlets than spreading their religion.
The only two religions I have ever heard of, ever, that charge before they let you in on their beliefs and who don’t want their beliefs spread for free, all while claiming that they have a valid spiritual system which will be a benefit to people?
Well… the Vampire folks, and Scientologists.
Hardly a flattering comparison, especially since after reading those worthless pages, I can’t possibly imagine how charging 1 dollar a page is anything other than a scam and a rip off.
So you just do what many Vampire folks do. You provide numerous posts in a community, with added links back to your Vampire group. Once someone clicks on that link, they’re met with purposefully vague and enticing promises which tell you that after you spend money (natch), you’ll understand and be Enlightened. But none of their members are allowed to talk to you, you have to spend the cash.
So basically all you’re doing is saying “here’s something cool, awesome, and that’d improve your life. You really should find out about this. And you can, once you pay us.”
And that isn’t recruitment in much the same way as a colonoscopy isn’t a bit forward for a first date.
I’ve read Crowley and Wilson and Gurdjieff and Neitzche and LeVay, etc, etc, etc… and now the Vampire Bible. and I say the VB is crap, and rather dressed up pretentious crap, to boot.
Can you actually defend it on its merits as a system, or would you only prefer to engage those who say they haven’t read it?
Yes, but what makes it superior to any other of the Western occult traditions which are, currently, freely available on the web for instance? I’m sure that the basic method works, because it’s the same basic method that everybody else has been using. But what’s a single good reason to pay hard earned money to follow this specific method rather than, say, studying pranayama, kundalini yoga, meditation, Liber Al Vel Legis, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, etc… ?
Give me enough time, and I promise I can create a ritualistic system whereby one communes with the smurfs in order to achieve heightened states of consciousness. Should I charge a dollar a page for that, too?
