A Satanist Reads the Bible: Recent Episodes
A Satanist Reads the Bible
Exploring the Bible, Christianity, and other religions and their sacred texts through the lens of Satanism in order to reinvent religion for myself. Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/asatanistreadsthebible/support
Today we'll be tracing the influence of dualistic cosmologies on the development of religious thought. In examining these historical narratives, we'll see how ancient beliefs influence modern religious thought. From there, we'll pivot to an examination of the concept of mind as it is understood in both historical and modern contexts. Challenging the Cartesian notion of isolated, atomic _egos_, we'll explore how the mind extends beyond the physical confines of the brain into the symbolic order of human interaction and language, mirroring the cosmic battles depicted in myths like the War in Heaven and positing a reevaluation of how ancient wisdom informs modern understanding.
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The word “sin” drips with centuries of religious baggage, conjuring images of fire and brimstone preachers and penitent souls begging for redemption. But what lies beneath the surface of this concept? In this episode, we’ll embark on a journey through the history and philosophy of sin, tracing its etymological origins, its central role in Christian thought, and its surprising resonances with ideas from Greek philosophy, Lacanian psychoanalysis, and the religious traditions of India. We’ll explore sin’s paradoxical nature as both a stain on the human condition and a path to transformation and transcendence—the pharmacology of sin.
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Within some cleft of history emerged the fallenness of humanity.
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Transcript with citations available at asatanistreadsthebible.com
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Transcript available at asatanistreadsthebible.com
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Transcript with citations available at asatanistreadsthebible.com
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Transcript with citations available at asatanistreadsthebible.com
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Transcript with citations available at asatanistreadsthebible.com
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Another episode of A Satanist Goes to the Movies. As I mentioned in the episode on Hitchcock's Rope, this is a project I've been wanting to do for a while, a look at the religious themes in the films of Martin Scorsese and in particular at a trilogy of films, The Last Temptation of Christ, Bringing Out the Dead, and Silence. This episode will focus on the first of these, The Last Temptation of Christ from 1988.
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In this episode I'll be delving into film criticism with an analysis of the 1948 film Rope, produced and directed by Alfred Hitchcock and starring John Dall, Farley Granger, and James Stewart. Rope has fascinated me since I first saw it earlier this year; it's now one of my favorite films and, in my opinion, and although it enjoys considerably less fame than staples like Psycho and Vertigo, Hitchcock's best. Its central theme, as I'll be arguing here, is the relation between the life-world of human symbolic reality and the Real itself, and as such makes an excellent example for exploring some of the themes of metaphysical idealism from my recent episodes. At the same time, I thought it would make an excellent warmup for a larger film criticism project I'd like to attempt, a look at the religious themes in the films of Martin Scorsese.
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For this one we’ll be focusing on the story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden as it appears in the second and third chapters of the Book of Genesis.
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I thought it might be fun to revisit the topics and themes of my earliest episodes, starting with my first essay, "Six Days of Creation and the Sabbath." It's been almost five years now and both my knowledge and my writing skills have improved immensely, and my perspective and positions have shifted as well. The circumstances certainly warrant a second look at things.
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A Satanist Reads the Bible continues today with our series on the rising threat of Christian fascism in America. Today we'll be looking at the thought of two Christians, one early 20th century German and one from our own day, respectively, Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Eric Metaxas.
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In this essay, we’ll see some striking and deeply troubling parallels to Germany in the 1920s, parallels which should be of grave concern to anyone who doesn’t want to see genocidal fascists take control of the most powerful economy and military in the history of the world.
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Today I’ll be arguing that this progression is amplified by a dialectic within certain threads of modern Christianity, an internal contradiction that pushes those threads further and further in a fascist direction.
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As I’ve mentioned before, ecumenical phenomenology has an enormous capacity to answer a wide range of difficult philosophical questions. This episode will be exploring some of those questions and the answers that ecumenical phenomenology provides.
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Human activity involves the redistribution of resources, including informational resources, to meet individual and collective needs. This process occurs through various systems, including biological, technological, and social systems, and is driven by the laws of thermodynamics and the increase of entropy over time. A distribution system is defined by its primary distributionary resource, which is the resource it is primarily responsible for distributing, and includes feed resources, which fuel the system, infrastructure, which facilitates the distribution of the primary distributionary resource, and the territory in which the system operates. Distribution systems may be analyzed at different levels of scope depending on the primary distributionary resource being studied and the purpose of the analysis. Normal order refers to the norms and expectations that govern distribution within a distribution system and is established through normative ordering cartels, which have normal order as their primary distributionary resource. Normative ordering occurs through ordering communication and results in the acceptance of a new normal order. Collaborative competition is the context in which many social systems operate, characterized by a combination of cooperation and competition within a shared normal order. The state of war is the exception to collaborative competition, involving a disagreement about the normal order and a struggle for control of ordering communication. Normal order is established through either the threat of violence or rational agreement on a non-violent alternative.
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Many of my recent episodes have been focused on explicating my central philosophical doctrine, ecumenical phenomenology, a transcendental and phenomenological idealist ontology of abstract reality. This episode continues that series, but I have at this point a complex net of ideas spread over several episodes and so I think it would be worth, as my patrons have suggested, laying it all out in one place as simply and briefly as I can.
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People in modern societies and especially in modern Western societies tend to value individualism over conformity. This is certainly a paramount value for we Satanists, Satan being effectively the first individualist. But if we draw a simple equation between individualism on the one hand and freedom and good on the other, I think we’re being catastrophically naïve and blind to the ways in which our individuality is both produced and manipulated within societies of control.
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This essay begins a series on dystopian films, a series which will explore the way our present circumstances are related to and portrayed in such films, as well as the ways in which such media actually disguise and reinforce those circumstances rather than waking us up to them or inspiring us to work against them and change things for the better.
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I mentioned in a prior episode that my theory of ecumenical phenomenology, which I’ve been exploring over the last few episodes, is rooted in two separate theories—platonism and phenomenology—along with a third which, given a small tweak, translates between them, allowing the phenomenological ideas to answer the questions posed by the platonist ideas and vice versa. Today we’ll be exploring that third theory, the connectionist theory of mind.
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Heidegger wants to redirect us from our normal ways of thinking about things and he does this by using language in ways both novel and tied to ancient Greek, ways that focus in particular on processes, and he focuses on processes because he had come to see the world as something active and dynamic but found the rest of his society looking at the world as something static and dead.
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Back in January of this year I released an episode, “Pema Chödrön and the Sublation of Mental Illness,” and mentioned that it marked a significant but nevertheless largely invisible shift of the trajectory of the show: instead of just collating the ideas of others, as I had mostly been doing since 2018 when I started this whole thing, I would start using episodes to develop and present my own theories. The reaction I got from that and the next eleven episodes, up through the last episode on Judas, was very positive. This episode is going to mark a similar shift: rather than using each episode to develop a different idea, I am now going to be directing this project towards the development and presentation of a single philosophical and sociological theory: ecumenical phenomenology.
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The story of Judas may have been the first thing I noticed about Christianity that didn’t quite add up.
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I’ll be arguing that the current opposition to the basic rights of the fertile is not fundamentally about the rights of the alleged fetus people but rather a significant component of a broader campaign, fundamentally patriarchal and ongoing since the Neolithic Revolution, to enslave and exploit human labor, and that the desired status quo of those opposed to these rights itself constitutes the enslavement of the fertile so as to control the reproduction of labor.
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Resources for trans and queer people in crisis
In March of 2022 Senator and former Florida Governor Rick Scott released his new 11 point plan to reshape the Republican Party. It’s clear from this that Scott has aspirations beyond his current senate seat; with this plan, he has set out a vision not just for his home state of Florida but for the entire party of which he is a member. His plan, as outlined on his website rescueamerica.com, is not mere political strategy but rather a comprehensive vision for the future of America. Given all of this, we are led to ask from what lens he is viewing this country in the first place, and one need only look at his words in order to understand that perspective.
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Mass shootings are the latent and intrinsic violence of the patriarchy spilling over the boundaries in which the patriarchs work to contain it.
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What can Ancient Egypt tell us about the development of religion and civilization?
The answer is: a great deal, more than I could possibly fit into a single episode. As part of a broader research project into economics, I’ve been studying various histories, and the history of Ancient Egypt has been particularly fascinating and informative. One of the world’s earliest civilizations, it extends over 3000 years of history, from the Bronze Age and through the Iron Age into classical antiquity. As I mentioned in a recent episode, the Great Pyramid was more ancient to Cleopatra, the last pharaoh, than Cleopatra is to us.
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The situation is this: our lifespans create a partial social amnesia, in that, while we have other documentation of the past, living memories of events are limited to the generation of humans presently alive on this planet. This prevents us from getting a clear picture of how the human condition has changed over the course of our history and in particular in the very recent past (i.e. the modern era and beyond). Really only for the past century, out of three million years of human history, has media had such a pervasive role in our lives. But our individual memories don’t extend back even that far, and this fog, this inability to directly compare the conditions of our existence from era to era, blinds us to the reality that our technologies and our media fundamentally change what it is to be a human being, almost always for the worse.
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The notion that the general public should have a general education is a modern one. In ancient Mesopotamia, education in writing had been reserved for the ruling class, the wealthy elite, the religious elite, and a class of scribes, and similar situations remained the norm throughout most of history. As we’ll continue to see in this essay, the elite have reasons for minimizing the transmission of knowledge.
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We certainly should not follow Kierkegaard so far into faith that we abandon reason, but we must recognize that this was the failure of Kierkegaard and his beliefs and not of faith, which he saw clearly. Rather, we must ask, given our belief in reason, in what may we have faith?
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The study of emergence in philosophy and the sciences generally concerns properties which do not exist at the individual level but which emerge at the collective level. I posit the existence of a contrary phenomenon, demergence, in which properties that exist at the individual level disappearat the collective level or transform at that level into something very different.
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Hail and welcome. Over the month of December I put a great deal of time into working on a new music project, Cyrus Dark and the Symbols of Reverence, which I’ve mentioned a few times on the show and on my Patreon feed. During breaks between tracking parts and mixing songs, I surfed various musician subreddits (ostensibly as a way of keeping my brain in a musical mindset during a break; more likely it was just an excusable means of procrastination). I became fascinated in particular by certain patterns I was noticing in the questions posted on the music theory subreddit, patterns which matched up with sentiments expressed by many of my music students. I’ve been studying music and music theory for decades and worked primarily as a professional musician up until the pandemic, so this is an area in which I consider myself to be an expert, and I spent some time answering questions on the subreddit by way of correcting various misunderstandings about what music theory is and how it works. As I thought about it, I began to develop a theory about the nature of those misunderstandings, and that theory is the subject of today’s episode.
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The focus of today’s essay is on an idea I’m calling the sublation of mental illness. In many ways, this will be a follow up to an essay I published in January of 2020: “Satanism, Mental Health, and the Search for Happiness.” I consider that one of my best essays, and it took on a special meaning for me over the two years following its publication as my everyday struggle with mental illness transformed into a struggle with mental illness in the context of a catastrophic global pandemic.
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I think that certain groups, my audience among them, should exercise caution and should pay very close attention to what’s being said on the radio, at political events, and in popular books. By way of doing exactly this, I’ll be looking at a recent book by popular Christian pastor John Mark Comer entitled Live No Lies: Recognize and Resist the Three Enemies that Sabotage Your Peace.
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Today I’m going to be returning to the subject of Critical Race Theory, which was the subject of my recent episode The Critics of Critical Race Theory. The focus in this episode will be on a particular idea that is not one that I came up with but was rather hit upon by my partner during a long nighttime drive, an idea which I’ll be referring to as the divine reward attribution fallacyand which we explored and developed through several conversations.
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'Let’s begin with a simple metaphysical proposition: Satan exists. In order to determine what we can say about this proposition—whether it’s true or false, whether it’s knowable or unknowable—it’s hardly surprising that we have to determine exactly what is meant by the word “Satan;” perhaps more surprising that we also have to determine exactly what is meant by the word “exists.” In the immortal words of former U.S. President Bill Clinton, it depends on what the meaning of the word “is” is.'
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This episode concerns the recent activities of the Satanic Temple, which is likely the most popular and most well-known Satanist organization.
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Reading the Phaedo, it struck me how similar Plato’s ideas about the soul are to those of Christianity, and this in turn led me to an investigation in which I compared ideas about the soul and the afterlife held by the ancient Hebrew people to those held by the early Christians, and those in turn to those presented in Plato’s dialogues and the other works of Ancient Greek philosophy.
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This essay, and likely others in the future, will focus on... the music of Deathspell Omega and its relationship to my religious Satanism.
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I find that LaVey’s ideas clearly fall in line with those that were either exclusive to Rand or shared between her and Nietzsche, and this is the thesis that I’ll be defending in this essay.
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I’ll be looking into the history and tenets of Critical Race Theory and the opinions of its critics, and seeking to determine whether it is indeed a “prejudicial ideological tool,” as the GOP suggests.
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I thought the best way to get back to work would be to get back to my roots, and indeed to the roots of all Western philosophy, that being the ancient Athenian philosophers Socrates and Plato, whose work is of central relevance to Satanism, as I’ll be exploring in this essay.
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This is the question I’ll be examining in today’s episode: do artificially intelligent programs or entities have souls? And furthermore, what does AI mean for our own souls?
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Artificial intelligence is not something that emerges into the world in a neutral way, or which affects the world in a neutral way. Artificial intelligence is something created by humans within the context of a particular society and period of history; that context determines the nature of the particular artificial intelligence that we create, as well as the environment in which it operates and the scope of its potential influence. This being the case, a proper understanding of how artificial intelligence influences human society and the possibilities for how it may do so in the future begins with a study of human society as it presently exists. This is a very broad topic and a full survey is well beyond the scope of the entire Satanist Reads the Bible project, but we can hone in on some key points that are particularly relevant to the subject of artificial intelligence.
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In the backstory of Frank Herbert’s Dune universe is an event called the Butlerian Jihad, a human revolt against “thinking machines.” Herbert himself provided few details of the Jihad in his books but the idea of a future without computers is foundational to many of the themes in his stories. The underlying philosophical justification for the Jihad, as later recorded in one of the Dune universe’s core religious texts, the Orange Catholic Bible, reads as follows: “Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind.” Though Herbert provided little other information in the six original Dune novels, it is clear that, in the universe of his stories, artificial intelligence had become a catastrophic problem for humanity. Now at the edge of advances in technology which have made artificial intelligence a reality, we have some questions to ask about what that means for us as humans.
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Cajete’s Native science has as much to tell us about religion as it does about modern Western science. For Cajete and for many of the indigenous peoples of the world, the entire universe is in process. Everything is in constant flux: the material world, our lives within it, and even the divine itself are all shifting, changing, evolving.
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The Nye-Ham debate is emblematic of the broader relationship between science and religion. These two fields of discourse are generally perceived as being both fully disjunct and largely in conflict with one another. Certainly, science and religion do come into conflict—the Young Earth creationist claim and the scientific consensus claim about the age of the Earth cannot both be correct—but the relationship between the two fields of discourse is generally more complex than that and, while conflicts do arise, I don’t see them as being necessary or intrinsic to either science or religion.
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I’ll open by summarizing my opinions on science: It’s good that science be trusted by the general public because science warrants that trust. As I said earlier, that’s a trust that I intend to defend over the course of these essays. That said, popular beliefs in the nature of science, scientific progress, scientific knowledge, scientific method, and the like, are generally very dogmatic, inaccurate, and at times approach an unwarranted degree of near-religious reverence.
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How is it that evangelical Christians, who have long advocated for America to more fully endorse their strict and bigoted interpretation of Christian morality, simultaneously endorsed someone who is so clearly morally destitute by their standards, or by any standard?
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An examination of how religion and ideology can be healthy rather than toxic.
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I’ve never pinned down what exactly I mean by nihilism in anything more than a cursory way. This episode will remedy that deficiency and explore why nihilism, such as I construe it, is a pathological ideology.
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This month’s series will largely be a continuation of the November series, which was originally planned to be an exposition of some of the problematic aspects of religion.
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A look at some of the arguments for and counterarguments against antireligious atheism.
This episode is available in video format on YouTube
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Do American Jews, Christians, and Muslims believe in the same god? Nominally, at least, the answer seems to be an obvious yes: I think Americans whose religion falls into the Abrahamic tradition in general identify their god as being the same god worshipped by other such Americans. But in practical terms, that may not be the case; even American Christians may functionally believe in a different god than other American Christians.
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In this episode I’ll be examining two particularly fanatical manifestations of religious belief, with discussion on Aum Shinrikyo and a look at the Branch Davidians.
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I’ve generated five stipulative definitions for magic: stage magic is a performative art in which neither performer nor audience truly believes that magic is taking place; magic proper is what we find in fictional accounts such as Harry Potter; type N pseudomagic describes real phenomena outside of present scientific models which could be studied, explained, and understood, but which have not been; type K pseudomagic describes real phenomena which are magic-like in character and which are explained by present scientific models; and type P pseudomagic is magic performed for the purpose of creating some personal psychological effect. Type K pseudomagic does indeed exist, with electromagnetism being an example. The potential existence and nature of pseudomagics type N and P will be explored in this essay.
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The questions I’m aiming to answer are one, whether there are any phenomena like electromagnetism which might be considered magic if we considered their properties independently of their realness (in other words, whether there are any other forms of type K pseudomagic beyond electromagnetism and whether there are any forms of type N pseudomagic at all); and two, if magical practices might be incorporated into personal religious belief and practice in a non-realist way (whether type P pseudomagic is viable, in other words). But first I’ll need to figure out more about what magic is.
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This month A Satanist Reads the Bible turns to the thematically-appropriate subject matter of magic, which will be the subject of this episode and the subsequent two.
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Third of my three-part series on the moral theory of perfectionism as it relates to Satanic religion.
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In the last episode, I examined the moral philosophy of perfectionism as formulated by the philosopher Thomas Hurka. I recommend listening to that episode before this one, as this essay is a continuation and will build on the foundation that I established in that one. But to sum up, perfectionism posits the development and exercise of our characteristic human capacities—those things which are unique and essential to humans—as being intrinsically good and the foundation for right action.
My objective here will be to start with the basic premise of perfectionism and rebuild it from the ground up, allowing it to conflict with our moral intuitions where it must while simultaneously seeking a foundation on which I can build a more robust defense against bigotry.
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This episode opens a three-episode series, following the structure of my last three episodes, in which I will be exploring moral philosophy from my Satanic perspective. In this particular episode, I’ll be surveying moral philosophy in general and taking a look in particular at the philosophy of perfectionism. On the 16th, I’ll be exploring perfectionism more in depth, especially in terms of its relationship to Satanic religion, and then the 26th will be a more poetic expedition into the subject matter.
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A quick update on the state of the project. Normal episodes—at least as normal as they ever are—will resume September 6th.
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The theopoetics of Satan the Accuser, with opening and closing invocations performed on the oud.
We need not reach into the primordial to apprehend bereshit, the continuous beginning which opens from the first chapter of Genesis. We need only wait for the dusk to see that which God has divided between.
Transcript (with citations and references) available at asatanistreadsthebible.com
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Ever since I transitioned this project from being primarily a blog to being primarily a podcast, I’ve been using the tagline, “Exploring the Bible, Christianity, and other religions and sacred texts through the lens of Satanism in order to reinvent religion for myself.” Aside from some of the early creative and constructive work, I’ve mostly emphasized the exploration part of that tagline, but this episode and the next will be focusing more on the invention aspect. My intention here is to construct a sketch of a Satanic theology, and to that end, I’ll be discussing what theology means, both in general and in relation to the specific source I’ll be drawing from; discussing some of the potential qualities that a Satanic theology would have; and offering some preliminary results. A proper and complete Satanic theology would be better suited to something the length of a book, and perhaps that’s a book that I’ll write one day, but given the space available to me here, I’ll have to confine myself to a more limited collection of ideas. I’ll also be introducing the approach I’ll be taking next episode, which will likewise be a theology, but a very different one and much more experimental in character.
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This episode begins a three-episode series that will explore the foundations of Satanic religion, as I understand it. Each episode will concentrate on a different aspect of Satanism and will be written in a different style. This one will be somewhat like my typical essays, especially those that focus most closely on Satanism and philosophy of religion, and here I’ll be exploring the religious philosophy of one of my most significant influences, the American philosopher William James.
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Matters of personal will, independence, and autonomy are central to Satanic thought. The central principle of Satanism is opposition, and, in my interpretation, opposition to hegemony, which often entails opposition to presumed authority.
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I want to know why Islam has been so successful, seemingly more so than any other modern religion, in convincing people to abandon this world for some other world and to construct what remains of them in this life around what awaits them in the next. I would know, is this truly what Muhammad intended? As much as I have fallen in love with the mystical Sufi poetry of Rumi and Hafez, and as much as I respect Islam’s singularity of vision, I see this religion as one of the greatest fonts of nihilism in the modern world. Is this nihilism reflected in the religion’s sacred texts? Are these texts misunderstood and misrepresented in Islam as Christian and Jewish texts are in their respective religions?
Transcript available at https://asatanistreadsthebible.com/a-satanist-reads-the-quran/
Video version available at https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCo1avyQsMpFL4u4XtaW3SXw/featured
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What I’m going to say next, I say without an ounce of hyperbole: rational argumentation is the most important of all human skills, because rational argumentation forms the basis not only for critical thinking, which is of paramount importance, but for affecting the world and shaping it to one’s ends.
This essay is also available as a podcast on anchor.fm and other platforms.
Transcript (with links and citations) available at asatanistreadsthebible.com
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What does it mean that I went to war for a country where this kind of person—a fellow American citizen and one among those whose rights I literally swore to defend with my life—does not feel safe? Does not feel free?
Video available at https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCo1avyQsMpFL4u4XtaW3SXw
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Last week, I opened my essay with a description of the murder of George Floyd by the police officer Derek Chauvin by way of introducing the ongoing political unrest in the United States that was instigated by Floyd’s murder, and that by way of introducing a White House photo shoot at St. John’s Episcopal Church in Washington, D.C., which took place in the midst of the protests and which, for me, exemplifies the relationship between Christianity and white supremacy in this country. This week, I’ll be turning to my roots as a propaganda analyst for the United States Army and examining that photo shoot—and the video montage it was used to create—in further detail, analyzing it as United States government propaganda using the methods in which I was trained.
Stop by the transcript at asatanistreadsthebible.com for links to references used in this episode.
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Racial hegemony and police violence in America are inextricable from religion, and Satanism, while not necessarily partisan in either direction, is necessarily political. Christianity cannot be disentangled from American politics, and so neither can Satanism.
Visit asatanistreadsthebible.com for a transcript of this essay with complete citations and references.
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What is the ego? What is the self? How is it that we can gratify, intensify, or encourage the self without knowing and understanding what it is?
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I’m not certain where I first arrived at the idea of observing the Ramadan fast, although it likely came up during my research over the past couple years. Primarily, it was a simple matter of curiosity, as is the case with many things in my life, so I approached it as a sort of spiritual experiment. I didn’t have any specific outcomes in mind, but I thought that it might serve as a means of structuring my life and imposing order on a world that presently seems more chaotic than usual, and as well, an opportunity to take a break from some of my favorite indulgences.
A transcription of this episode, with citations and references, is available at https://asatanistreadsthebible.com/
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A mistake to which I think that I am especially prone is that I anthropomorphize the universe, turning its grandeur into something altogether human.
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In my last essay, I took a general survey of the history and philosophy of capitalism as formulated by Adam Smith in the aforementioned book, which is usually referred to by the shortened title of The Wealth of Nations. If you haven’t listened to that episode, I highly recommend checking that out before continuing with this one, in which I intend to begin looking at critiques of capitalism.
Transcript, with citations and references, available at https://asatanistreadsthebible.com/
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I’m continuing this week with my American Mythology series, which explores the myths present in contemporary American philosophical and political thought. My objective in my explorations of religious texts has been to demonstrate that what is said of the texts and what they actually contain are often two very different things, and my objective in these essays is essentially the same, only addressing political theory instead of sacred texts, but as I’ve described in the previous two essays in this series, political theory and religion are themselves not very distant from each other and often there’s considerable overlap. I’ve looked at the myths surrounding the way in which the Americas were first conquered and colonized and the myths about American freedom as related to the philosophical influence of John Locke on the American political sphere, and now I’m turning to the myths embedded in American capitalism.
Visit https://asatanistreadsthebible.com/american-mythology-capitalism/ for a transcript of this essay, including citations and sources
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The New Testament Book of Revelation is one of the most distinct and bizarre books of the entire Bible, and I think that its writer was saying the same things about what was to come that I had learned from both my Christians teachers and from history.
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The 17th-century English philosopher John Locke is one of the most important names in modern philosophy. Following Descartes, he is often taken to be the second major philosopher of the modern era. Additionally, his philosophy was of particular influence on early American political thought, and he was even involved in the design of one of the colonial American governments, that of Carolina. Today, I’ll be looking at his philosophy, and to what degree contemporary America is living up to or failing to live up to his ideals, whether that’s even something we should be aiming for in the first place, and why all of this is relevant to us as Satanists and to American Satanists in particular.
Works Cited or Consulted
Armitage, D. (2004). John Locke, Carolina, and the Two Treatises of Government. Political Theory, 32(5), 602–627. https://doi.org/10.1177/0090591704267122
Cahoone, L. (n.d.). The Modern Political Tradition: Hobbes to Habermas. Retrieved March 9, 2020, from https://www.thegreatcoursesplus.com/the-modern-political-tradition-hobbes-to-habermas
Declaration of Independence: A Transcription. (2015, November 1). National Archives. https://www.archives.gov/founding-docs/declaration-transcript
Diethe, C., & Nietzsche, F. (2006). Friedrich Nietzsche: On the Genealogy of Morality (K. Ansell-Pearson, Ed.; 2nd ed.). Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511812026
Guelzo, A., Gallagher, G., & Allitt, P. (n.d.). A History of the United States, 2nd Edition. Retrieved March 24, 2020, from https://www.thegreatcoursesplus.com/a-history-of-the-united-states-2nd-edition
Laslett, P. (n.d.). Locke and Hobbes. In J. Locke, Two Treatises of Government.
Liberty: Incorporating Four Essays on Liberty (2nd edition). (2002). Oxford University Press.
Lloyd, S. A., & Sreedhar, S. (2019). Hobbes’s Moral and Political Philosophy. In E. N. Zalta (Ed.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2019). Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University. https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2019/entries/hobbes-moral/
Locke, J., & Laslett, P. (1988). Two treatises of government (Student ed). Cambridge University Press.
MacCallum, G. C. (1967). Negative and Positive Freedom. The Philosophical Review, 76(3), 312. https://doi.org/10.2307/2183622
Survey: White Evangelicals See Trump As “Honest” And “Morally Upstanding.” (2020, March 12). NPR.Org. https://www.npr.org/2020/03/12/815097747/survey-most-evangelicals-see-trump-as-honest-and-morally-upstanding
The Problem With Human Rights. (n.d.). Retrieved April 15, 2020, from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AhRBsJYWR8Q
Thorpe, F. N. (Ed.). (1998). The Federal and State constitutions, colonial charters, and other organic laws of the states, territories, and colonies now or heretofore forming the United States of America. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1909. https://avalon.law.yale.edu/17th_century/nc05.asp
Uzgalis, W. (2020). John Locke. In E. N. Zalta (Ed.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2020). Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University. https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2020/entries/locke/
Zinn, H., & Arnove, A. (2015). A people’s history of the United States (Thirty-fifth anniversary edition). HarperPerennial.
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Though the 19th century German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche did not call himself a Satanist (and likely wouldn’t have, Satanism being then associated with the Romantic, which he detested), his role as a virulent critic of religion and culture, as well as his intelligence and radical individualism, have made him an icon of Satanic thought. His works appear on the official Church of Satan reading list, and it’s clear that the Church’s founder, Anton Szandor LaVey, was heavily inspired by Nietzsche’s thought. To such a degree as Satanism concerns freedom, Nietzsche’s ideas are highly relevant, as he advocated throughout his works for what he saw as the path towards becoming a truly free spirit.
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Over the coming weeks and months, I’m going to be shifting the focus of my work towards more political matters, applying the way I approach problems in general to the historical and contemporary political situations in the United States, and the mythology that surrounds them. In order to ground my work in this area in its historical context, the specific matter I’ll be discussing today will be the conquest and colonization of the Americas by Europeans, which began in the late 15th century.
Works Cited or Referenced
Armstrong, D. (n.d.). The Black Death: The World’s Most Devastating Plague. Retrieved March 24, 2020, from https://www.thegreatcoursesplus.com/the-black-death-the-worlds-most-devastating-plague
Corcoran, P. (2017). John Locke on the Possession of Land: Native Title vs. The ‘Principle’ of Vacuum domicilium. 21. https://doi.org/10.1080/10848770.2017.1416766
Eusden, J. D. (1960). Natural Law and Covenant Theology in New England, 1620-1670. The American Journal of Jurisprudence, 5(1), 1–30. https://doi.org/10.1093/ajj/5.1.1
Guelzo, A., Gallagher, G., & Allitt, P. (n.d.). A History of the United States, 2nd Edition. Retrieved March 24, 2020, from https://www.thegreatcoursesplus.com/a-history-of-the-united-states-2nd-edition
Hardy, G. (n.d.). Sacred Texts of the World. Retrieved March 11, 2020, from https://www.thegreatcoursesplus.com/sacred-texts-of-the-world
Hoppe, H.-H. (2004, October 15). The Ethics and Economics of Private Property | Mises Institute. https://mises.org/library/ethics-and-economics-private-property
Huntington, S. P. (2011). The clash of civilizations and the remaking of world order (Simon & Schuster hardcover ed). Simon & Schuster.
Judis, J. B. (2018). The nationalist revival: Trade, immigration, and the revolt against globalization. Columbia Global Reports.
List of epidemics. (2020). In Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=List_of_epidemics&oldid=946207636Zinn, H., & Arnove, A. (2015). A people’s history of the United States (Thirty-fifth anniversary edition). HarperPerennial.
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The interrelated concepts of faith and sacrifice have remained, throughout my explorations into religion, matters of endless fascination. In the installment, I adapt the story of the Binding of Isaac, as Kierkegaard had done, and take an overview of the history of faith and sacrifice, especially as they occurred in the Hindu religions. Then, I turn to the details of the views of two particular philosophers who wrote extensively on the subject of faith in particular, Søren Kierkegaard and Paul Tillich.
I mention a couple links in the show discussion, which can be found here:
https://www.cnn.com/2020/03/24/politics/donald-trump-coronavirus-strategy/index.html
https://www.lawfareblog.com/can-federal-government-override-state-government-rules-social-distancing-promote-economy
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This situation has forced me to consider why I’m doing the whole Satanist Reads the Bible project in the first place. I’ve never really had to think about it before because it’s always been fun, interesting, and meaningful work, but very rapidly over the last couple weeks, my sense of meaning and purpose in the world has fallen out from under me, and I’ve had to adjust to that with regards to everything that I do, including this podcast.
Works Cited or Consulted
A World Without Children. (2019, September 5). The Point Magazine. https://thepointmag.com/examined-life/a-world-without-children/
Csikszentmihalyi, M. (2009). Flow: The psychology of optimal experience (Nachdr.). Harper [and] Row.
Cuarón, A. (2006, September 22). Children of Men [Drama, Thriller]. Universal Pictures, Strike Entertainment, Hit & Run Productions.
Dixit, A. K., & Nalebuff, B. J. (2010). The art of strategy: A game theorist’s guide to success in business & life. Norton & Company.
Event 201, a pandemic exercise to illustrate preparedness efforts. (n.d.). Even 201. Retrieved March 17, 2020, from http://www.centerforhealthsecurity.org/event201/
Hegel, G. W. F., Miller, A. V., & Findlay, J. N. (2013). Phenomenology of spirit (Reprint.). Oxford Univ. Press.
Horowitz, A. (2012, October 6). GOP Rep.: Evolution, Big Bang “Lies Straight From The Pit Of Hell.” HuffPost. https://www.huffpost.com/entry/paul-broun-evolution-big-bang_n_1944808
Huntington, S. P. (2011). The clash of civilizations and the remaking of world order (Simon & Schuster hardcover ed). Simon & Schuster.
Kaufmann, W. A., & Nehamas, A. (2013). Nietzsche: Philosopher, psychologist, antichrist (First Princeton classics edition). Princeton University Press.
List of epidemics. (2020). In Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=List_of_epidemics&oldid=946207636
National Security Council. (n.d.). The White House. Retrieved March 17, 2020, from https://www.whitehouse.gov/nsc/
Nietzsche, F. W., & Kaufmann, W. A. (1974). The gay science: With a prelude in rhymes and an appendix of songs (1st ed.). Vintage Books.
Spanish flu. (2020). In Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Spanish_flu&oldid=946121163
The End Is Coming. (2020, March 11). The Point Magazine. https://thepointmag.com/examined-life/the-end-is-coming-agnes-callard/
Trump disbanded NSC pandemic unit that experts had praised. (2020, March 14). AP NEWS. https://apnews.com/ce014d94b64e98b7203b873e56f80e9a
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One of the ways I pay the rent is by working as a composer and musician for theater and dance productions. It’s something I’ve been taking time off from since before I started the whole Satanist Reads the Bible project—I had had a busy year and got burned out on it—but back in December I got an email from one of my music mentors asking if I wanted to join in as a musician on a production of a piece of musical theater called Shockheaded Peter. It’s based on a German children’s book of cautionary tales called Der Struwwelpeter in which various misbehaviors on the part of the children result in disaster and death. I played a drum kit made partially out of garbage along with an upright bassist and an accordionist, and it’s been a highlight of my career and one of the great privileges and joys of my life. I’ve been training as a musician for about 25 years now and have performed hundreds of shows, and this show has both demanded and demonstrated my highest capabilities as a musician, performer, and human being. It’s been difficult work that’s pushed me to my limits but I’ve loved every second of it—it’s one of those experiences that has made the Eternal Return worth it for me—and it’s brought up some questions regarding philosophy and theater, some of which I’ll be exploring here.
Works Referenced or Consulted
Bodman, W. S. (2011). The poetics of Iblis: Narrative theology in the Qur’an. Harvard Theological Studies, Harvard Divinity School : Distributed by Harvard University Press.
Bradford, G. (2013). The Value of Achievements: The Value of Achievements. Pacific Philosophical Quarterly, 94(2), 204–224. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-0114.2012.01452.x
Csikszentmihalyi, M. (2009). Flow: The psychology of optimal experience (Nachdr.). Harper [and] Row.
Goffman, E. (1990). The presentation of self in everyday life (Nachdr.). Doubleday.
H7451—Ra`—Strong’s Hebrew Lexicon (KJV). (n.d.). Blue Letter Bible. Retrieved March 10, 2020, from https://www.blueletterbible.org/kjv/gen/1/1/s_1001
Hamilton, J. R. (2019). Philosophy of Theater. In E. N. Zalta (Ed.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2019). Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University. https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2019/entriesheater/
Nietzsche, F. W., & Kaufmann, W. A. (1974). The gay science: With a prelude in rhymes and an appendix of songs (1st ed.). Vintage Books.
Satan As a Moral Exemplar. (2020, February 29). A Satanist Reads the Bible. https://asatanistreadsthebible.com/satan-as-a-moral-exemplar/
Satan in the Qur’an. (2019, November 16). A Satanist Reads the Bible. https://asatanistreadsthebible.com/satan-in-the-quran/
Taylor, C. (1994). The politics of recognition. In A. Gutmann (Ed.), Multiculturalism: Examining the politics of recognition. Princeton University Press.
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Coming back to it now, I read Harris’s text with disappointment but even greater disappointment in myself. Harris’s rhetoric is terrible, and though at the time I thought myself a competent critical thinker, I was nevertheless entirely blind to what I can now only call incompetence by way of still feeling too generous towards him to call him a sophist.
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What is the ethical standpoint of Satanism? Being that Satanism is generally less codified than other religions and exists in several different forms, there are many possibilities. My goal here is to explore a few of them and to arrive at a possible ethical framework that naturally follows from Satanism in general, as well as from my own particular satanic theory.
Works Cited or Consulted
Baggini, J. (2005). The pig that wants to be eaten: 100 experiments for the armchair philosopher. Penguin Group.
Faxneld, P., & Petersen, J. A. (2014). Cult of carnality: Sexuality, eroticism, and gender in contemporary Satanism. In H. Bogdan & J. R. Lewis (Eds.), Sexuality and New Religious Movements. Palgrave Macmillan.
LaVey, A. S. (2005). The Satanic Bible. Avon Books.
Milton, J. (2005). Paradise lost. Dover Publications.
Nietzsche, F. W. (1976). The portable Nietzsche. Penguin Books.
Nozick, R. (2013). Anarchy, state, and utopia. Basic Books, a member of the Perseus Books Group.
Pagels, E. H. (1995). The origin of Satan (1st ed). Random House.
Paradise Lost as a Sacred Text. (2019, March 9). A Satanist Reads the Bible. https://asatanistreadsthebible.com/paradise-lost-as-a-sacred-text/
Satan the Accuser. (2018, November 24). A Satanist Reads the Bible. https://asatanistreadsthebible.com/satan-the-accuser/
Satan the Accuser and the Temptation of Christ in the Wilderness. (2018, December 1). A Satanist Reads the Bible. https://asatanistreadsthebible.com/satan-the-accuser-and-the-temptation-of-christ-in-the-wilderness/
Satan, the Best Friend the Church Has Ever Had. (2020, January 25). A Satanist Reads the Bible. https://asatanistreadsthebible.com/satan-the-best-friend-the-church-has-ever-had/
Shafer-Landau, R. (2015). The fundamentals of ethics (Third Edition). Oxford University Press.
The Book of Job, pt. 1. (2019, August 17). A Satanist Reads the Bible. https://asatanistreadsthebible.com/the-book-of-job-pt-1/
The Book of Job, pt. 2. (2019, August 24). A Satanist Reads the Bible. https://asatanistreadsthebible.com/the-book-of-job-pt-2/
Tillich, P. (2001). Dynamics of faith (1st Perennial classics ed). Perennial.
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A Biblical scholar, Morton Smith, was doing research in a library Jerusalem in 1958 when he chanced upon a letter that appeared to have been written by one of the 2nd century church fathers, Clement of Alexandria.
Morton Smith's translation of the letter: http://www.earlychristianwritings.com/text/secretmark.html
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Development and analysis of the concept of moral alienation, both in prior philosophy and as a new idea regarding morality in a world of extreme complexity.
Works Cited or Consulted
Arendt, Hannah. Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. Penguin Books, 2006.
Elon, Amos. “The Excommunication of Hannah Arendt.” Eichmann in Jerusalem, by Hannah Arendt, Penguin Books, 2006.
Leopold, David. “Alienation.” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, edited by Edward N. Zalta, Fall 2018, Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University, 2018. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2018/entries/alienation/.
“Little Eichmanns.” Wikipedia, 18 Nov. 2019. Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Little_Eichmanns&oldid=926759936.
Marcuse, Herbert. One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society. Beacon Press, 1991.
Marx, Karl, et al. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy. Penguin Books in association with New Left Review, 1981.
Piper, Adrian M. S. “Moral Theory and Moral Alienation.” The Journal of Philosophy, vol. 84, no. 2, Feb. 1987, p. 102. DOI.org (Crossref), doi:10.2307/2026628.
Sommers, Christina Hoff, and Frederic Tamler Sommers, editors. Vice & Virtue in Everyday Life: Introductory Readings in Ethics. 9th ed, Wadsworth/Cengage Learning, 2013.
Whittingham, Ken. “The Book of Dougs.” The Good Place, S3E10, 10 Jan. 2019.
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For a long time, I had a post-it note on my bathroom mirror on which I had written: “You are going to die soon.” I had put it there after reading a quote by Steve Jobs expressing a similar sentiment. “Soon,” of course, is a relative term. Statistically, it’s most likely that I’ll be around for another 44 years (I checked the actuarial tables), but if I thought that the end of the world was going to happen in 44 years, would I be justified in saying that it’s going to happen soon? I think that I would, and that will indeed be the end of the world for me. The note disappeared the last time I moved, but I still remember it every time I look in the bathroom mirror in the morning and at night before I go to bed, and my thoughts return to it throughout the day. Others who had seen my note found it morbid; I always found it inspirational. Regardless of what happens after, I know that that much at least is true, and it’s shown its value as a compass for directing my actions and decisions.
But while I don’t base my decisions on it (or believe that I don’t), I nevertheless often contemplate what might happen afterwards. This question lies at the heart of religion: what happens after we die?
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I have my disagreements with LaVey, as I’ve described elsewhere, but this is one point where I’m in complete agreement. My objective here today is to explore that relationship with as much nuance as I can manage.
Works Cited or Consulted
Belief and Identity. (2019, August 3). A Satanist Reads the Bible. https://asatanistreadsthebible.com/belief-and-identity/
Bodman, W. S. (2011). The poetics of Iblis: Narrative theology in the Qur’an. Harvard Theological Studies, Harvard Divinity School : Distributed by Harvard University Press.
Dennett, D. C. (2007). Breaking the spell: Religion as a natural phenomenon. Penguin Books.
Glustrom, S. (1989). The Myth and Reality of Judaism: 82 Misconceptions Set Straight. Behrman House, Inc.
Grant, M., & Hazel, J. (2002). Who’s who in Classical Mythology. Psychology Press.
Huntington, S. P. (2011). The clash of civilizations and the remaking of world order (Simon & Schuster hardcover ed). Simon & Schuster.
Milton, J. (2005). Paradise lost. Dover Publications.
Neusner, J., Frerichs, E. S., & McCracken-Flesher, C. (Eds.). (1985). “To see ourselves as others see us”: Christians, Jews, “others” in late antiquity. Scholars Press.
Pagels, E. H. (1995). The origin of Satan (1st ed). Random House.
Paradise Lost as a Sacred Text. (2019, March 9). A Satanist Reads the Bible. https://asatanistreadsthebible.com/paradise-lost-as-a-sacred-text/
Satan. (2020). In Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Satan&oldid=934485628
Satan the Accuser. (2018, November 24). A Satanist Reads the Bible. https://asatanistreadsthebible.com/satan-the-accuser/
Smith, M. S. (2002). The early history of God: Yahweh and the other deities in ancient Israel (2nd ed). William B. Eerdmans Pub. Co.
Smith, M. S. (2004). The origins of biblical monotheism: Israel’s polytheistic background and the Ugaritic texts. Oxford University Press.
Stark, R. (2003). One true God: Historical consequences of monotheism (2. print., and 1. paperback print). Princeton Univ. Press.Twain, M. (2019). The adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Seawolf Press.
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Most of my research has focused on stories in the Bible with which I am already familiar. Often I find in the text aspects to these stories of which I was not previously aware (such as Noah’s sacrifice to God after the flood), but I also find stories that I have never heard mentioned before at all. One of these follows after the stories of the Great Flood and the Tower of Babel in Genesis, about which I have already written. This is the story of Abram, who later came to be called Abraham, and his wife Sarai (later Sarah), and their exile in Egypt.
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Not everyone has had to struggle this much to attain some measure of happiness in their lives, and many people have had to struggle a great deal more, but I’d venture to say that almost no one in this life shows up and gets a free pass at happiness
Works Cited
Csikszentmihalyi, M. (2009). Flow: The psychology of optimal experience (Nachdr.). Harper [and] Row.
Kaufmann, W. A., & Nehamas, A. (2013). Nietzsche: Philosopher, psychologist, antichrist (First Princeton classics edition). Princeton University Press.
Kraut, R. (2018). Aristotle’s Ethics. In E. N. Zalta (Ed.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2018). Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University. https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2018/entries/aristotle-ethics/
Lewis, J. R. (2002). Diabolical Authority: Anton LaVey, The Satanic Bible and the Satanist “Tradition.” Marburg Journal of Religion, 7(1). https://doi.org/10.17192/mjr.2002.7.3733
Lucretius Carus, T., Stallings, A. E., & Jenkyns, R. (2015). The nature of things. Penguin Books.
Mental Health By the Numbers | NAMI: National Alliance on Mental Illness. (n.d.). Retrieved January 5, 2020, from https://www.nami.org/learn-more/mental-health-by-the-numbers
Nietzsche, F. W., & Kaufmann, W. A. (1974). The gay science: With a prelude in rhymes and an appendix of songs (1st ed.). Vintage Books.
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One of the reasons that I venerate the Hindu religions may be that I find Satanism present even in its earliest sacred texts, which are as well the earliest extant sacred texts that we have access to.
Works Referenced
Communities Still Reeling After 2 Deadly Attacks On Worshippers. (n.d.). Retrieved January 2, 2020, from https://www.wbur.org/hereandnow/2019/12/30/religious-attacks-texas-new-york
Doniger, W. (2005). The Rig Veda: An anthology : one hundred and eight hymns selected, translated and annotated by : Wendy Doniger. Penguin.
Muesse, M. W. (2011). The Hindu traditions: A concise introduction. Fortress Press.
Roebuck, V. J. (Ed.). (2000). The Upaninṣads. Penguin Books.
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Let’s start with Karl Popper and the Paradox of Tolerance. This is something that has vexed me ever since I found out about it. The idea is this: think of society as having a sliding scale between tolerance and intolerance, with regard to people, with regard to ideas, politics, religion, race, sexual and gender identity, and so forth. The more the scale tips toward tolerance, the more intolerant ideas are sanctioned, so both tolerance and intolerance result in intolerance. Intolerance prevails either way. And the only way around this is to embrace intolerance, and then the question becomes, what kind of intolerance do we truly wish to prevail?
Works Cited:
Belief and Identity. (2019, August 3). Retrieved December 26, 2019, from A Satanist Reads the Bible website: https://asatanistreadsthebible.com/belief-and-identity/
Brandt, F., Brill, M., & Suksompong, W. (2016). An ordinal minimax theorem. Games and Economic Behavior, 95, 107–112. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geb.2015.12.010
Brown, D. (2017, August 20). How One Man Convinced 200 Ku Klux Klan Members To Give Up Their Robes. Retrieved December 26, 2019, from NPR.org website: https://www.npr.org/2017/08/20/544861933/how-one-man-convinced-200-ku-klux-klan-members-to-give-up-their-robes
Clark, D. J. (2018). Behind the Curve [Documentary].
Evil. (2019, June 8). Retrieved December 23, 2019, from A Satanist Reads the Bible website: https://asatanistreadsthebible.com/evil/
Farrelly, C. P. (Ed.). (2004). Contemporary political theory: A reader. London ; Thousand Oaks, Calif: SAGE.
Huntington, S. P. (2011). The clash of civilizations and the remaking of world order (Simon & Schuster hardcover ed). New York: Simon & Schuster.
Judis, J. B. (2018). The nationalist revival: Trade, immigration, and the revolt against globalization. New York, NY: Columbia Global Reports.
On Taake and Antifa. (n.d.). Retrieved December 23, 2019, from Metal Trenches website: https://metaltrenches.com/reviews/on-taake-and-antifa-1377
Popper, K. R., Ryan, A., & Gombrich, E. H. (2013). The Open Society and Its Enemies. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Rushin, S., & Edwards, G. S. (2018). The Effect of President Trump’s Election on Hate Crimes. SSRN Electronic Journal. https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3102652
Schmitt, C. (2005). Political theology: Four chapters on the concept of sovereignty (University of Chicago Press ed). Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
The Official Taake Website. (2007, March 29). Retrieved December 23, 2019, from https://web.archive.org/web/20070329042528/http://taake.theblacksun.org/
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You’re wrong about something. That I can say with certainty. There are things I’m wrong about and I don’t know it; there are things you’re wrong about and you don’t know it. How are either of us ever going to find our way if we don’t challenge what we think we know, as often as possible?
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The gap between what we’re able to achieve as a species and how wrong we’re capable of going in our thinking never ceases to amaze me. On the one hand, we’ve put people on the moon, and on the other--well, a quick look at the political climate in my own country, the United States, is certainly evidence of how much trouble we have thinking clearly and critically.
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This will be a shorter and somewhat atypical episode because I’ll be writing here about the blog and podcast themselves and my plans for them for next year.
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My aspiration for religion is that it be a reflection both of who we are and of our highest aspirations for ourselves as humans, but in terms of morality, traditional religion seems to fail at this.
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My question is, should Paradise Lost, John Milton’s 17th-century epic poem concerning the fall of Satan from Heaven, be considered a sacred text, especially with regard to the Satanist?
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The fact that this same book, the Bhagavad Gita, “The Song of the Lord,” was a major inspiration for both Gandhi and the man who assassinated him has fascinated me ever since I learned it. I’ve examined the text before, in a piece about hedonism; here, I’ll be taking a broader look at the text and also the matter of the proper interpretation of sacred texts.
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I’ve written this story before, but I’ve also mentioned that I never want anything to be fixed or definitive in this religion that I am creating for myself. Religion is a question that I am seeking to ask as sincerely as anyone ever has. So the above title is not so much a statement but a question that I am asking myself: What exactly do I mean by all of this?
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Odd that this has never come up in the year now, almost, that I’ve been doing this. No one’s ever asked me what I do for a living, what my day job is. I’m a teacher, primarily working as a private tutor for gifted children and those with learning disabilities. I have some other gigs as well, but these days, I primarily think of myself, at least in terms of what I consider to be my “job,” as a teacher. More generally, I think of myself as a scholar and a philosopher and critic of religion, but my job as an educator is very important to me and, I think, an integral part of my Satanic philosophy.
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This week I’m taking a break from my usual focus on the sacred texts of the Abrahamic tradition and turning my attention to those of Hinduism. In reading the Text, I’ve come to a new and different understanding of what hedonism might mean for me in the context of this Satanic religion that I’m building for myself. Hedonism is traditionally thought of in terms of indulgence in sense-pleasures, but I think there may be a greater indulgence to be found.
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I really enjoyed writing the last piece I did on the Marvel Cinematic Universe and philosophy, so I’m doing another one. This one will be focusing on the villain Ronan the Accuser and the conflicts that he’s involved with in primarily in the first Guardians of the Galaxy movie (though he appears in the movie Captain Marvel as well), and using that as a jumping-off point for exploring the ethics of warfare.
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Christianity is not the religion of Jesus. It is not the religion that he followed. It is not the religion that he preached. It was not the religion that he would have had his followers pursue during his life or after his death. What do we know of Jesus and the religion that he promoted?
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A Satanist Reads the Bible is getting big enough that I’m starting to get requests for topics, and one of the requests I’ve gotten a few times now is to do an examination of different denominations of the Christian religion. I think that this is an excellent choice for a topic.
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The Bible has its own narrative of the origin of language, or at least the origin of its diversity, and it paints a problematic picture both of God and of language.
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The following is an introduction to a project I’d like to attempt: an in-depth look at the philosophical implications of the Marvel Cinematic Universe movies, and in particular their villains.
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Sometime when I was very young, my mother began bringing me to church. The church was of the Christian Science denomination, in which she herself had been raised. She did not adopt the doctrine of the religion wholesale, but rather maintained a loose and abstract belief in God and Jesus. She told me many years later that she was not trying to indoctrinate me into the religion, but rather only to expose me to religion in general and to give me some moral grounding.
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I’m going to start delving back into the theoretical underpinnings of my Satanic philosophy, but I need to do it better than the last time I attempted such a thing, and that will require laying some groundwork. When I started this project last year, I dove right into the philosophy, but didn’t spend much time at all covering the underlying concepts, and the result was some obscure, muddy writing. So I’m going to spend a few weeks here and there covering some of the foundational concepts upon which my philosophy is grounded. I’ve already covered Nietzsche at length, so at least that’s out of the way. Here, I’ll be exploring the nature of dialectics, and the Hegelian approach to dialectics in particular.
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What’s interesting to me is that the story of a great flood is one that many people have been telling for a very long time. But in many traditions, and in the Abrahamic tradition in particular, there is an aspect to the story that is particularly troubling: God became displeased with us. So They murdered almost the entire world.
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Yes, food and cooking is the real subject for this week’s story. I’m definitely having some fun with this one, but at the same time I think that the topic has been very useful in terms of exploring Satanism in an authentic and meaningful way. One of my favorite pastimes is cooking, and this is a skill that is particularly reflective of Satanic values. In fact, I think that the practice is a kind of microcosm of Satanism, a reflection in miniature of the ways that a Satanic philosophy can transform one’s life and experience.
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It is important to remember that what we see of Christianity today are outcomes from a series of disputes that has lasted millennia. There were disputes as to what had actually occurred during the life of Jesus (cf. difference between the Synoptic Gospels, and between those and the apocryphal Gospels), disputes as to how to interpret and follow the new teachings (cf. the Epistles), disputes as to which books should be considered sacred (the Book of Revelation was not formally accepted for three and a half centuries after Jesus’ death, and there were several gospels that were never accepted). Gradually, these disputes were resolved (or, as in the case of the gospels, deemed unresolvable and left to stand), but what’s unavoidable in that is that it was people who decided what Christianity is today. And I have to wonder if all sacred texts meet that definition, that they be attempts at resolving some dispute.
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Some people claim to have a spiritual authority that permits them to teach of spiritual matters to others. I think that some people do indeed have this authority, by virtue of their experience and education in such matters and the authenticity of their character, while others are charlatans.
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What were Cain and Abel told by their parents in their childhood? All children wish to know about the world, and inevitably ask questions to that effect. Parents, in response, tell stories that signify their knowledge thereof. Did Adam and Eve tell them about their life in the Garden of Eden, how they sought knowledge and were for that reason exiled from paradise?
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I’ve written often on the subject of the Hegemon, my collective word for religious and cultural hegemonies that appropriate and contort religions and their sacred texts for the purposes of power and manipulation, but it’s largely been in the abstract. Today I’ll take a look at a real-world, concrete example.
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I despise Christmas. For a duration fast approaching an entire sixth of the year, the worst aspects of capitalism, religion, music, and human social culture combine and worm their way into individual lives in a way that cannot be avoided if one wishes to participate in society at all, and all under the auspices of a holiday for a religion that is not mine but that nevertheless infuriates me because of the degree to which it’s been appropriated and corrupted. It’s a striking example of the way the Hegemon cannibalizes what it ostensibly holds sacred and distorts the meaning of what it claims are the foundations of Truth so as to serve its own ends.
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In the summer of 2013, I arranged a pilgrimage to a religious monument: the Boudhanath stupa in Kathmandu, Nepal. At the time I was still primarily a Zen Buddhist by training and belief, and had been so for about the prior thirteen years. The stupa is more closely tied to Tibetan Buddhism, but I also had some connections to Shambhala Buddhism, the sect founded by Chögyam Trungpa which sought to merge Zen, Tibetan Buddhism, and Western philosophical thought. But even though the stupa wasn’t directly tied to my lineage as a Buddhist, it had a particular calling for me ever since I first saw a picture of it as a child: the great white dome under a clear blue sky, painted eyes looking out at the world in all four directions, prayer flags extending in every direction, tattered and fluttering in the wind.
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Skeptics of all stripes will rightly scoff at the word “sacred.” It has often been used over the course of history as a hollow justification for the rationally unjustifiable. But taken in its proper context, its reality and relevance to our lives is unavoidable.
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A few weeks before going completely insane, and even in seeming premonition of that occurrence, Friedrich Nietzsche completed the final revisions to what would be his last original book1, Ecce Homo, a brilliant retrospective of his life and work, completed in 1888 but not published for another ten years. He signed it, “Dionysus versus the Crucified,” thus affirming the centrality of the Dionysian to his life’s work, a notion that appeared in his first book and which would recur in some form in everything he ever wrote.
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As mentioned in the previous podcast on the Book of Genesis, there are two distinct creation narratives present at the beginning of the book, both well-known in popular culture. The second continues from the first, but immediately distinguishes itself from the first in several ways...
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Part 1 of this series covered much of the background of the Book of Job, some matters of translation, and the first two chapters, which cover much of the story of the book as it is commonly told. From here we’ll proceed through the parts of the story that have remained largely untold.
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When Satan came to Jesus in the wilderness, was he the Adversary or the Accuser?
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The Book of Job, which relates the story of a devout and wealthy man from the land of Uz whose devotion to God is tested by profound suffering, is easily the most fascinating and enigmatic book of the Old Testament. In looking into it, I found that, once again, what is said of the text and what the text actually says are two very different things.
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Much of Satanic symbolism is oriented around an archetype of Satan that I refer to as Satan the Adversary. This is Satan as the Rebel Angel, whose rebellion against God and subsequent fall from heaven is described in Milton’s epic poem Paradise Lost. As compelling and inspiring as I find this archetype, my own philosophy is predicated upon another: Satan the Accuser.
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I think that Samuel Huntington is right and that the West and the Islamic world are in the midst of a clash of civilizations. But I don’t think that’s what Islam really is. I don’t think that that’s what the Qur’an says that Islam is, and that’s the source I take to be most authoritative in this matter.
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What I mean when I say that I am a Satanist is markedly different, I think, from most other uses of that word. And yet I find no other word quite so apt when it comes to capturing the scope and essence of my ideas and beliefs.
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My partner and I recently watched the movie Behind the Curve, a documentary about modern flat Earth societies. What has remained with me most strongly was that the flat Earth hypothesis is not only what the various flat-Earthers documented in the film believe, but also a core component of their identities as persons.
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Earlier this year I purchased a copy of the Christian Bible as part of a broader study of religions and their sacred texts. Unlike other Satanists, I do not consider the Bible as something wholly abhorrent, false, or misleading. To the contrary, I find it to be an interesting and compelling work of great literary merit, a useful window into history and into the beliefs of a substantial subsection of humanity, and even a source of personal insight and inspiration.
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Earlier this week, my partner found a small religious pamphlet at the laundromat and brought it to me, and it reminded me of the work that I had done and got me thinking about the role that propaganda plays in religion.
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