- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
Community members in a Tennessee school district want to banish Satan from their children’s halls after the formation of a new club was announced.
The After School Satan Club (ASSC) wants to establish a branch in Chimneyrock elementary school in the Memphis-Shelby county schools (MSCS) district.
The ASSC is a federally recognized nonprofit organization and national after-school program with local chapters across the US. The club is associated with the Satanic Temple, though it claims it is secular and “promotes self-directed education by supporting the intellectual and creative interests of students”.
The Satanic Temple makes it clear its members do not actually worship the devil or believe in the existence of Satan or the supernatural. Instead Satan is used as a symbol of free will, humanism and anti-authoritarianism.
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ASS Club.
Nice.
Lmao.
Nice to read. I’m agreably surprized and relieved the kids are displaying this level of creativity. And all for a cause that does good in ways that are not at all obvious at first sight for so many people who see themeselves in grey zones. My only fear is that going such a point of controversy will provoque violent reactictions where other ways of fighting may not have, and thereby not causing to swap contless more enemies they (or we) didn’t need to have. But then again, can anything happen without it being the case?
The violent reactions are the point, precisely due to the Christian sedintary population.
US South is entrenched reactionary. They are the prime target.
Over throwing the Mississippi/MassonDixon line quadrant is going to be key to moving the country forward, and that means breaking the Christian voting/donation block.
They can’t without getting rid of all other extra curricular activities & I love that for them.
Don’t underestimate the evangelicals, they will cut off their nose to store their face and will cancel all the after school programs over this.
Don’t underestimate the evangelicals, they will ignore the laws and act like martyrs when punished for it. Then they will run for office as defenders of the constitution and church, get elected, push even more evangelical agenda on everyone, be exposed as homosexuals, retire and live comfortably ever after.
Yeah they don’t want fair universally applies laws. They want preferential treatment.
This guy understands evangelicals.
There needs to be some hard karma for these people, and hard karma is synthetic and not supernatural. This happens repeatedly because there is no hard karma.
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They literally can’t get away with cancelling all after-school programs.
Yeah but then they won’t have a nose and we’ll have a court case to win so
Just remember what the SCOTUS looks like now.
If SCOTUS did that then I’m sure there would be (checks notes) no consequences whatsoever.
Yeah, I’m not convinced they aren’t itching for the right case to come along to strip seperation of church and state to declare an official state religion.
Thanks Obama
Please tell me that’s sarcasm? The GOP literally just refused to confirm anyone he nominated.
And he should’ve gone to war with them over it instead of assuming that he would win support at next election. McConnell’s “rationale” was “let the American people decide!”
How? What political calculus results in McConnell releasing the hold?
Not all, right? Just the religious ones I hope.
No because this isn’t a religious club.
The Satanic temple is a non-theistic religious group, that’s the entire point. They use religious groups’ own tactics against them. If the school allows the Christian church to host a club, then they must allow the Satanic temple to host a club. TST doesn’t have anything against after-school clubs and the school could simply choose to ban activities funded by religions.
This isn’t a Temple though, it’s an After School Satan Club.
Satanic after-school clubs are usually established in a school district in response to the presence of religious clubs, such as the Christian evangelical Bible group the Good News Club. The temple says it “does not believe in introducing religion into public schools and will only open a club if other religious groups are operating on campus”.
It’s more of an anti-religious club really.
Right, because they’re not evil, but it is still a club organized by a group that is recognized as an organized religion by the US government and has all the protections that come with it. The school will have to choose between allowing all religious groups into schools or none.
I’m just pointing that out since other commenters are insisting that they will have to ban all after school activities as a result which isn’t true
Alright, gotcha. Good point.
Usually the way it works if the school district digs in it’s heels is, TST sues the district. The district realizes it cannot win in court because there is a staggering amount of precedent and law against them. Then the district itself shutters all after school programs officially. Except of course the teacher running the Christian club invites kids to off campus gatherings that occur after school. Then the district gets sued again.
Me and my wife are both members of TST and we LOVE the work they do. The Tenets they promote are loving, self-respecting, and do justice towards an ideal world of Individualism, anti-authoritarianism, and critical thinking - i.e. everything that Christianity and modern conservatism in general are eager to suppress. We regularly donate to them, and we constantly purchase stuff through their store to help support them.
Same, also a member of TST and a practicing romantic Satanist. It’s brought a lot of strength, clarity, and confidence to my life.
That sounds interesting, I know I can try googling but I would love to hear from the source. What is a romantic Satanist?
Check out the book “Compassionate Satanism” by Lilith Starr. You can buy it on TST’s website, I am not sure about availability on other platforms.
Romantic Satanism holds up the depiction of Satan from Romantic period literature as an ideal. The book has a nice analysis of Satan’s use at that point as a rebel against authoritarianism who fought for Enlightenment. Romantic Satanists are non theistic and do not believe in the supernatural. TST is an organization of Romantic Satanists but you don’t have to be a TST member to be one; the seven tenets of TST are a major guiding force as well.
Totally suggest reading the book - it’s fascinating and well written.
Thank you, I will check it out!
Edit: it’s available on Bookshop.org and on Amazon, too.
lights candles, opens box of wine
Well, you see…
box of wineA connoisseur I see 🧐
Oh, yeah, I love wines. Red, white, fizzy white, rosey… all the wines.
It just comes in a box, they’re not going to drink it from the box! I’m sure they’ll pour it into a mug first.
No, we get a box each and drink it like a Capri-Sun.
You don’t know me
Hey now. Some boxed wines have AMAZING taste. Especially in their super-cool naming.
That sounds like the start of ritual to me!
Another member here, are donations tax deductible?
Out of curiosity, how does one join the Satanic Temple? I never hear anything about them except when they show up in the news, and the more I hear about them the more I love them.
Check out their website. You can join there.
Thank you! Joined!
Open question to anyone: how much shit do you get being TST members? Do you just keep it on the downlow? I can very much imagine consequences if it got around at work, etc. Any repercussions may be illegal, but a lot of people are “ask questions later, sort it out in court if it gets there” types.
My work associates are all extremely liberal so they were actually pretty stoked. A couple others had no idea what it was, but LOVED the concept after it was explained to them.
A good friend of mine who’s a Christian Pastor was the only one that was like…shocked. lol. After he chilled out and I got to explain it to him, he was all in favor of it. He’s not a big fan of the mainstream evangalism shit that’s going on, so TST being a way to fight the encroachment of the alt-right/Supply-side Jesus on our government was a big win for him.
I want the Samuel Alito’s Mom’s Abortion Clinic lunchbox, and I want it now! That merch is AMAZING!
Sad that something like this is even needed but the US is full of bigoted hypocrites that want to turn the country into a religious state.
Sad that something like this is even needed but the
USworld is full of bigoted hypocrites that want to turn thecountryworld into a religiousstatewasteland.Hahahah good luck to them if they try to pull any of this shit in Western Europe 🍿
The majority of western countries are nowhere near as religious as the US. Maybe something like Poland.
I’m cool with banning satan shit if we ban all other religious shit in politics and law. Fuck your imaginary friends.
That is the exact goal of The Satanic Temple. They would be incredibly happy to have their own symbols removed, as it would mean all religious symbols would be removed from government institutions. They are trying to scare Christians into voting against their own legislation, basically.
The first amendment in the constitution makes it so the government has to give equal rights to all religions, so the Christians can’t remove the Satanic symbols without also voting to remove their own.
The Satanic Temple is an atheistic organization that uses Satan metaphorically, mostly to troll Christians.
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
As you can see from this uproar, it works quite well too.
Yeah, I know. Good.
The Satanic Temple isn’t religious.
Thats a complicated thing to say because the ST functions as a real religion in the US which is the basis for why they’re able to challenge things in court. If they didn’t qualify as a sincere religion their mission wouldn’t work, and that “sincerely held” qualification is actually challenged in some cases. Recently this qualification became an even bigger deal when people claimed they had religious beliefs against vaccination. In the past its been applied to people challenging the draft on behalf of sincerely held religious beliefs.
I don’t think they’re a religion like Christianity though, maybe a pseudoreligion or civil religion.
I know, but they’re using religious pretense in the service of freeing us all from religious oppression.
The uproar is the point.
The Satanic Temple makes it clear its members do not actually worship the devil or believe in the existence of Satan or the supernatural.
But somehow conservative Christians believe that there are huge swaths of people who agree that their religion is 100% correct but worship the weak bad guy character.
(Which is not to mention that there are actually multiple bad guys who got combined, Satan and Lucifer and The Snake were originally different people)
“Well, they are Satanists. They are just lying.”
That last part is intriguing. Do you have any more info that I could read about how/when their unholy trinity was combined into one evil deity?
I know that many of the modern misconceptions (according to Biblical canon anyway) about Hell came from Dante’s Inferno. So perhaps it’s also something like that?
Oh, it starts way before Dante. Hell is actually a sort of mismatch of different beliefs. Babylonian, Norse, Buddhist and Greco-Roman belief systems all had an underground afterlife with variable ideas of punishment for the wicked. The Bible just mentions “Gehenna” which was actually a real place on earth where trash was burned. Basically think of someone talking about the local dump. Thing about trash though is it doesn’t really burn eternally, it just burns away and it was likely being used as a metaphor. The usage of it also doesn’t really mention an eternity, links it with the devil or any of that. People really like rhe idea of someone getting their jist desserts after death so a idea of “bad people just stop existing” was probably kind of doomed to not be super popular. Basically that just leaves a door open for folk belief to stuff somebody else in the Hades/Hel/Ereshkigal role and carry on having a hell just like they did before.
All told Christianity and it’s family of belief systems is actually a fairly late adopter of the belief in something like a hell. It’s closest thematic relative is probably Buddhist Naraka which was first written about around the 400 BC but there’s not a lot of scriptural evidence that anything like that was intended for Christians. At best Judaism has an idea of an afterlife where one is consumed by shame but it sounds more like what happens when a kid is told their parent is disappointed in them and to go to their room.
The wiki article does a decent job. Basically the mentions of him in the texts describe different beings because they were written by different authors for different audiences with much different views. The serpent story has echos of other bronze age ones in that area and the text says as much that El put him there. The story in Job looks like a Cannite legend that got reimagined in Judaism. At some point the people of the region believed in desert spirits that would inhabit people causing them to go crazy and kill other people.
Due to the first exile Judaism started inventing an explanation for why they weren’t allowed to freely practice by imagining a being that was opposed to El. Because the pattern had broken. The pattern of the past was: everything fine, Jews sin, god punishs, jess repent, everything fine. However, this time they were trying to repent and weren’t able to. Which meant that something was blocking it. Hence Satan. The accuser.
By the time Paul came around the Book of Enoch was popular and to him Satan was a leader of a celestial army of angels. Which is why Paul said that had they known they were killing the son of God they still would have. That were not just following El. Off his writings we see things like Revelations and John where Greco-Roman celestial powers were merged with Satan and Lucifer together.
There was never an idea that someone had 2900 years ago and Christianity is following it. Like all myths it is a combination of different fables, attempts by people to explain their world, and thinkers continuing on a tradition.
I really wish Lilith stayed in the story, I always liked that version of the garden better.
Just curious, do you think she was part of one of the originals and not just a combo of some “heretical” Jewish texts and ideas of the Middle Ages? Legit asking.
I just think it’s a better version of the story. If your going to be writing some religious fantasy, might as well make it as interesting as possible.
Which wiki are you talking about exactly? Did I miss something?
Just the regular wikipedia article about Satan subcategory Historical Development
I can’t comment on Lucifer and Satan but serpent reverence showed up in a lot of ancient matriarchal religions before they were displaced by modern patriarchal ones.
This doesn’t apply to only Abrahamic religions but shows up in Greek mythology too. Apollo slaying Gaia’s serpent messengers at the temple of Delphi for example.
Gnostic teachings, which are a form of Christianity, see the serpent as divine wisdom (Sophia) and the old testament God as the demiurge (Devil). Jesus as the good God. And Lucifer as the light of reason and not a villain.
But Gnosticism is basically a dead form of alternative Christian belief. So I have no idea what the modern church’s take is on these three entities.
It’s now thought the number of truly matriarchal beliefs in antiquity have been grossly overstated. Your comment belies a strong Judaeo-Christian ethos and historiography, which is all fine of course, but the feminists reinterpreting history isn’t divinely wise at all, but political.
God is omniscient and thus knew exactly what Lucifer would do. Angels don’t have free will. Lucifer did exactly what God intended. God wanted Man to have free will. Free will requires the choice between good and evil. Man is the “bad guy” as well as the “good guy”.
If god is omniscient they would know exactly what everyone is going to choose, nullifying free will entirely
This is a great example of why I don’t believe free will is a coherent concept outside of religion. It’s basically a perk that negates God’s omniscience as it applies to you, but if you don’t believe in God, it’s meaningless.
Free will is the ability to be belligerent until death.
If there exists a being that experiences time the same way we experience space, do we have any less free will just because the being can continue knowing about it before it happened? The person is making the choice, not the being that knows about the choice.
Is that true. Could he know what we will do but what we do is still our choice without influencw
God is supposedly all powerful and all knowing. God created the universe and everything in it. He did so with the full knowledge of everything that would happen in advance. He chose to do it anyway, despite knowing all the suffering it would cause. And then he chose to create a realm of eternal suffering (either by literal fire and brimstone, or by ‘absence of God’, it doesn’t really matter) for those fleetingly finite-lived humans that he created knowing they would screw up. Less than a hundred years of life in exchange for billions of years of torment. And he created them in a way that is fully capable of realizing how horrible a way to treat someone this is. It’s nothing but cruelty of an unimaginable scale. Part of the reason I don’t believe the Christian God exists is because I can’t accept something that evil. It’s too horrifying.
Most people that believe or even don’t believe don’t usually follow it to its logical conclusion like that, but I concur. The opening lines of Richard Dawkin’s God Delusion says something similarly.
If god existed, my driving force would be to kill them
Like the Klingons. Lol
True, if somebody comes from the future and knows what you’re going to eat tomorrow morning, that doesn’t make it suddenly not your choice. But to add to the other comment, an important point is that he made us all as well. Because if a god creates you according to his grand plan—knowing full well every single decision you will ever make—it is no longer a choice. Every one of your decisions were predetermined from the start.
Something I like to think about is that it is impossible to go against the Christian god’s plan. If such a thing were possible, then this god would not be omnipotent nor omniscient. As such, everybody that has ever gone to hell did so because god designed them to.
My knowing what you shall do in no way invalidates your free will. That is invalidated by the futility of your choices. Totally man made and not to be confused with determinism.
I think its still possible that I could freely choose my actions and you knowing what they would be would not invalidate that it was an action I choose based on my own free will.
yup
How is that a choice. If they know exactly what’s going to happen I don’t have the power to do anything except for what is going to happen. If you only have an apple at home, you can’t get any other kind of food and your gonna die if you don’t eat the apple, did you really choose to eat the apple?
Take the garden of Eden story.
Did God know that if he put the tree there then the people would eat from it?
Did God have a choice to put that tree there?
Could God have made a world where they did not eat that fruit?
If he picked this possible world out of all possible worlds based on an outcome that he had in mind, then we’re just playing out the parts that he assigned for us.
Ok Calvin
For those downvoting the above, @[email protected] is making a reference to John Calvin, who is considered to be an OG determinist.
(Determinism: The view that God determines every event that occurs in the history of the world.)
The funny thing about the free will argument is that theoretically if you could build a galaxy powered “super” computer, you could potentially track every single movement of every single particle in the entirety of the universe, so that level or scientific inquiry nullifies free will.
That’s where it gets interesting though! A set of all numbers cannot contain itself! It’s out of control! Call the alphabots!
If god is omniscient they would know exactly what everyone is going to choose, nullifying free will entirely
Yeah but if God knows every choice that’ll be made ahead of time, it doesn’t mean he’s taking the choice away from the person actually making the choice, they still go through the motion of making the actual choice, and hence, they have free will to make the choice. God just predicted it ahead of time.
Yeah but if God knows every choice that’ll be made ahead of time, it doesn’t mean he’s taking the choice away from the person actually making the choice
That argument would only make sense if god wasn’t the supposed creator of the universe and everything in it. If god created everything, is omnipotent and omniscient then at the moment of creation she would have known every single event and circumstance in that person’s life leading up to making a certain choice and she would have been able to create the universe differently so that a different choice would have been made.
If you set up all the dominoes, you cannot claim the 100,00th domino falling over wasn’t your doing because you only tipped over the first one.
That argument would only make sense if god wasn’t the supposed creator of the universe and everything in it. If god created everything, is omnipotent and omniscient then at the moment of creation she would have known every single event and circumstance in that person’s life leading up to making a certain choice and she would have been able to create the universe differently so that a different choice would have been made.
This actually makes my point though.
God knowing everything doesn’t mean that God made you make that choice, God let you make that choice, but knew what that choice would be ahead of time.
You still had free will, you still were the one that had the neurons fire off in your brain, and you made the choice. God was able to predict that choice ahead of time with 100% accuracy.
On a side note, I love that you use ‘she’ for God.
God knowing everything doesn’t mean that God made you make that choice, God let you make that choice, but knew what that choice would be ahead of time.
If she intentionally chose those circumstances to happen so that the choice would be made that way, which she would have to have done being omniscient and omnipotent then that choice being made is 100% her responsibility.
If I put a child alone in a room with a powered on electric band saw, is it the child’s fault for getting their arm sawed off ? They had free will and could have chosen to not go near the saw. Or is it my fault for putting a child in that situation?
If she intentionally chose those circumstances
Why are you assuming she chose them, versus just letting them happen via free will, mapping them out ahead of time, precog style?
If I put a child alone in a room with a powered on electric band saw, is it the child’s fault for getting their arm sawed off ? They had free will and could have chosen to not go near the saw. Or is it my fault for putting a child in that situation?
The childs.
We need better RNG, clearly. My D&D character should have died by now!
We need better RNG
This is what happened when you don’t seed your RNG.
Ah, but that is the point, until Man chose it hadn’t happened, it is the precognition paradox. Until the event occurs, what is known is all the possibilities.
That’s… just like your opinion man.
Then god isnt omnipotent, cause you know, it lacks the power of whats actually to come and is only good at knowing all the hypotheticals. Or may be lacks omnicience, but one could argue that knowing all the possibilities counts.
All that matters is that its lacking something, when it shouldnt
Spirituality is all opinion man.
But no, it not lacking anything.
Except all morality and empathy
How would an explanation of a religious concept have morality or empathy? Words don’t generally have Human emotions in my experience.
This is a long standing joke - what do you call someone who believes in Satan?
A Christian.
Got sources for this? Not that I don’t believe you I’m just interested in reading up on exactly what you’re referring to.
Short of it is that the concept of Satan didn’t exist at the time Genesis was written.
From a more literary perspective, there’s nothing that directly connects the serpent in the Garden of Eden, the interlocutor in Job, and the later mentions of Satan in the Hebrew and Greek scriptures (and there’s not a lot of direct mentions in the Hebrew scriptures). You can kinda make it work if you read between the lines, but fundamentalists will be the first to say you’re not supposed to read between the lines of the bible. To them, you take the word as it is written and nothing else.
Naturally, this rigid reading of the bible doesn’t work out so well for their beliefs.
To take the Answers in Genesis article on the subject (just because they’re a prominent fundamentalist organization), their reasoning is that the bible shows that Satan can enter into a physical being and control them. Notice that they leave out any reasoning showing that Satan did so in that particular case. He could have, and therefore, he did.
So if Satan wanted to, for example, make it so everyone would fail to meet the entry requirements for heaven laid out in the old testament, and end up on hell… could he, theoretically of course, pretend to be the son of God and “change the rules” so that sin is totally ok as long as you say sorry before you die?
Asking for a friend.
All hail Satania!
Yep, that’s the good stuff. I can hear that laugh in my head lol
The outrage these assholes are feeling is what the rest of us feel every time we see them trying to force their dogma into every facet of society.
Except ours is actually justified.
Way to miss the point and misunderstand it in terms of polarized politics. There is no “ours” and “theirs”.
Not everything is a debate with multiple valid points of view. The notion that your right to a belief somehow encompasses a right to inflict that belief on everybody else isn’t an ideological position; it’s a declaration of violence.
Fuck dishonest moral relativism. 2+2=4 and one person’s religious freedom ends where another person’s begins. Those are facts, not opinions, and if you disagree you’re just wrong.
Neither is justified, theirs is just hypocritical
Excuse me, but being outraged at having your rights attacked – your actual rights, in contrast to the religious nutjobs’ imagined “right” to inflict their beliefs on others – is entirely fucking justified!
Sorry you’re right, I misread the post. I thought the poster was saying that we feel outrage by their clubs. On reread it’s clear I interpreted it wrong (my own fault) and agree.
If it makes you feel any better I was interpreting it the same way and appreciate your sacrifice.
I’m amazingly good at forgetting my own mistakes. It’s how I maintain such a high opinion of myself despite being so deeply flawed.
I’m pretty sure this is how normal people maintain their self-esteem.
Unfortunately I do not have that trait myself.
Need more groups.
Every city that allows religion in a public school needs a ASS club
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, nor prohibiting the free exercise thereof.
Everyone gets to be part of whatever religion they want, Peace is a lie, there is only passion.
What do you call someone who believes in satan?
Christian.
Yes, yes, there are other Abrahamic religions… The point is that the only group who actually believe in Satan and therefore are the ones who afford Satan a place in their society are the ones complaining.
Obviously a red herring. The Devil went down to Georgia, looking for a soul to steal.
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In the 60s my best friend started the Organization for Atheists or OFA in response to the young christian group in our high school. They even had a chant" OFA OFA OFA goodness sakes!!!
