My daughter and her friends were saying they were Satanists to piss off the "normal" kids. So I had her look up TST's 7 fundamental tenets. Now she really is one.
For those unfamiliar, The Satanic Temple is an atheistic organization. Here are its tenets. I often ask people what they disagree with and get very little in the way of meaningful response.
THERE ARE SEVEN FUNDAMENTAL TENETS
I
One should strive to act with compassion and empathy toward all creatures in accordance with reason.
II
The struggle for justice is an ongoing and necessary pursuit that should prevail over laws and institutions.
III
One’s body is inviolable, subject to one’s own will alone.
IV
The freedoms of others should be respected, including the freedom to offend. To willfully and unjustly encroach upon the freedoms of another is to forgo one's own.
V
Beliefs should conform to one's best scientific understanding of the world. One should take care never to distort scientific facts to fit one's beliefs.
VI
People are fallible. If one makes a mistake, one should do one's best to rectify it and resolve any harm that might have been caused.
VII
Every tenet is a guiding principle designed to inspire nobility in action and thought. The spirit of compassion, wisdom, and justice should always prevail over the written or spoken word.
No, nor do we believe in the existence of Satan or the supernatural. The Satanic Temple believes that religion can, and should, be divorced from superstition. As such, we do not promote a belief in a personal Satan. To embrace the name Satan is to embrace rational inquiry removed from supernaturalism and archaic tradition-based superstitions. Satanists should actively work to hone critical thinking and exercise reasonable agnosticism in all things. Our beliefs must be malleable to the best current scientific understandings of the material world — never the reverse.
CoS or Levayan satanism does not worship Satan. Like TST, they don't even believe in a literal Satan. Although they do have a concept of magic. Some in CoS take that tongue-in-cheak. Some take it more literally.
Can you please elaborate? I hear this a lot but mostly from people who know little to nothing about CoS. They just read that comparison chart that TST threw together with hard bias.
The Satanic Temple is incredibly based. I've been a member since they started trolling Iowa legislators a year or two ago with Iowa Satanic Temple School in response to the school choice nonsense.
Me and my wife are both Members of the TST and we're wholeheartedly proud of it. They are doing such great things for religious equality and attempting to stop the overreach of Christianity within our schools and government. We donate to them regularly and I'm so happy to be supporting a group that is genuinely doing great things for our individual rights and the betterment of our communities as a whole.
As far as membership goes, yes kids are allowed. You can buy a membership card and certificate on their website, or you can just go and participate in one of their public events as long as the event doesn't mention any age requirements. My local chapter definitely does family friendly events.
They organize events on Facebook groups in my area typically. Just search for TST and your state name and you should be able to find a local chapter that does some sort of events.
In this thread: people who have never taken a deep dive into the myriad forms of ethics and morality that have existed throughout history
Like, a whole bunch of the arguing in this thread boils down to "when does utilitarianism overrule moral absolutism" or "is it always the case that one should use deontology, vs consequentialism, vs virtue ethics"
These are really complicated questions that have been considered and discussed at great lengths and I see a lot of comments in here making statements assuming one or the other is absolutely correct, without addressing the underlying justifications for their personal ethical and moral convictions
Personally, I’ve taken much deeper dives into game lore.
This is what I absolutely love about sci-fi and fantasy. It lets writers kick about stuff that can be dry and boring if you go into it from the pure academic route, and it lets writers get around knee-jerk reactions to certain ideas by first fooling around with them in a neat fantasy or sci-fi universe.
Basically, it can make a lot of history and mythology and science fun, and once someone's into lore from a pure entertainment standpoint, then they start following stuff back to get the historical or scientific parts of it if they want to go deeper.
Well, you're missing out. There are some really interesting arguments out there for why we should or shouldn't behave in certain ways. I love that so many exist and none of them are objectively falsifiable, so you get to decide for yourself which to follow
That's the nature of literally every social issue.
Can you provide an objective, philosophical reasoning for why able bodied people should pay taxes to support disabled people?
That's something I fully believe in, but I'm not able to formulate any good arguments as to why I think it's the right thing to do. It's simply what I was raised to believe in.
I think it's important for us to recognize that most of don't actually have objective moral explanations to back up our values. For most of us, the values we hold are simply matters of belief in what's good, in much the same way a Christian believes in the good of God.
People consider their own lives to have value beyond their ability to produce wealth. Every individual has the expectation that if they were to become disabled or too old to work, they would receive assistance from society to help keep them alive. So you can try to form a moral argument about why caring for someone else is correct, or you can turn it inward and say that you expect to be taken care of if you get hurt and leave it at that. What's the point of doing all this work if your value ends when you can no longer work?
I'm setting a reminder to come back to this when I'm at a keyboard instead of on my phone. Because yes, I can provide such an argument! Multiple, in fact! You might not agree with the foundational assumptions behind the arguments but that's the point of philosophical debate. It will just take some time to present the necessary ethical and moral framework that leads to the conclusion "we should pay taxes to help the disabled".
People have been working on those sorts of questions for generations upon generations. And we can answer some of them without ever using terms like "good" or "right".
Read my username as a poor phonetic spelling of a philosopher's name for a preview of what I'll say :D
As someone who grew up in a conservative Christian church and became an atheist as an adult, I still have an innate emotional reaction to the name The Satanic Temple that I struggle to get over, even as I’ve fully gotten over earlier emotional reactions like making jokes about Jesus the same way I might about anything else (which I couldn’t do at the beginning of my atheist journey).
Good on your daughter for not caring about that and fully evaluating it based on its tenets.
It might help to better understand the origin of the term.
It first appears in Job in reference to a supernatural 'adversary' who petitions Yahweh to be able to kill Job's children and ruins his livelihood causing him to tear his clothes in grief and setting up the rest of the book which is a dialogue on the injustice of suffering.
The later dialogue part of Job is pretty much a direct adaptation of the earlier Babylonian Theodicy, a dialogue on suffering.
But this earlier opening has a remarkable parallel with the earlier Canaanite Tale of Aqhat, where in the opening the goddess Anat petitions El as the head of the pantheon for permission to kill the son of Danel, which he finds out about at the same time he finds out his livelihood is ruined, when he tears his clothes in grief.
So it pretty much looks like what we have in Job was a combination of two earlier polytheistic stories where a lazy editor under later monotheistic reform needed to get rid of a different god in the story while keeping the role, so switched out the name for a generic term of 'adversary' (Satan).
This addition of a supernatural adversary caught the imagination of later development of the theology and led to a great deal of fanfiction, much like how the failure to translate 'Lucifer' falling in Isiah back to "the morning star" led to even more fanfiction because of parallels to the Enochian apocrypha.
TL;DR: While you may no longer have a faith-related uncomfortableness about some supernatural 'evil' entity, understanding that the very origin of all that warning and indoctrination you suffered which has left a remnant avoidance of the term was itself an adaptation of polytheism in the tradition - something you were likely also conditioned to reject by the same indoctrination - might help in further distancing yourself from that remnant concern. 'Satan' is not only silly in a rational consideration of cosmic forces, but is a ridiculous part of the Abrahamic tradition down to its very first appearance in the tradition.
My wife has the same issue as you do because of the same reason (although she became an atheist in her teens). She's working to get over it because she knows my daughter is firm on this.
I know they didn't on their website, I just want to make sure. I'd hate to give her a membership card and then tell her it was withdrawn because they found out she was under 18.
I didn't know they were purely atheistic. I though it was religious, but subverting the christian interpretation of the bible so that Lucifer/Satan would actually be the good guy, written about by unreliable narrators.
I even had a whole circular theory about it. Like, Lucifer being the angel that brings the light of reason, and the serpent who argue that humans should, in fact, know right from wrong... and who would have been cast out for rebelling against a malevolent god who thinks wanting to use reason to determine and enact justice rather than blindly take it on "faith" that the unfair natural law is part of an inherently good yet unscrutable "plan" is an unforgivable sin of pride worthy of eternal damnation... A malevolent creator who'd have used this 'faith' flaw in our brains to build an army of authoritarian followers, and manipulated the narrative to systematically assassinate the character of an "adversary" that is actually our best ally in any struggle for self-determination and justice against the oppressor.
I read waaaaaay too much into the name. Now I'm actually a bit disappointed.
Edit: wait am I thinking of another form of satanism?
Edit2 : nevermind, apparently I'm describing a blend of Luciferianism and the Church of Satan. Imma take whatever appeals to me, add a bit of discordianism to make the incompatible bits stick together better and I think that's gonna be my religion for a while.
Edit3: apparently it gets me even closer to the Our Lady of Endor Coven.
I'll be honest, when opening this thread I was not expecting people to not universally agree on tenet number 3 there. I was even going to make a joke on your first paragraph and how they might take issue because of that tenet because nobody can be that absurd, right? RIGHT?
The pro-eugenics stance that Lucian has is obviously very problematic and it would be nice if he were removed. Otherwise, yeah. Never met a Satanist I didn't like.. My mom even sent me a tshirt she bought while passing through Salem a little while ago.
Problem with them is while you can admire their core values, the shock value imagery and unnecessary allegories taint what would be an otherwise great idea.
You mean imagery from the Bible? The majority of images that they use are symbols taken from Christianity. They are about as shocking as Halloween decorations or goth kids.
Also, a big part of the reason TST uses the Satanic imagery is to fight for the separation of church and state. To give an example, Christians wanted to pass a law to make courtrooms display the ten commandments in the US. The Satanic Temple argued in court that they will have to be allowed to display statues of Satanic demons in courtrooms. This made the Christians repeal the law forcing religious imagery into the courtroom, which is what TST really wanted all along.
You're breaking the fourth tenet my friend, but I forgive you because I know you just want what you think is best for people.
Not everybody should be a vegan. There's plenty to gain from eating meats and vegetables, and humans evolved to be capable of eating both. Some day in the future I hope meat is replaced with either fully synthetic or lab -growth meats simply because I don't think any living creature should have to live the way food animals (I forget the word) do currently. But for now I will continue eating meat because I am just one man and meat is very tasty.
Maaaan I hope you don't live in the Bible Belt.. because if so, you just royally screwed your daughter when it comes to meaningful associations in school.
When you hear hoofbeats think horses, not zebras.
When the majority of people hear Satanist, they think Anthony LaVey and the Church of Satan - Satanism.
I hope she makes that distinction instantly and incredibly clear to everyone around her.
Seeing as the OP's daughter and her friends were telling people they worshipped Satan just to piss them off in the first place, I suspect she's already got a healthy amount of social support. Besides, the Bible Belt is chock-full of hyper-religious, xenophobic idiots, and they don't count as "meaningful associations." Nothing to be lost there.
Pretty sure there’s no such thing as a meaningful relationship with a person who would judge you based on your religion, and she’s better off finding out early who her friends really are.
We're talking about 13 year olds here, not 30 year olds. I have one. They judge each other based on the absolute dumbest shit. The site they got their Jordans from, how many followers they do/don't have on whatever platform, whether someone's text message bubble shows a certain color.
Don't get me started on the 'shooters' that worship Satan and don't even own a pair of Jordans.
Thankfully mine is aware that none of that stuff matters, and I try to convince them not to get it any thought, but they're still heavily judged by their peers for all of that, they feel it and to them it's the worst pain they've experienced do far, so we still get constant requests to buy this thing or that thing for them because it's what's cool this millisecond.
Kids aren't the brightest, their brains are still developing until they're in their 30s, and the emotional turmoil it takes is still incredibly real to them, regardless how little thought you want to give it.
There are no meaningful associations to be had in school other than friends gained.
Take your tongue off that boot for a moment and try thinking for yourself for a change.
Friends gained is what I'm talking about, numbnuts. You associate with people before you become friends with them. Friendship doesn't happen overnight, and it happens much less if you're the school outcast because "she's a Satanist and her dad baptized her in blood" or whatever rumors are about to start flying around once her current friends confirm it's true.
By then, no amount of explaining the rationalization of the difference between the CoS and TST will un-outcast her.
Thankfully middle- and high- school aren't forever, but many outcasted kids just off themselves because to them, so far it has been forever and they don't know any better.
Signed, the formerly outcasted middle schooler from the Bible belt who is fine as an adult but wishes my parents would have thought about the consequences of their actions.
Laveyan Satanism is a step better than gothic satanism (that is, enemy cultists in Hollywood movies, and what churches imagine they're fighting against).
Unlike actual religions, they aren't trying to recruit the world. They are just trying to shake up all the others.
The local school leads a Christian prayer circle every morning? The law roughly says that if you let ONE religion practice, you must let them ALL. So, when the SATANIC TEMPLE shows up and says that they want to talk to your kids, the school decides that maybe it isn't worth hosting Jesus if they also have to invite Satan.
The name scares the shit out of those who believe in it, and just makes the rest of us laugh. It's perfectly effective as it was intended.
I’m with you on most of that, but please don’t imply the Satanic Temple is not an “actual religion.”
It is removed from the baseless superstitions that plague most religions, but it is important that it be recognized as an “actual religion” so that it can actually fight these legal battles effectively to retain rights for all people, whether they are religious or not.