Originally published at: http://boingboing.net/2016/09/29/after-school-satan-club-gets-a.html
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I propose this scrappy group of underdogs brand themselves “The Bad News Beelzebubs.”
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Meanwhile all the hardcore kids are in After Satan School Club.
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Hmm doesn’t look Satanists are a very diverse group…
Also I call bullshit, not one black t-shirt?
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Most of the members of the convent were old-fashioned Satanists, like their parents and grandparents before them. They’d been brought up to it, and weren’t, when you got right down to it, particularly evil. Human beings mostly aren’t. They just get carried away by new ideas, like dressing up in jackboots and shooting people, or dressing up in white sheets and lynching people, or dressing up in tie-dye jeans and playing guitars at people. Offer people a new creed with a costume and their hearts and minds will follow. Anyway, being brought up as a Satanist tended to take the edge off it. It was something you did on Saturday nights. And the rest of the time you simply got on with life as best you could, just like everyone else.
-“Good Omens”, Pratchett & Gaiman
(I really ought to read that again sometime.)
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After School Satan Club, which will focus “on science and rational thinking.”…
OK, I get it. But if they REALLY were interested in promoting those things, they might have considered hitching their wagon to something less distracting from that goal. The giant, fire-eyed horned goat, the pentagram, and “in your face” subtheme kinda get in the way of rational discourse. Besides, Satan does not have much of a reputation for truth-saying. Clever bullshit has always been his big thing.
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Uh, that’s the whole point of Satanic Temple activism. They have this huge reputation that they can use to bait cities and states into illegal religious discrimination. Then they have standing to sue and can force the city or state to treat everyone fairly.
The straight up atheists have been trying to do this for a long time, but because they won’t say they’re a religion, most often their legit cases get thrown out with the judge saying they don’t have standing to say, object to the erection of a ten commandments statue on a courthouse. But the satanists who are not shy about calling themselves a religion can get the job done, and force the government’s hand.
And the satanists do care about teaching science and rationality. They’re just much better at using their image to fight legal battles.
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Good for them. It’s nice that the kids have a place to talk about Santa.
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But he kind of does, even within Christianity. At worst he tests people. The snake in the garden didn’t offer lies but truths - which is also why, in some branches of Christianity, the snake was associated with Jesus.
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Like I said…I get it. They’re making a legit legal point. But what’s that going to look like to the vast majority of people who might otherwise take the point…but are revolted by having it all gussied up in Ole Beezlebub’s duds? Hard-assed fundies are obnoxious … whatever the persuasion. They might score some technical wins in the law…but that’s not going to change hearts and minds. If, on the other hand, they took a less inflammatory … and, yeah, more rational…theme, they might achieve something worthwhile.
Satan would make for an entertaining conflict…if this were a movie. As a constitutional point-man, he loses a lot of steam because of his record.
Then again, this might REALLY be about Satanism, after all. Sneaky bastard!
Aw c’mon. You went with that when you could’ve used, “The Bad News Beelzebuds”?
Plus the ‘s’ needs to be backwards.
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Satanists generally view “annoying and/or horrifying Fundamentalist Christians” as a feature rather than a bug. Possibly even their main reason for organizing in the first place.
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“Beelzebuddies” is already the name of their Pre-K outreach program.
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As someone already said, that’s the point. The tactic here is that any religion seeking special privileges that other people don’t get is wrong, so the best way to point out the ridiculousness of this religious privilege is to mock them with religion. In this case Satanism.
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To repeat what @Shuck said: not so much in the Bible. It was God that was telling porkies in the Garden: “but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall die” (Genesis 2:17 – Adam lived to be 930).
In the Book of Job, which is basically the Duke brothers’ bet from Trading Places but nastier, he does a lot of horrible things (with God’s OK), but I don’t recall any lies as such.
When he tempts Christ with all the kingdoms of the world, there is no suggestion that those aren’t his to offer; it would be a pretty poor temptation if they weren’t.
The Dragon of Revelation will go out “to deceive the nations which are in the four quarters of the earth”, but some translations prefer “seduce”.
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Having lurked here for well over a decade, I finally registered just to share this anecdote:
Some number of decades ago, as a precocious pre-teen proto-punk, I took offense to my public school funding the Christian Campus Club out of public funds. My proposed solution: the Satanic Schoolyard Society, with exactly the same purpose and rationale (well, as close to “exactly the same” as you can reasonably expect from a ~10 year old).
It went over about as well as you would expect.
I bring this up mainly so I can give the SSS name to the world, for use by anyone wishing to start up a similar program to the one mentioned here and competing for funds/space/etc with the CCC.
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Satan loves everyone.
Satan actually did lie. He said that eating the fruit would not lead to death and that it would make Adam and Eve “be as gods”. Although they didn’t literally die the day they ate the fruit, their days were numbered as the death sentence was handed down at that moment.
We are talking about mythology here. This isn’t exactly factual.
Do we know that he knew that, though? The Bible doesn’t say. Satan tells the woman (she isn’t Eve yet) two things: that she will not certainly die, which could simply mean that the fruit won’t kill her on the spot (which is true), and that her eyes will be opened to good and evil (which is also true). Basically he’s asking her if she wants the blue pill or the red pill, and she chooses the red one.
Donald Trump’s campaign manager has established that a lie isn’t a lie if you don’t know it’s a lie, which is to say that blinkered ignorance is an excuse, so I would be inclined to give Satan a pass on this: unlike God, he’s not supposed to be omniscient.
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