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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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)
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
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.
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.
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.
Is that true. Could he know what we will do but what we do is still our choice without influencw
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 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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
Reading the outrage comments always tickles me lol. Welcome to the point, bitches!
It’s a bit frustrating that it doesn’t make any of them actually reflect on their hypocrisy though. They just double down on the hypocrisy with no questions asked.
Were are they? I want popcorn! Edit nvm, The article was longer than i The post.
From the full article (had to click the link):
Jenny Kincaid, a grandparent of a student at Chimneyrock, told the local Memphis news station Action News 5: “I’m about to come unglued right now. I cannot believe … this is a kindergarten-through-fifth-grade school and they’re letting a satanic club come in here?”
The MSCS interim superintendent, Toni Williams, reportedly said there were no plans to prevent the club from operating in the district.
“I do not support the beliefs of this organization at the center of recent headlines,” Williams said. “I do, however, support the law.”
The Satanic Temple does a little trolling.
The Satanic branding is basically the trolling and meant to be provocative, at least that’s what they say on their About Us page. That’s one reason other (more insane) Satanists hate the ST, because they basically openly admit to appropriating Satanic and pagan imagery in jest which is sacrilegious to “real” Satanists and some pagans who actually believe the symbols have power. It works in the sense the ST is a political advocacy group though because it freaks some Christians out.
