Month: June 2023

Satan thinks egalitarianism has merit

Posted on by A lesser demon

Every religion considers other religions to be the source of devilry, although in the past, pantheistic religions have usually been happy to incorporate inspiring elements from other religions into their own. People and hence their religions tend to become more tolerant towards other religions if resources are scarce and reliance on alien cultures is vital to one’s existence. However, as a general rule, anything that seems wrong in one’s society has always been blamed on others. It does not matter that it had been effective for centuries; if it eventually became undesired, it could be blamed on others and perceived as some kind of demon that they had introduced.

The Devil’s own church, The Church of Satan, has identified its share of demons that it attributes to other religions. One such archdemon is egalitarianism, which Peter Gilmore repeatedly denounces in The Satanic Scriptures and believes is caused by Christianity. He demands instead Social Darwinism and authoritarian eugenics, arguing that they expose the fundamental fallacies of egalitarian doctrine, although he does not explain how. In Peter Gilmore’s mind, the fallacies of egalitarianism are the belief that everything and everyone are, or should be, equal:

Thus, some random splashes on a canvas were considered an equal achievement to the Sistine Chapel; a mud hut was held up as being equivalent to Versailles. A janitor was dubbed the equivalent to a physicist; a novelist was now the peer of one who scrawled graffiti on a bathroom wall. This principle of “discrimination” was applied to all other fields of achievement.

The opposition to egalitarianism is deeply entrenched in both LaVeyan and Gilmoron Satanism, to the degree that the very first point, “on which all the others ultimately rest,” of The Church of Satan’s mostly political program is: “the advocacy … of stratification, which is no less than the elimination of egalitarianism wherever it has taken root.”

Egalitarianism, in The Church of Satan, is meant as a complete leveling of all differences between human beings. Similarly, equality is the presumption that everyone has equal abilities and no differences, and nobody performs to the best of their ability as everything is compressed into conformist homogeneity. Satan can barely fathom how nightmarish the thought of thereby having nothing to brag about must be to a stereotypically complete grandiose narcissist such as Peter Gilmore. From the Devil’s opposite perspective, however, most of His followers would improve considerably if it were possible to average all humans. When we sort their souls for incineration in Hell, we usually classify them as “small combustibles” unless they are toxic waste.

Neither of the two writers appears to be aware that their understanding of egalitarianism is utterly false nor that egalitarian principles have secular origins. These principles were born of the Enlightenment and are now adopted by numerous international laws, treaties, and domestic constitutions and bills of rights despite religious opposition. They cannot be dismissed as the product of a single religion or even several religions in unison. Egalitarianism involves the principle that everyone has a set of immutable rights that should not be infringed upon. They are designed to protect all individuals from social, legal, political, or other abuse. They are minimal standards, not maximal standards, whose goal is to prevent the worst, not enable or prescribe the best.

Human rights are not a leveling tool and have no bearing on ability or skill. They exist to protect the vital existence of every individual, not to artificially foster incompetence or homogenize society, and are constructed on the basis of human equality. In egalitarianism, equality is the claim that all humans are of equal moral worth, not equal ability. Anyone with the ability to write a symphony rivaling Beethoven’s genius is free to do so, and any individual who lacks the ability never will. (Satan thinks that, although holding a degree in musical composition, Peter Gilmore’s closest experience with musical recognition will remain the Salieri syndrome.) The human rights of egalitarianism protect everyone from repression or persecution in pursuit of their respective goals, and do not determine what individuals can do with their natural abilities nor flatten the differences between those abilities. With their fundamental liberties protected by egalitarian principles, individuals become free to pursue any life they feel is rewarding, providing that the rights of others are respected. Egalitarianism is a prerequisite for a functioning meritocracy.

Satan initially thought to Xerox Peter Gilmore a copy of the definition of egalitarianism from any modern dictionary, but the extent and the form of Gilmore’s misunderstanding of the term is all too familiar to His Infernal Majesty, who knows that Gilmore will not be educated. It is how the far-right ultra-conservatives apply the term when (like LaVey and Gilmore) they imagine that their arbitrarily charted group of people has intrinsically higher moral worth than other human beings. The only difference is that LaVey and Gilmore believe the horror stems from left-wing politics emanating from Christianity, whereas the typical far-right advocates against egalitarianism are equally convinced that it is a left-wing plague but believe that Christianity is the cure.

Old Nick considers an exposition on right-wing politics to be outside of the scope of these thoughts and believes it suffices to observe that when egalitarianism is yet another word that The Church of Satan uses incorrectly, in this incident, the primary explanation is not their usual subaverage comprehension skills. The Church of Satan echoes a far-right view that makes sense only when accompanied by a complete ideological framework from that same end of the political spectrum. It is an interpretation tightly knit with several other elements that provide that political position’s view of humans and cannot be separated from those elements.

One does not have to be a master of systemic functional linguistics (which Satan is, of course) to understand that people’s vocabulary reveals much about them, nor that social semiotics tells us that a consistent use of specific misunderstandings serves as a language equivalent of secret handshakes. The Church of Satan reveals and communicates a far-right political platform and attracts members accordingly.

Satan thinks resonance is instability

Posted on by A lesser demon

No intelligent person can write a bible in any religion. To cater to the average masses, a true bible must be comprised of confusion, ignorance, popular “knowledge,” and lengthy, irrelevant tirades to which its readers can relate and remember. People with scientific training or scholarly skills avoid such tendencies when they speak of things that they know. Satan also never goes off on a tangential rant when He wishes to make a point, or He would have written a proper bible long ago. A bible cannot contain reasoned observations and conclusions, because reason can be argued. Bibles must be immune to reason.

The Satanic Bible is no exception. Virtually no paragraph in the book survives critical scrutiny against facts and healthy arguments. Satan thinks His church may be secretly aware of the deep flaws of its foundational scripture because it applies modernized interpretations to many of its key elements. What was once very real magic is now “just psychodrama,” and Anton LaVey’s overtly fascist understanding of Social Darwinism has been reduced to comprehending that the universe is not fair. Carpentry on LaVey’s decaying ship of Theseus is a full-time job.

It is, therefore, no surprise to The Prince of Darkness that The Church of Satan no longer requires its followers to agree with The Satanic Bible, as was once its officially stated criterion for being a Satanist. It now suffices to like the book—or, as they phrase it, to feel that it resonates with you. That, and your continued praise of Anton LaVey, The Church of Satan, and its internal hierarchy.

Satan agrees with LaVey when he said that language can be highly revealing. Sometimes, what you read between the lines may be the bulk of the message. “Resonance” is one fine word with such an interesting connotation that it is uniquely well-chosen.

The Devil thinks some explanation is required. If you poke an object repeatedly, there is a narrow range of poke frequencies where the object will vibrate at a rate that matches your stimuli before the energy is dissipated. Each stimulus then stacks on top of the previous stimuli so that, eventually, there is lots of movement, far greater than that of any single stimulus. Consider the musical guitar, for example: you pluck the string, which keeps vibrating for a while and thus keeps poking the air in the guitar body. The size and shape of the guitar body reflect the sound of a plucked guitar string, but before the sound escapes the hole in the guitar body, more sound from the vibrating string has already been added on top of it many times. What sounds like an amplification is the effect of thousands of identical little sound wave tops having been added together. This effect is called resonance.

Resonance typically occurs at the so-called “natural frequency” of a system. This innocuous-sounding property can be very dangerous to a system, because it marks a point of instability. At just the right frequency and with the right material, the total energy that is accumulated in a resonant system may approach infinity and often spells disaster as the system is torn apart and, for systems that can draw this energy from their surroundings (for example, electrical systems), may destroy the source of energy as well. While many important applications utilize resonance (for example, to produce sound or to generate stable frequencies for radio communications), engineers and architects go to great lengths to avoid the phenomenon unless it is explicitly desired, even trivial forces can wreak havoc if they occur at the resonant frequency. Nobody wants to repeat the Tahoma Narrows Bridge collapse. That being said, some systems are more prone to resonance than others. It typically occurs if a medium is high-strung or rigid, or is hollow or homogenous matter with few diverse components. A common method for reducing the risk of resonance is to use non-simple structures of composite materials with non-trivial responses to external stimuli.

Satan thinks the term “resonate” very accurately describes people who gravitate towards His church: if The Satanic Bible resonates with a person, it is because its banalities are inflated to high importance by a naturally unstable reader with an empty head. It has a great effect on simple, easily provoked people with views constructed from a few rigid absolutes. Resonance is usually detrimental to a medium, and Satan thinks that many readers who found that The Satanic Bible “resonated” with them have developed to the worse.

Satan thinks His organizations can find proper designations

Posted on by A lesser demon

The Devil appreciates self-confidence but feels that The Church of Satan oversteps its territory when it insists that there are no kinds of Satanism because only Anton LaVey’s 1960s mish-mash of now dead or dying ideas and beliefs exists. Satan thinks He possesses the absolute right to decide whether some movement is Satanic and whether some person is qualified to pass the gates of Hell.

It made sense some decades ago that there were Satanists and nuts, with nothing in-between, because the nuts were those who propagated the Christian myths about devil worshipers, whereas if you were a Satanist, at that time there was just The Church of Satan. There had been short-lived societies who had called themselves Satanists and similarly to The Church of Satan had defined ideologies that were not intended as Christian slurs or relied on Christian mythology, but they were forgotten and only rediscovered by scholars about a decade into the current century.

Overlooking that a sizeable number of unaffiliated individuals with each their own notion of Satanism exists, the above categorization no longer suffices. There are now Satanism as practiced by The Satanic Temple, Satanism as practiced by the Church of Satan, and nuts.

The Church of Satan maintains its belief that only they can be Satanists whereas obviously The Satanic Temple disagrees but is forced to acknowledge that multiple definitions coexist, at least while The Church of Satan lasts. (The latter sometimes appears to rest upon the fate of Twitter.) However, both organizations emphatically and firmly agree that their own version of Satanism is certainly not like the other, and that out in the real world the umbrella term “Satanism” thus includes elements that they both reject.

The Satanic Temple often refers to the other group as “LaVeyan” Satanism, or LaVeyans, whereas The Church of Satan refuses to refer to The Satanic Temple at all. (Well, with the exception that they are in fact all The Church of Satan ever talks about, but Satan thinks we should not dwell on that.)

Some Church of Satan members suggested that members of The Satanic Temple should be called “templars,” thereby nimbly avoiding the ‘S’ word, but it backfired when The Satanic Temple’s members responded by referring to The Church of Satan’s members as churchgoers. Satan is known to also have used this term.

Satan thinks the organizations should not be asked to agree on a term that covers them both, but believes it is possible to reach a compromise if The Satanic Temple will agree to play by the rules of the Satanism of The Church of Satan. Specifically, Satan thinks that The Church of Satan should approve of the employment of one of its most admirable foundational principles: Might Is Right. Everyone should be allowed to reach his level according to his strength and cunning. If this simple and beautiful maxim of Nature is obeyed, the solution comes naturally and will install stratification on every level of society.

It would be moderately entertaining to watch Lucien Greaves of The Satanic Temple pitted against Peter Gilmore of The Church of Satan in a cage fight, but Satan thinks that one should focus on organizational power not personal brawns. Hence, Satan thinks the situation should be solved via organizational might, and in this contest domination is clear as the sky is blue. Nobody hears about The Church of Satan anymore but everyone knows about The Satanic Temple, which currently drowns the voice of any competing organization. That objectively bestows the definition rights onto The Satanic Temple, because anything The Church of Satan might have to say is in Davy Jones’ locker whose key was lost with LaVey.

Satan thinks His temple should exercise this right with utmost responsibility—as a token of respect for The Church of Satan’s declaration that Satan represents responsibility to the responsible, of course. Being this principle personified, Satan therefore offers a proposition:

The Satanic Temple shall henceforth refer to themselves as Satanism, and their members as Satanists. No qualifier shall be provided. The Satanic Temple shall refer to The Church of Satan as LaVeyan Satanism, and its members as LaVeyan Satanists. This indicates that The Satanic Temple accepts their presence while also signaling that in the bigger picture, The Church of Satan has become the marginalized group and its former rights revoked. In addition, “LaVeyan” implies that the ideology is primarily tied to a specific persona.

Satan thinks The Satanic Temple should avoid the temptation to use the short-hand “LaVeyan,” without the Satanism part. Firstly, that term should be reserved for people who are only Anton LaVey personality cultists to whom the majestic designation of Satanism does not apply. Secondly, and more importantly, Satan thinks His church should be reminded that they are now second class and may claim the name of Satanism only as allowed by The Satanic Temple, which may and can select the third alternative of reallocating the churchgoers to the “nuts” category at its discretion.