Hello, and yes, I have an annoying habit of injecting entries from my decaying memory of seventh-grade French class into my sentences in an attempt to look cool.

I have been toying with the idea of subscribing a "religion" for a year or two now. What motivates me is the need to throw off the mental shackles of my environment (a dismal suburb) and the ability to converse with others who share my view that information is a virus and in many ways can be treated or applied as such. While I confess to not having read any of his works, William S. Burroughs' notion that language is a virus stands very true to me.

I experimented briefly with LaVeyan Satanism over the past summer - it, like the CoV, preaches doubt and constructive skepticism, but also a controlled form of ignorance in the application of magic, which as you may know is defined as being split between carnally oriented social engineering (Lesser) and an updated amalgam of various Pagan rituals (Greater). While I loved its Machivellian virtues and its acknowledgement of the power of the deeper, more primal side of the human brain, I found the aesthetic used in its rituals largely incompatible with my cyberpunk-saturated mind. My appreciation of the scientific method was too strong for me to bother with a set of "intellectual decompression" rituals with vague purposes. I'm not sure how many here I'm offending by saying these things, but no offense is intended to Satanists - these are just the things that drove me here. I wanted to be part of a religion that was constantly updating and revising itself.

Well, I hope I can keep up with some of the spirited discussions I've seen on this board. Your library excites me a lot more than the CoS's does, honestly.