For those unfamiliar, The Satanic Temple is an atheistic organization. Here are its tenets. I often ask people what they disagree with and get very little in the way of meaningful response.
THERE ARE SEVEN FUNDAMENTAL TENETS
I
One should strive to act with compassion and empathy toward all creatures in accordance with reason.
II
The struggle for justice is an ongoing and necessary pursuit that should prevail over laws and institutions.
III
One’s body is inviolable, subject to one’s own will alone.
IV
The freedoms of others should be respected, including the freedom to offend. To willfully and unjustly encroach upon the freedoms of another is to forgo one’s own.
V
Beliefs should conform to one’s best scientific understanding of the world. One should take care never to distort scientific facts to fit one’s beliefs.
VI
People are fallible. If one makes a mistake, one should do one’s best to rectify it and resolve any harm that might have been caused.
VII
Every tenet is a guiding principle designed to inspire nobility in action and thought. The spirit of compassion, wisdom, and justice should always prevail over the written or spoken word.
https://thesatanictemple.com/blogs/the-satanic-temple-tenets/there-are-seven-fundamental-tenets
DO YOU WORSHIP SATAN?
No, nor do we believe in the existence of Satan or the supernatural. The Satanic Temple believes that religion can, and should, be divorced from superstition. As such, we do not promote a belief in a personal Satan. To embrace the name Satan is to embrace rational inquiry removed from supernaturalism and archaic tradition-based superstitions. Satanists should actively work to hone critical thinking and exercise reasonable agnosticism in all things. Our beliefs must be malleable to the best current scientific understandings of the material world — never the reverse.
https://thesatanictemple.com/pages/faq
She’s 13. Does anyone know if she’s allowed to become a member? The website isn’t clear on that.
They don’t list an age at all. membershp is fre and it doesn’t look like they ask.
they probably don’t care.
I know they didn’t on their website, I just want to make sure. I’d hate to give her a membership card and then tell her it was withdrawn because they found out she was under 18.
The pro-eugenics stance that Lucian has is obviously very problematic and it would be nice if he were removed. Otherwise, yeah. Never met a Satanist I didn’t like… My mom even sent me a tshirt she bought while passing through Salem a little while ago.
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well cool bro
theres no age limit on existing cults… i mean religions. so i cant imagine one here. good luck!
🎵 Be gay, do drugs, hail Satan 🎵
Great song!!
The Satanic Temple is incredibly based. I’ve been a member since they started trolling Iowa legislators a year or two ago with Iowa Satanic Temple School in response to the school choice nonsense.
I’ll be honest, when opening this thread I was not expecting people to not universally agree on tenet number 3 there. I was even going to make a joke on your first paragraph and how they might take issue because of that tenet because nobody can be that absurd, right? RIGHT?
Humans, man…
Hail Satan!
Ave Satanas!
I didn’t know they were purely atheistic. I though it was religious, but subverting the christian interpretation of the bible so that Lucifer/Satan would actually be the good guy, written about by unreliable narrators.
I even had a whole circular theory about it. Like, Lucifer being the angel that brings the light of reason, and the serpent who argue that humans should, in fact, know right from wrong… and who would have been cast out for rebelling against a malevolent god who thinks wanting to use reason to determine and enact justice rather than blindly take it on “faith” that the unfair natural law is part of an inherently good yet unscrutable “plan” is an unforgivable sin of pride worthy of eternal damnation… A malevolent creator who’d have used this ‘faith’ flaw in our brains to build an army of authoritarian followers, and manipulated the narrative to systematically assassinate the character of an “adversary” that is actually our best ally in any struggle for self-determination and justice against the oppressor.
I read waaaaaay too much into the name. Now I’m actually a bit disappointed.
Edit: wait am I thinking of another form of satanism?
Edit2 : nevermind, apparently I’m describing a blend of Luciferianism and the Church of Satan. Imma take whatever appeals to me, add a bit of discordianism to make the incompatible bits stick together better and I think that’s gonna be my religion for a while.
Edit3: apparently it gets me even closer to the Our Lady of Endor Coven.
I’m only aware of LaVeyan Satanism as an alternative.
There’s actually a bunch
https://satanicdelco.com/ Satanic Delco? 🤷♂️
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Please note Church of Satan (LaVeyan) is strictly atheistic.
Thankfully I can ignore this detail by the power of Our Lady of Chaos and Discord, Hail Eris.
Seems like the kids are actually allright
🎶Jamie had a chance well she really did🎶
🎶Whoa oh🎶
🎶Instead she acted with compassion and empathy towards all creatures 🎶
🎶Whoa oh🎶
Not to be confused with the Church of Satan.
The Satanic Temple is way better.
Just putting it out there for anyone who doesn’t know.
Or just a good way of triggering those damn pearl-clutchers. 🤣
Can you please elaborate? I hear this a lot but mostly from people who know little to nothing about CoS. They just read that comparison chart that TST threw together with hard bias.
My understanding, though it may be totally wrong, is TST is atheist and TCoS is theist. Everything else derives from that. TST is humanist.
CoS is 100% atheist and always has been. The “magick” people reference is mostly mentally manifesting your hopes and dreams to come true. There’s no supernatural anything involved.
So, “law of attraction” type bs?
Like, “Man, I really hope I get that raise. Let me think about it really hard and focus on how to earn it,” type bs.
Yeah that’s “the secret” law of attraction junk
Do you think that’s how people get raises? By thinking about it really hard and focusing on how to earn it? And not, you know, by jumping ship and moving to another company where you can earn a 40% raise?
I’m sure brainstorming about how to earn more money would provide a few different options, yes. Expecting a raise to just miraculously appear certainly isn’t the way to go. It’s not like just thinking about getting a raise will make it happen. It’s about setting it as your prime directive and thinking about HOW to make it happen. Your destiny is your own hands.
TCoS supposedly isn’t all that active except for their admittedly amusing Twitter. They also seem anti fun and stuffy whereas TST pushes “Satanism” as tongue in cheek social activism.
Both are atheist, tho if memory serves TCoS has rituals and associations with “magick” and the occult in the past
From their webpages, I would think they use the acronym CoS, and not TCoS. I was wondering if web searches were deliberately not showing relevant results.
my dumb ass keeps reading it as “Circle Of Steel” and wondering what any of this has to do with Fallout
As someone who grew up in a conservative Christian church and became an atheist as an adult, I still have an innate emotional reaction to the name The Satanic Temple that I struggle to get over, even as I’ve fully gotten over earlier emotional reactions like making jokes about Jesus the same way I might about anything else (which I couldn’t do at the beginning of my atheist journey).
Good on your daughter for not caring about that and fully evaluating it based on its tenets.
It might help to better understand the origin of the term.
It first appears in Job in reference to a supernatural ‘adversary’ who petitions Yahweh to be able to kill Job’s children and ruins his livelihood causing him to tear his clothes in grief and setting up the rest of the book which is a dialogue on the injustice of suffering.
The later dialogue part of Job is pretty much a direct adaptation of the earlier Babylonian Theodicy, a dialogue on suffering.
But this earlier opening has a remarkable parallel with the earlier Canaanite Tale of Aqhat, where in the opening the goddess Anat petitions El as the head of the pantheon for permission to kill the son of Danel, which he finds out about at the same time he finds out his livelihood is ruined, when he tears his clothes in grief.
So it pretty much looks like what we have in Job was a combination of two earlier polytheistic stories where a lazy editor under later monotheistic reform needed to get rid of a different god in the story while keeping the role, so switched out the name for a generic term of ‘adversary’ (Satan).
This addition of a supernatural adversary caught the imagination of later development of the theology and led to a great deal of fanfiction, much like how the failure to translate ‘Lucifer’ falling in Isiah back to “the morning star” led to even more fanfiction because of parallels to the Enochian apocrypha.
TL;DR: While you may no longer have a faith-related uncomfortableness about some supernatural ‘evil’ entity, understanding that the very origin of all that warning and indoctrination you suffered which has left a remnant avoidance of the term was itself an adaptation of polytheism in the tradition - something you were likely also conditioned to reject by the same indoctrination - might help in further distancing yourself from that remnant concern. ‘Satan’ is not only silly in a rational consideration of cosmic forces, but is a ridiculous part of the Abrahamic tradition down to its very first appearance in the tradition.
Thanks for this! Today I learned
My wife has the same issue as you do because of the same reason (although she became an atheist in her teens). She’s working to get over it because she knows my daughter is firm on this.
Yeah I think if my daughter was interested or wanted to join it that would definitely spur me in that direction more.
That’s very interesting. Sounds like satanists should be vegan.
Everyone. Everyone should.
You’re breaking the fourth tenet my friend, but I forgive you because I know you just want what you think is best for people.
Not everybody should be a vegan. There’s plenty to gain from eating meats and vegetables, and humans evolved to be capable of eating both. Some day in the future I hope meat is replaced with either fully synthetic or lab -growth meats simply because I don’t think any living creature should have to live the way food animals (I forget the word) do currently. But for now I will continue eating meat because I am just one man and meat is very tasty.
You’re breaking the first tenet my friend but luckely this is not about salvation but about the path everyone takes. I would like a world where we show compassion to all around us (that includes animals) and ourselves. I wont try to convince you here because convincing yourself is not something i can do. There is no need to tell me your reasons for consuming animals because you do not have to justify your actions before me. But are not really talking to me, are you? Seems more like you are convincing yourself why you will continue to do what you are.
I agree that hopefully one day we will have lab grown meat because people are very bad at change (that includes me, it is kind of a “miracle” that i stopped this one thing). It is the only way for people to not change anything and still stop the animal abuse.
I feel like you didn’t really read what I said. I eat meat because I like it. I have no desire to go out of my way to not eat meat. If I don’t feel like eating meat with a meal then I won’t. I have no internal struggle or “convincing myself that it’s ok”. I despise the way food animals are treated, like they’re not even living creatures, but I feel no guilt in eating the end result.
Frankly you have no right to make such assumptions about my character. You have no idea of my situation any more than I have of yours. If you can be a vegan and be happy, good! I’m happy for you. But I am not a vegan, and I am also happy. Saying “Everybody should be a vegan” is no different than saying “Everybody should run a mile every day”. Sure it’s a generally beneficial lifestyle, but it’s just that: a lifestyle, and it’s not for everybody.
To get this right, your entire argument for continuing to fund the horrors that are inflicted on animals is: I like meat?
No, my argument for continuing to eat meat is “I like meat”. I haven’t made any statements about my eating meat funding the animal-murder machine because we’re not talking about that, we’re talking about how “everybody should be a vegan”.
Once again you haven’t really read what I said. But this time I’m not going to explain myself except to again say: you don’t know me, you don’t know my situation, you don’t know my station in life. You have no right to place these single-minded assumptions upon me.
Edit: you’re not the person I responded to initially, but my point still stands.
Edit2: Ah, I see you’re the one who started this thread.
Hey man, I am not the same person and I have just asked you a question trying to understand your position.
Ok, so are you saying that the meat you eat does not include funding the murder of animals?
My statement wasn’t “everybody should go vegan” my statement was that if you hold these tenets that you should go vegan.
Yep, it sure is compassionate to do what we are doing to animals because we like it.
I’m a fan of TST, and agree with all of their tenets, but I have no intention of ever “joining” or affiliating myself with it as my “religion.”
I don’t need or want anything like that in my life. I don’t want to be a part of any kind of temple or church, regardless of how atheistic they are.
