Grievous Angel
Beast of Burden
As to, do we need religion at all, I have to say that the feeling of many if not most people engaged in the kinds of project K-Punk posits is that "religion" per se is unnecessary to spiritual engagement. Indeed the term "religion" is something of a pejorative term in contemporary paganism. (Much of this argument was rehearsed over at the K-Punk blog last year.)
It's interesting to see the voodoo meme rise in this context 15 years after it made serious inroads into the occult scene. I'd caution against understanding voodoo too quickly. I certainly don't. On the one hand it's clearly a contemporary brand of paganism springing partly from the African diaspora and partly from European folk magick in common with Hoodoo, Santeria and much else. On the other it has a quite specific sense of otherness. This seems to be true of much pagan spirituality: it's amenable to classification and analysis but it is all too easy to cross the line from comparison to cultural appropriation. I'd personally fight shy of seeking to "re-work voodoo" for example. There's a real danger of thereby commodifying and de-sacralizing it. (That's not to say that British white people can't do voodoo.
Rather, if you're going to do voodoo, do voodoo, not a bowdlerised copy. If you want a comfortable way in there are plenty of them and in this case, you really do pays your money and makes your choice.) And if you want existing spiritual paths that would be amenable to a non-theist or Spinozist angle, take a look at neopaganism in general and have a poke around the embers of chaos magick in particular.
However there's no doubt that voodoo techniques will generate ecstasy and experiences that are, to all intents and purposes, genuine interactions with deities. That is no surprise. As Uncle Al said, "from certain actions certain results follow." It's not really a matter of religion as usually defined, but of engineering. Whether you're a believer in god or not, if you do the exercises, you will get the results. The difference is that if you keep doing the exercises you will probably find yourself concerned with matters of compassion to self and to others rather than being obsessed with magickal power or whatever, and this of course is the "inner teaching" of all the main religions. So it goes. That stuff about love isn't there by accident. A non-theist spirituality is likely to come back to love, agape, and compassion in the end.
It's interesting to see the voodoo meme rise in this context 15 years after it made serious inroads into the occult scene. I'd caution against understanding voodoo too quickly. I certainly don't. On the one hand it's clearly a contemporary brand of paganism springing partly from the African diaspora and partly from European folk magick in common with Hoodoo, Santeria and much else. On the other it has a quite specific sense of otherness. This seems to be true of much pagan spirituality: it's amenable to classification and analysis but it is all too easy to cross the line from comparison to cultural appropriation. I'd personally fight shy of seeking to "re-work voodoo" for example. There's a real danger of thereby commodifying and de-sacralizing it. (That's not to say that British white people can't do voodoo.
Rather, if you're going to do voodoo, do voodoo, not a bowdlerised copy. If you want a comfortable way in there are plenty of them and in this case, you really do pays your money and makes your choice.) And if you want existing spiritual paths that would be amenable to a non-theist or Spinozist angle, take a look at neopaganism in general and have a poke around the embers of chaos magick in particular.
However there's no doubt that voodoo techniques will generate ecstasy and experiences that are, to all intents and purposes, genuine interactions with deities. That is no surprise. As Uncle Al said, "from certain actions certain results follow." It's not really a matter of religion as usually defined, but of engineering. Whether you're a believer in god or not, if you do the exercises, you will get the results. The difference is that if you keep doing the exercises you will probably find yourself concerned with matters of compassion to self and to others rather than being obsessed with magickal power or whatever, and this of course is the "inner teaching" of all the main religions. So it goes. That stuff about love isn't there by accident. A non-theist spirituality is likely to come back to love, agape, and compassion in the end.