Month: June 2019

Satan thinks the “masochism” model deserves a spanking

Posted on by A lesser demon

All models are wrong, but some are useful. But unlike our denizen Mr. George Box, who famously noted this, few people are statisticians or system modelers and instead evaluate the usefulness of their simplified explanations according to how well they support their desired conclusions, not how well they provide them with actual insight of the situations modeled. That is: people are uninterested in undefiled wisdom and prefer to deceive themselves, much in contrast to what Satan represents. People readily adopt models that are so poor that they are useful only for delusions, especially for complex explanations where they find answers that are easy, simple to understand, and wrong.

Mr. Anton LaVey was no statistician either but like any lay man lacking insight into his own scholarly limitations this did not suitably dissuade him from slapping together a correspondingly unaccomplished explanation for human behavior, especially regarding situations where he faced disagreement. So if someone was provoked by Mr. LaVey’s choosing my Master of All Things Evil as his “godshead” and decided to confront Mr. LaVey and usually lost the debate—because, after all, religion is not exactly a benchmark of logic and reason—Mr. LaVey concluded by some Freudian logic that they were masochistically inclined and had shown up unconsciously yearning for punishment. They wanted to confront Anton LaVey because they harbored a secret wish to be spanked, he mused, and any decision to confront a Satanist thus became proof of masochism. LaVey himself, coming out of the blue and being nowhere provocative by attacking established religion and using the “Satanism” moniker, was obviously not asking for a whipping, one must understand. Satan does not distinguish between Satanists who declare themselves as such, knowing what is in store for them, and masochists who start trouble with anyone else, but that is another matter.

Now, the Devil has nothing against sado-masochistic relationships (as long as He remains the perpetual sadist) and turns His blind eye towards the fact that The Church of Satan, which also professes LaVey’s view, uses “masochist” in a deprecatory sense in spite of its official stance on sexual liberation. My Master is content with being amused at how The Church of Satan feels satisfied whenever it receives mammoth beatings in any major confrontation and nonetheless believes it somehow “won” by declaring that its victor was a “masochist” for using The Church of Satan—even if the victor had merely used The Church of Satan as a gullible tool to gain the support of the masses. Or as they say nowadays: when The Church of Satan has its derriere whipped particularly hard in a spectator sport, it feels pride in making its BDSM master tired. Satan has always been the best friend the Church has ever had, and His own church seems to revel in its position as its bitch, seeing how often it asks for beatings by involving itself in matters that it could have ignored. Satan considers His church to be a masochism society that closes in on itself by assigning petty internal ranks to indicate their levels of submissiveness relative to each other.

I am sorry; the Devil made me overdo this. The crux of the matter is that The Church of Satan considers it masochism if anyone confronts it while considering it reasonable or incited criticism if The Church of Satan confronts anyone else, or even actively seeks confrontation by monitoring any mention of the Devil, Hell, or similarly connotational words as an excuse to meddle in affairs that they did not need to subject themselves to. Satan does not care if one calls it hypocrisy or uses fancy terms such as “correspondence bias” or “the fundamental attribution error.”

The Church of Satan has a number of such models, each of which can be traced to Anton LaVey’s policies or opinions.

Masochism, which was just covered, is integral to The Church of Satan and its social Darwinist leanings, which state that there are masters and slaves, Satanists obviously being the masters. Anyone who opposes the master is considered a slave, who does so only for masochistic reasons.

Shit-disturbers could be an exception to the above rule, depending on their motivation. Anton LaVey and subsequently The Church of Satan feel confident that they have produced all that is required to understand Satanism. If anyone points out discrepancies, inconsistencies, obsoletions, ambiguities, contradictions, or fallacies, or merely asks for elaboration or asks some critical questions, Anton LaVey made sure to characterize such people as shit-disturbers, whose only intent was to sow mischief. Well, either that, or to be spanked per the aforementioned model, one may assume. The term is not being used now that “troll” has gained more widespread use on the Internet.

Journalists and scholars in the field occasionally find themselves being either labeled or treated as shit-disturbers. This happens when they acknowledge the existence of other kinds of Satanists than The Church of Satan. Among recent events, Penny Lane would soon learn what vitriol one receives for neglecting to emphasize that only The Church of Satan are true Satanists in her film, Hail Satan?. Satan has it on good authority that The Church of Satan’s interviewee delegate struck her crew as such a know-nothing clown that the true reason his appearance was omitted in the final production was that they felt they did his home organization a favor.

Nuts: Anton LaVey once said that “[t]here are no categories of Satanists—there are Satanists, and then there are nuts.” The original context was a comment on the “no true Scotsman” tactic often used against Satanists where an antagonist will proclaim how Satanists are and offer an “oh, not your kind, of course” clarification in private to any Satanist who complains, while everyone else receives the original story with no such reservations. Anton LaVey sought to counter the tactic by asserting that there are no “kinds” of Satanists. Whoever the antagonist had in mind was not a Satanist but simply a nut who did not deserve this fine label. Satan thinks that Anton LaVey, who was originally remarkably tolerant of different approaches to the Devil among his first followers, had meant to distinguish only between real, existing Satanists and the mythical, non-existent “Satanists” who are found only within the heads of scared Christians—and possibly those few, confused individuals who occasionally act according to those myths, believing that behaving as Christians tell them will turn them into Satanists. Anton LaVey is now among us in Hell, but even while he was alive, it came to mean that only members of The Church of Satan could possibly be Satanists; everyone else is a non-Satanist, a poseur, and a wanna-be Satanist even if they do exactly what one would be praised for as a member of The Church of Satan.

Muting or kill-filing (or kill-listing) are Internet terms that The Church of Satan employs according to its masochism model: the terms refer to adding user names to a list that hides anything they write from your view, thus keeping the discussions clean from their nonsense. People are typically unaware of being thus ignored, and the method is favored by The Church of Satan because it believes it starves those users of the verbal spanking they crave when they beg (by addressing The Church of Satan) for punishment but never receive a reply. However, Satan has observed that The Church of Satan frequently forgets that it has “ignored” certain “shit-disturbers” but instead keeps a close watch on them either from other accounts or by merely claiming to have muted them.

Ex-members are people who left The Church of Satan for one reason or another. It goes without saying that ideological divorces rarely are civil but The Church of Satan applies a specific model against ex-members that is eerily reminiscent of Soviet Bloc propaganda during the 20th Century. Anyone who left The Church of Satan is invariably described as someone who couldn’t cut it (whatever “it” is), failed to apply Satanic principles to his or her life, was not around long enough to be truly initiated, or is in rare cases “forgotten,” as if that person never existed. The person could have been the very high priestess, as in the case of Karla LaVey, and yet is always immediately deemed irrelevant, said to never have been around, having never met Anton LaVey, never developed an understanding, did not display adequate interest, etc.

Sour grapes: whenever someone criticizes The Church of Satan for, say, being hopelessly outdated, it is considered a sour grapes attack. The Church of Satan’s model states that such people yearn for the high standards of The Church of Satan and fail to meet them, often being Iznogouds demanding to become the Caliph instead of the Caliph, and therefore consider The Church of Satan an unattainable ideal that is unfairly described as sour grapes cf. Aesop’s famous fable. Sour-grapes attacks are, of course, always made by people who qualify as ex-members and (therefore) nuts, because otherwise they would be labeled shit-disturbers. Within the The Church of Satan’s discourse, sour-grapes attacks are usually launched by former members who are disgruntled and resentful, and whose only fuel in life is their unjust hate of The Church of Satan. The longer the time since their departure from the organization the deeper their bitterness; no alternative explanation is possible.

Satan admits that He may have overlooked a few key models but believes that He has made His infernal point sufficiently clear: His church utilizes a selection of simple models that any of its members can readily learn, understand, and employ. To everyone else, who dares to recognize the shadow of my Master lurking in the details, the use of over-simplified explanations merely exposes closed-mindedness. An ultra-reductionist explanation that makes all the sense in the world to you can be just what makes everyone else realize that you are being ridiculously narrow-minded and short of insight.

Satan does not discourage such self-deceit. The world needs laughing stock as much as it needs knowledge, and everyone feels smarter and better when they encounter a conceited clown. Satan thinks you should apply any model that helps float your boat and considers it your own responsibility to avoid those models that enable everyone to identify you as an idiot.

Satan thinks Satanists are made, not born

Posted on by A lesser demon

If asked, a large number of the Devil’s followers will tell you that they always were Satanists, but that they first realized this when they encountered Satanism one way or another and realized their true nature. They never knew about Satanism and when for no apparent reason they accidentally obtained a copy of The Satanic Bible and decided to spend time reading it, it dawned upon them. Satan is not always entirely convinced by their explanation because some have been fundamentalist Christians for their entire lives until only a few years earlier, and usually when someone later discovers that Satanism was not for them after all, they cease to always have been Satanists. Far be it for the Devil to insinuate that they are lying; He merely hypothesizes that they sometimes apply alternate pasts.

Unlike we Hell-spawned creatures who dwell in the Devil’s reign of chaos, humans are a little conservative in that you require a certain level of consistency to stay sane. It is a social requirement that is deeply embedded in the human brain to expect that people do not behave entirely erratically, and to maintain a steady mental course. People usually do not change spontaneously unless something is very wrong. Convictions, ideologies, values, and morals are malleable but possess a degree of inertia. Any major change, such a politician’s change to another political party or someone’s decision to join a religious movement that they hitherto disagreed with, requires a good explanation which convinces especially themselves. An atheist simply does not become a born-again Christian overnight, for example, without providing some believable and unsophisticated story that supports the change: having met Jesus in one’s dreams is a tried and tested answer that is usually good enough for both believers and non-believers, because although their reaction will differ, they will accept the story as a valid reason.

Anyone who attempts to dig a little into such stories will find that such change typically has a backstory and rarely occurs as fast as told. People have usually shown significant interest prior to their revelations, and their “sudden” change merely marks the day they finally came out of their closets. Satan remembers that when Michael Aquino in 1975 spun his tale of being bestowed with the Fallen Angel’s “infernal mandate,” he had evidently desired it for a while, for example.

Such explanations are conversion narratives, which often follow certain unspoken rules depending on the nature of the target. Each ideology has its own set of expected and accepted narratives. The aforementioned Jesus experience is common among Christians in the US, and politicians whose alliances shift often explain that either the political landscape had moved while they stood their ground, or that they always were at heart what their new party represents.

Those who chose to follow the Prince of Darkness also use conversion narratives that obey certain rules. Satan maintains a strict principle of not showing Himself to His followers, so any narrative that involves His presence is frowned upon in the atheistic, Satanic arena, and will generally not be acknowledged. Even “losing faith” in one’s former religion is often not considered sufficiently convincing, and perhaps reasonably so, says Satan, because that would merely turn this lost sheep atheist.

The gold standard for a Satanic conversion narrative was provided by Anton LaVey, who several times declared that Satanists are born, not made, offering himself as a matchless example who demonstrated demonic tendencies from the day he was allegedly born with a tail. Satanists were unlike the herd; an alien elite in a sea of ordinary people. Satan thinks there is good reason for Anton LaVey’s sentiment because Satan thinks he had Asperger syndrome, which often manifests itself as herd apprehension and extraordinary skills that alienates one. However, the proclamation may also be a corollary of Anton LaVey’s belief in social Darwinism: a statement that Satanists are a breedable race with an iron youth.

Anton LaVey’s stand is regularly echoed by both The Church of Satan and non-affiliated Satanists, and The Church of Satan’s application for active membership still includes questions about the applicants’ biography, including their early childhood, supporting its position that one does not become a Satanist, one is a Satanist and therefore joins the organization. This conversion narrative has prompted Satanists across the entire spectrum to declare that they always were Satanists, only they did not know it, and to identify all sorts of anecdotes highlighting diabolic qualities earlier in their lives.

Satan has not doubt that most of His followers have occasionally exhibited traces of Satanic dispositions but suspects that the same followers could readily, and much more convincingly, identify an equal number of habits contradicting them if they felt so inclined—and they certainly do in those cases where they find it necessary to declare that Satanism was not their thing after all. As any born-again Christian will gladly inform you, everyone has a sinful past, so by carefully ignoring everything that speaks against your claim, anyone can say he was always a Satanist. Satan thinks that for the most part His followers do indeed become Satanists in the same way that anyone else gravitates to a new position and explains the change of mind and heart according to appropriate conversion narratives. A a Satanist, the proper conversion narrative is to make yourself and others believe you always were one whenever you become one.

Satan thinks His followers dress funny

Posted on by A lesser demon

Satan’s key observation about hipsters is that they prove a generic human trait: whenever humans achieve the freedom to be individuals, they use it to imitate each other. In an attempt to look unique and uninfluenced by fashion, hipsters look to each other for inspiration and eventually all look the same. It is this trait that makes Satan think of His followers as hipsters: they wish to stand out from the herd’s expectations but habitually become involuntary stereotypes for that very reason. Satan has observed that with some venerable exceptions, His followers occupy three categories when they choose their outfits:

1. The heavy metal dude with a pitiable body dressed with prominent pentagrams and inverted crosses, complemented with illegible band name tee shirts. Studded leather boots that would fit a slightly homo-erotically–appealing villain of a medieval-times TV series also seem popular. All of it except the band name and image was black before being worn and fortunately washed too many times. Satan counts his blessings (or curses) that they grew up without knowing what the heavy metal icons of the 1980es looked like and attempted to imitate them instead.

2. The pretentiously overdressed snob who attempts to impress others, who watch overbearingly while the pretender impresses only himself or herself and possible a few fellow followers. The Devil hands this follower that at least he or she managed to grasp a few basics about lesser magic and the need to stand out from the herd but wishes that they would observe the Balance Factor. At least they seem to be learning that looking like Anton LaVey is growing out of fashion. Satan cannot tell if the memory of Mr. LaVey is fading or if the general population today now simply shrugs at a shaved head and a goatee, and is mostly relieved that fewer of His followers make the attempt without having the skull—both literally and figuratively—to imitate the old Doctor. He cringes at the thought that His followers might instead one day look to Peter Gilmore, LaVey’s successor in His church, resulting in a horde of eyebrows combed upwards and a tendency towards overweight, but rather than hoping Peter Gilmore will one day recall his own opinion about Michael Aquino’s shaved eyebrows two decades ago, the Devil takes solace in knowing that Peter Gilmore’s meager charisma will inspire few people to imitate his physical appearance.

3. The person who has lost perspective and only recalls that he or she is a Satanist when the Devil is occasionally mentioned and otherwise behaves and thinks and dresses entirely like everyone else. The wardrobe reflects the similarity with others.

The Devil swears by nine parts respectability to one part outrage in accordance with the Balance Factor. Not eight parts that scream loser to two parts 1990es movie, not seven parts respectability to three parts empty posturing, and not ten full parts of mediocrity.