When it comes to actual devil worship, Mesner has little faith. “I think that idea is silly,” he said. “I can’t even conceive of that actually being the case.” Then he added politely, “I mean, I try to respect other people’s beliefs as far as that kind of thing goes.”
Only one response to that, though he’s not my first choice for people to quote:
“We are all atheists about most of the gods that humanity has ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further.”
I mean, is it really any sillier than Hades? Anubis? The Erinyes?
Belief in Satan implies a belief in God, so devil worship is kind of uniquely silly in that practitioners would consciously choose to back the “bad guy” whose ultimate goal was to make his followers suffer eternal torture in the depths of hell. Even followers of the Church of Satan seem to find the idea of actual devil-worship silly.
That’s the thing though… technically, Satanists aren’t backing “The Bad Guy” but rather, “The Free Will Guy”. They don’t believe that Satan (and we could get into a very long argument about which particular entity is being worshipped, Lucifer, Satan, The Devil, etc… depending on the mythos of origin it gets very cloudy) is bad at all. God told Adam and Eve to obey a rule, then Eve got tricked (this is KEY) into breaking said rule. God then proceeds to kick his ever so precious creations right out of a life of comfort and happiness! All because this other dude, the dude who told them they can think and do whatever they want, tricked them into disobeying. Now, the trickster could definitely be seen as an asshole for that, but I think God looks much worse in this story.
I’m an atheist… I don’t believe in ANY of this, but I find it endlessly fascinating.
YOU DARE TO MOCK ANUBIS? Just you wait until you’re dead, and need someone to lead you to Osiris for judgement, your heart being weighed against Maat (represented by a feather), with Ammit just waiting to devour your sinful heart… Boy oh boy, you’ll just wish you hadn’t mocked the Jackal headed one!
I couldn’t help but notice their heretical depiction of Baphomet as a clothed male, when all right-thinking people know that s/he/it is a naked hermaphrodite.
I would add that God created Adam and Eve without knowledge of good and evil, so that they couldn’t understand even in principle that disobeying God would be wrong.
I haven’t looked too far into what particular Satanic groups proclaim, but I think you could construct a fairly unsilly story out of, for example, the Manichaean heresy.
Also, the hard part is not shouting “Good” (or “God”) but deciding which is which. If you look at the actual Bible (perhaps through the lens of someone seeing it as the story as written by the victors) it isn’t difficult to make the Abrahamic God look monstrous. And really, why should something be right just because God said so?
Hypothetically, suppose angels came down from heaven tomorrow, in public, and proclaimed for all to see that actually the Aztecs were right and asked why did the human sacrifices stop? Building pyramids is the wrong response to that, because whatever it is such a God wants it has nothing to do with “goodness.” Even if it were futile, and if there were an evil omnipotent deity, I would argue that there is a moral duty to disobey such a God. Even if that God also tossed in some really good ideas to conceal the hideousness, we would be obligated to ignore the evil parts.
If it wasn’t clear, yes, I’m an atheist.
This is disappointing. I still like the statue though, I just don’t feel like it really captures the full essence of LORD SATAN any longer. sigh
Well, deciding between Satan and God is a bit like deciding between rape by a perfect stranger and rape by your spouse, who’s sometime nice to you when he’s not drunk, has low blood sugar or feels like it.
i’m actually kind of bummed that it’s coming from the whole rationalist-individualist camp. the coolest thing about the statue is that it that it’s both silly and really fucking badass. look at that thing! it’s so cool.
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