Religions are as significant for what they leave unmapped and open to the imagination in the supernatural world as for what they rule on definitively – and religions are often pretty bad at drawing definitive conclusions beyond their core tenets. So I don’t see religious faith as a bar to being very curious and open-minded about high strangeness, and to adopting an agnostic attitude to speculative claims about the supernatural. But ‘organised woo’ is rather different. Like fundamentalist materialism, it is organised around the core principle that everything can and should be explained. That is not, in and of itself, a bad aspiration – genuine curiosity is arguably sustained by the conviction that an answer can, in theory, ultimately be attained. But in reality the belief that everything can and should be explained, harmless in itself, elides into an excessive confidence in available explanations. It becomes a pigeonholing exercise, on the implied assumption that our current state of knowledge can account for everything; or, in the case of ‘organised woo’, it becomes a process of inventing new pigeonholes for weird experiences to go in. The fundamentalist materialist and the occultist systematiser may seem at diametrically opposed ends of the epistemological spectrum, but they are more similar than either would care to admit – for they are both uncomfortable with doubt, with the unexplained, and with free-floating weirdness.
I’ll be making good use of the phrase “organised woo.”