Crowley was a scholar of the occult and in fact helped found scientific skepticism. He was also in the Golden Dawn. I haven't looked that far into the ocult, but I'm not going to assume he was a charlatan. His system has to do with self-actualization through mysticism, which also having not looked into, I'm not going to discount or assume it's true either.
I don't know much about the Church of Satan (cue lightning strike and whinney of startled horses), but I've looked at some of the stuff and a lot is basic common sense which seems to have been thrown under the label of Lucifer for shock value (or hooking people who like to be rebellious for the sake of rebellion), and the rest is utter bollocks.
The subject of the Sith: From what I've seen, it's more about embracing ones emotions, rather than detaching yourself from all elements of your humanity like the Jedi are supposed to. The trouble is that without emotion being tempered by a bit of reason (well, what fallicy of reason humans possess), people tend to flock to it and become zealots, and a whole lot of assholes used it to gain power. But it's all just because Lucas needed a big bad (very definitively) "evil" force for the heros to fight anyhow.
I could get farther into it, but it's really not worth my effort. When you draw back on your young age in defense of an argument, you need to get your facts straight. I'd say you sound like an existentialist, except you've got it all skewed, SWiU. And darkness is the absence of light, nothing more. Either way, that's not a justification for anything, and you can't use a black-and-white polar opposite system that somehow relys on itself to exist as something to live by. And religion isn't confined to a box. It
is the box. Ok, I'm done. I hate having to bring up asinine things and take swipes at them.
AND TYPING IN ALL CAPITALS IS THE BEST WAY TO MAKE PEOPLE WANT TO POKE YOU IN THE EYE. Especially around here.
Edit: (SP?), a little bit more.
This post has been edited by Slade: 21 May 2005 - 04:20 PM