The American Civil Liberties Union said Thursday that the Saucon Valley School District had agreed to pay $200,000 in attorney’s fees and to provide The Satanic Temple and the After School Satan Club it sponsors the same access to school facilities as is provided to other organizations.
The ACLU filed the lawsuit in March after the district rescinded its earlier approval to allow the club to meet following criticism. The After School Satan Club, with the motto “Educatin’ with Satan,” had drawn protests and even a threat in February that prompted closure of district schools for a day and the later arrest of a person in another state.
Saucon Valley school district attorney Mark Fitzgerald told reporters in a statement that the district denies having discriminated against The Satanic Temple, its club or “the approximately four students” who attended its meetings. He said the district’s priorities were education and the safety of students and staff.
I assume the Satanic Temple is the non-theist one, which doesn’t actually believe in Satan, and just uses it to troll religious nutjobs.
It’s a pity the Christian right are invariably functionally illiterate, or they would have known to not kick themselves in the dick.
Why would you assume anything? The answer is provided in the article itself. Why can so few people be arsed to read the information provided before leaping to an attempt at pithy commentary?
The group … views Satan not as a supernatural being but as “a literary figure that represents a metaphorical construct of rejecting tyranny over the human mind and spirit.” The club’s programs, they say, focus on “science, critical thinking, creative arts, and good works for the community.”
(Boldface mine. “science” comes to us from Latin’s “scientia”: knowledge)
The irony of assuming something instead of learning/confirming it from the information provided, as regards an article about an organization whose stated focus is on knowledge and critical thinking, is disappointing.
Tbf they’re using one of the internet’s laws to their favour. I forgot the name, so I’ll do the same thing and call it Godwin’s law: when you want to know something you post an incorrect answer (or in this case not knowing the answer, they basically wrote the right answer) and someone will correct you soon enough.
It’s lazy tbh, but it helps in case you don’t know how deep the rabbit hole is gonna be and don’t have the mental capacity or time to invest in it. This is specially relevant to people who have ADHD or other similar attention disorders.
P.S. I did end up looking up the actual name of the law and it’s Cunningham’s law, so I corrected myself in this case.
Let’s get meta! lol
Godwin’s Law: As an online discussion grows longer (regardless of topic or scope), the probability of a comparison to Nazis or Adolf Hitler approaches 1.
Cunningham’s Law: The best way to get the right answer on the internet is not to ask a question, it’s to post the wrong answer.
Correct on The Satanic Temple (TST) being non-theistic. While it did start off as trolling, it has coalesced into a religion of its own (much to the chagrin of the nutty christians here), just without the superstition used to coerce people in abrahamic religions.
The idea that people take a troll religion made up to challenge laws seriously is as absurd to me as the laws they challenge, if not more so.
Man, I love threads about the TST, because there’s always people like you who absolutely shit themselves over any mention of them, and write small novels about how stupid they are.
It’s really all very entertaining.
I would say far less absurd than most other religions. Looking at their tenets, its basically how descent society should function anyway.
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.
Fear not my brother or sister or nonbinary friend, for ye too shall one day be touched by His Noodly-appendage. Ramen.
Tbf, to really believe the things that organized religion tells you, you have to be on the wrong side of the IQ bell curve, so it’s not really something they have the ability to avoid.
IQ has very little to do with this. There are some very intelligent people who are also very religious.
A lot of people confuse intelligence with wisdom. If you considered a human mind like a computer, intelligence would correspond to the CPU and RAM, which determine how fast you think and how much memory you have (and how good it is) whereas wisdom is like the software that runs on the computer.
Install shitty software, and the most powerful, fastest computer will just give you shit. Garbage in, garbage out, as they say.
You take a guy like Elon Musk, for example. Clearly intelligent. Definitely not slow. But he’s spectacularly wrong about many things. Because he was not taught right when he was a kid, and he then learned the wrong lessons in life afterwards. Bad software, bad data. Still very intelligent.
Yeah there’s no good data to back up the idea that IQ is correlated with religiosity. Also any time IQ is used as a broad determining factor like “low IQ people shouldn’t be allowed to x” the next step is basically applying the same logic the Nazis would to determine which humans are suitable.
That’s the Church of Satan, the Satanic Temple and them deny the legitimacy of each other. The Church of Satan accepts all of Satan’s supposed ideology even the “bad” things, and the Satanic Temple was basically constructed as a “good” alternative/challenge to Christian political influence from a logical positivist perspective with individualism and neoliberal ideology commodified and branded with Satanic iconography. It’s all pretty stupid IMO, aside from the way they can mount legal challenges. The fact they need to exist to do this is absurd but it is what it is I guess.
Iirc TST doesn’t deny anything about, or really ever mention CoS. CoS doesn’t like TST because of the same reasons you listed (basically they don’t like being conflated or associated with TST, cus their super cereal).
I personally love the absurdity of TST, and heavily believe in their mission/philosophies. Lucian Graves has some issues, but overall they track overwhelmingly on the side of good. Am also a lifelong gothy metal kid so the aesthetic also pleases me.
TST doesn’t deny anything about, or really ever mention CoS.
It’s right at the top section of their About Us page which provides a link to this long article about the difference, complete with infographics.
And yeah they’ve branded it with those aesthetics as opposed to cottagecore or something soft, so it can have the affect that serves the idea of what the church is the best.
