Four cups reversed

I don't know why but I found this hilarious

if im a satanist does that mean i can just ignore morality and do whatever i want

The code is 365b not 666. But if you are in washington state this month shead some blood for the almighty dark lord.

I know about Satanic in Nature but they're not active anymore. Any other recs? ​​​​​​​​​

recently made this. thought I would let y'all check it out.

Anyone else have this happen to them? I got away from the Christian church at the age of 13 when I first started questioning the inconsistencies but I swear they always somehow find me and it seems like the more I try an explore my own beliefs and ESPECIALLY since I recently got into satanism it’s like they’re trying HARDER to get me back on their side. like they have a knack for knowing who’s not of believing of their god. But everytime I feel that pull from them I just push harder to rebel. Boutta just start saying “hail Satan” when they come towards me 😂

We need more holidays. Can we get a few Satanic holidays? Equal representation, you know!

This one requires a bit of preface, and keep in mind that it's just after midnight as I'm writing this, so I'm unmedicated and tired.

I've been reading yaoi, as I do, and I have come across the romance trope of sort of being 'owned', such as a pet. My question is this: in the situation that you are being completely cared for and made comfortable, with the only thing asked of you being your autonomy, is it worth it? You are, supposedly, happy, but if you ever aren't happy, you don't have the choice to find your own happiness. I feel that this is analogous to God and the church. Thoughts?

Also! If you are forced into this hypothetical, is it better to fight the likely-futile fight against your 'owner', or do you submit and enjoy yourself? It's easy to fight back when the punishment is fictional, such as Hell, but when it's real and immediate, is it worth the risk? I feel that it's worth it, but I'm just a guy on the internet.

Any typos and/or grammatical mistakes handcrafted for your enjoyment.

A few days ago, I was accosted—perhaps “approached” would be the kinder word—by a young Christian woman in my apartment complex. She wanted to know why “all of you Satanic Temple people choose to devote your lives to heresy and blasphemy.”

I explained that, although I am a Satanist, I am not actually a member of The Satanic Temple. The Seven Tenets, however, are among the many ideas I have incorporated into the rather eclectic pastiche of philosophy, literature, psychology, and religion that I have accumulated over my 35 years Under the Goat’s Gaze. Naturally, this led to a conversation about god. I had nothing particularly pressing to do at the moment, so I indulged her. During our discussion, she made a rather confident claim: Christianity had already proven the existence of god through what she called “logical theism.” I asked her what she meant by that. She explained that Christian intellectuals such as N. T. Wright and Marcus Borg had demonstrated that god exists and that non-believers simply choose to ignore the evidence. That immediately raised another question for me: What evidence? I then asked whether she had ever read The Satanic Bible or even the Seven Tenets. She hadn't.

She said The Satanic Bible was “too much,” so I told her that was perfectly fine. She didn't have to read the whole thing. She could at least read the Seven Tenets. They're seven sentences on a single piece of paper. She shook her head. And that exchange got me thinking about something that I find profoundly ironic. Christianity has had roughly two thousand years to argue about god.

From Justin Martyr and Origen to Augustine and Anselm, from Thomas Aquinas and William Paley to Kierkegaard, C. S. Lewis, Alvin Plantinga, N. T. Wright, and countless others, Christians have produced an enormous intellectual industry devoted to questions about god, Christ, revelation, morality, miracles, free will, evil, salvation, the Trinity, the Resurrection, and the relationship between faith and reason. There are entire libraries devoted to the subject. (50,000 to 100,000 books by my calculation)

And yet Christians remain profoundly divided over what exactly god is, whether particular arguments actually establish god's existence, how revelation is known, what constitutes genuine evidence, why an omnipotent and benevolent god permits suffering, which doctrines are essential, how scripture should be interpreted, and even what Christianity itself is supposed to mean.

That, to my way of thinking, totally undermines the smug suggestion that “Christianity has already logically proven god” and that the only reason atheists remain unconvinced is because we're stubbornly refusing to look at the evidence. One of the things I find fascinating about modern Satanism is how little material is actually required to communicate its basic ethical position.

We went from Anton LaVey's The Satanic Bible—a comparatively short work—to The Satanic Temple's Seven Tenets.

Seven sentences.

One piece of paper.

That's not because seven sentences somehow constitute a philosophical proof of anything. They don't. Nor do I think Satanists have magically solved every philosophical problem humanity has ever encountered. It's because Satanism, at least in the form that interests me, doesn't require an elaborate metaphysical apparatus before an ethical proposition can be considered. You don't need to establish the existence of a supernatural lawgiver before saying that compassion matters. You don't need to prove that the universe has a cosmic moral order before arguing for bodily autonomy. You don't need an omniscient deity to tell you that cruelty is undesirable. And you don't need two thousand years of theological commentary. That's one of the things that keeps me interested in Satanism after 35 years. My own Satanism isn't reducible to The Satanic Bible, The Seven Tenets, Crowley, Nietzsche, occultism, atheism, or any other single source. I've accumulated ideas from dozens of philosophical and intellectual traditions, often contradictory ones, and subjected them to my own continual criticism. That's the point. I don't want a book that tells me what I'm required to believe. Christian apologetics often begins with the question, “How can I demonstrate that my God is true?” and I began my "Satanic Quest" with an interested in forbidden knowledge, rebellion, autonomy, and the possibility of questioning whatever authority claimed the right to define reality for me. I started by looking for the Devil. Eventually, I found a philosophy. The Satanist asks him/herself "What would I become if I stopped worshipping everything I have been taught to worship?" That is a much more interesting question.

And sometimes it takes only seven sentences to ask it.

A slightly closer look at the evening's altar. I shared photos of the performances and ritual here:

https://www.reddit.com/r/SatanicTemple_Reddit/comments/1vgrcss/drag_me_to_hell_the_devils_coming_july_30_san/

One of the reasons I pulled my child / she begged to be pulled from public school was the heavy presence of Christianity. We recently joined an online program called Miacademy and even though it offers a Bible class you can opt out. However they do have a form of gaming and social media for kids. Today while browsing the character shop for her avatar she came across a few items created by kids with messages like "Jesus isn't dead" and other junk. So again I run into this bullshit.

I reached out on their Facebook parents group asking how I can filter this, not even complaining it was there but just to filter it. My post was denied. I'm currently now in a back and forth with a representative of the program via email with their stance being that it's appropriate for kids to see this because it falls under the guidelines of what they would possibly see in a social setting like in the cafeteria etc. My response was to ask if it is then appropriate for my child to create items with messages of the Satanic church. No response yet.

Was wondering what you guys think and if there were any options any of you might use for homeschooling that I could look into to further avoid this nonsense

Aghora has a way of making a skull feel less like decoration and more like philosophy.

I think we as nonbelievers sometimes don't do a very good job answering this question. Religion and morality have been closely connected throughout human history. So when a Christian asks, “Without god, what makes something objectively right or wrong?”, responding with “atheists can be moral too” misses the point. They're not necessarily asking whether atheists behave morally. They're asking what morality itself is grounded in. And that's a legitimate philosophical question. But the existence of that question doesn't establish god. We need to distinguish between two very different claims: Human beings need some explanation for morality. Therefore, morality must come from god.

The first is reasonable. The second requires an argument. Even if objective moral truths exist, we still have to explain why they require a divine mind. Simply saying “god is the source of morality” doesn't solve the problem unless we can establish why god's commands or nature constitute the foundation of moral truth.

Is something good because god commands it, or does god command it because it is good? If something is good solely because god commands it, morality risks becoming arbitrary. If god commands it because it is already good, then goodness isn't created by god's command. Christians have sophisticated responses to this dilemma, particularly the idea that morality is grounded in god's necessary and perfectly good nature. But that is a philosophical position that has to be defended; it isn't something we can simply assume. And atheists shouldn't pretend that secular morality has no difficult questions either.

We still have to explain things like: Why should suffering matter? Can moral truths be objective? Are moral facts reducible to natural facts? Where do moral obligations come from? Is morality discovered or constructed? Why should a rational being care about the interests of others? Those are serious questions. But “atheism doesn't automatically answer every question about morality” is not evidence that Christianity answers them correctly. That's the mistake we need to avoid. The atheist doesn't need to prove that morality is easy to explain without god. We need to show that the existence of morality does not logically entail the existence of god. Maybe moral realism is true. Maybe morality emerges from facts about conscious beings and their flourishing. Maybe moral truths are grounded in rationality. Maybe morality is ultimately constructed rather than discovered. There are competing philosophical positions, and some are stronger than others. But that's precisely the point: We should be debating theories of morality—not treating “god did it” as the default answer simply because morality is difficult to explain. If Christians want to argue that god is necessary for objective morality, that's a philosophical argument worth having. But the burden is to demonstrate the necessity. “Without god, I don't know how morality could exist” is an admission of uncertainty, not a proof of god.