Sex

Satan thinks LaVey wrote a rape ritual

Posted on by A lesser demon

Lucifer prefers to call a spade a spade and avoids all sorts of “fancy” language. The Angel of Enlightenment thinks that exorbitantly whimsical wordings or effervescent expressions obscure intent, regardless of the verbal dexterity of the author. Satan considers it lingual masturbation that renders everyone else unsatisfied. He would allow none of His demons such self-inflated literary smugness and considers it proof that their thesauri are larger than their wits. But enough about the writings of Peter Gilmore—Satan appreciates that in The Satanic Bible, Anton LaVey uses simple words when he calls a “love charm” or a “love spell” for what they are: an attempt to get sex.

LaVey explains that the purpose of the sex ritual that he introduces in The Satanic Bible is to “create desire on the part of the person whom you desire.” All of Satan’s followers will please remember that, according to LaVey, magic is used when normal methods would fail, because the situation would be unchangeable using normal methods, and one applies magic only when conventional methods fail because otherwise, one would use conventional methods. In the case of sex rituals, it means that you could not possibly make the person desire you, even with the best tricks in the pick-up artist’s book. Satan thinks you are truly that undesirable if you must resort to a sex ritual.

Hence, the purpose of a sex ritual is to create the sexual consent that you have never received: that you may have sex with a person despite being denied the mating signal that Satan requires for any sexual advances per Satanic Rule of the Earth number five. This may have seemed reasonable in the 1960es of Anton LaVey when the absence of affirmative consent was yet to be understood as a sexual violation, but today it is indicative of a sexually predatory mindset.

Satan will hear no such excuse that having created the desire through magic, it became a genuine desire. Such an argument is true for sexual grooming as well, and for con jobs in general; the victim may have handed over his money willingly to the con artist but is nonetheless a victim. The mindset is no less dangerous in the modernized perception among His current churchgoers, where ostensibly a ritual now serves to modify one’s own mind, because it instills in the mind of the practitioner the delusion that the quarry has provided consent and thereby the mating call that justifies transgressive action. Unlike magic which does not exist, self-suggestion is real and can have consequences.

Returning to the topic of plain speech, Satan appreciates that LaVey did not hide the intent of the “sex ritual” behind a veil of love, but He thinks it is high time to call the ritual for what it is: it is a rape ritual, the purpose of which is to force consent where none was given.

Satan thinks Satanic child abuse is taboo

Posted on by A lesser demon

In spite of their ideological differences, one thing my Master’s followers can agree on is that sexual abuse of children has no place among Satanists. But let us be honest: there are genuine examples of sexual child abuse among Satanists. Satan personally knows of an example involving a former priest in His church and another example involving a person who possessed a membership card of a Satanic organization. Both of these examples considered their sexual abuse of their own children to be a facet of their beliefs. His Infernal Majesty must know such things because He is required to keep track of human evil to exact a fitting punishment when their time comes.

A little sense of realism should erase all doubt anyway. Statistics on child abuse vary and involve unreported numbers but given any 1,000 people it is virtually guaranteed that some of them are unfortunately child abusers or harbor some level of pedophile tendencies. This implies that any organization with more than a few hundred members should be expected to have child abusers among its members regardless of ideology. It is not the nature of the organizations but the disagreeable human nature that allows such a prognosis. The Devil has a few larger groups devoted to Him, and any accusation that they include pedophiles is, sadly, bound to be true for this reason alone. Satan wishes them rooted out regardless of the internal taboo of His Satanic organizations that was bound to take root when Anton LaVey condemned child abuse to the level of elevating it to one of the Eleven Satanic Rules of the Earth.

Yet, Satan advises His followers to keep their pride checked and avoid unnecessary suspicions. Any one group of organized Satanists that accuses another Satanic organization of pedophile inclinations and thus perpetrators of the worst taboo should remember its own position in the real world. The history of the “Satanic Panic” in the late 1980s and early 1990s had real implications for thousands of innocent victims, and the current QAnon attempts to resurrect the panic as part of their political movement should be a concern for any modern Satanist with a little historical and social perspective. Such people do not distinguish between Satanic groups, and if Satanic organizations accuse each others of child abuse, all would-be Satanic Panic revivalists will just lump them together and throw all non-Republican presidential candidates in for good measure, and could not care less if these Satanic organizations happen to damn each other away from Hell.

The last thing any Satanic organization needs is to feed such nation-wide herd stampedes with speculations that tie right into their myths, and which they will readily use against this same Satanic organization. An accusation of pedophilia may help dissuade a few would-be members from joining the other Satanic group but it misses the greater picture. Any little harm one Satanic organization inflicts upon another is a gain to opponents with genuine power to effect changes for the worse who will happily use it. It is a poor general who loses the war to win the minor skirmishes.

Satan thinks that His original organization, The Church of Satan, is particularly challenged in its perspective when its members repeatedly insinuate that The Satanic Temple has a pedophile appeal for constructing a statue that allows children to sit on its lap and for establishing projects such as their “after school Satan” program. In fact, Satan thinks it is worrying when people who think in terms of sexual child abuse at the sight of a child on the lap of a statue feel the more attracted to an organization which proudly displays a picture of a little child next to a naked, real woman in a Satanic ritual, and describes in its literature how this child, the daughter of the very founder, became pregnant with an unknown father at the age of 13. The pendulum may strike back hard one day.

Satan thinks abortion is murder

Posted on by A lesser demon

Before your unfaithful narrator begins, the Devil wishes to stress that He does not intend to discuss Anton LaVey’s opposition to abortion. Nor does He wish to discuss how Anton LaVey views demonstrated both misogyny and an unusual lack of perspective.

He will therefore not address Anton LaVey’s opinion that the wish for an abortion demonstrates ignorance, negligence, or irresponsibility on the behalf of the would-be parents, or how Anton LaVey criticized the idea that women should have the right to control their own bodies. (Perhaps this explains why, when Anton LaVey’s own daughter became pregnant at the age of 13, she became a mother two months after her 14th birthday.) Least of all does Satan want to discuss the impossibility of mandatory sterilization or use of contraceptives that Anton LaVey proposed as a “third alternative.”

The Prince of Darkness thus leaves it to others to imagine examples when an abortion might have other causes than stupidity, or whether especially women might want a time in their lives when they avoid pregnancy and only later become parents.

No, Satan has something different in mind. He is thinking of the ethical issues about abortion potentially being comparable to murder, at least in those situations where they are choices rather than medical emergencies intended to save a mother’s life.

To begin with, Satan finds that “pro-life” arguments are generally horrendous. Religious anti-abortionists usually apply arguments that make no sense outside of their religions; for example, that abortion is a crime against their god—making it a victimless crime to anyone else. Any meaningful argument should at least appeal to some level of neutrality or reason and leave superstition out of the picture.

Satan also objects to highly polarized positions. Some anti-abortionists believe that a fertilized (human) egg that has not even divided into a second cell qualifies as a human being, but Satan begs to differ. Bacteria are single-celled organisms, yes, but at that stage they are also in their adult life, as it were, whereas it takes about 26 billion times that number of cells to comprise even a newborn baby. It indeed stands a four-out-of-ten chance of developing into a healthy baby, but maintaining that the very first cell was a human being is as absurd as asserting that no child, even after the due date, is human until it is born.

There are fortunately few who claim the latter but Satan thinks there is nonetheless a gray area in-between those extremes where the debate becomes valid. It is in this area that pro-choicers prefer to debate, too, and they usually acknowledge that an embryo or a fetus (the difference is the development of vital systems versus growing bigger) has the potential to become a “real” human being.

Pro-choicers find themselves in a more difficult position than anti-choicers, however. Anti-choicers oppose any termination of pregnancy, period; but pro-choicers must either define the cell constellation in the womb as somehow non-human or admit that they are supporting the termination of innoncent human lives even if they can find good reason for it.

Satan thinks it is more difficult to distinguish between abortion and murder than pro-choice groups tend to do. He thinks they merely assume that some specific developmental stage can be determined and leaves it to the experts—presumably biologists and medical experts—to identify it while the pro-choicers themselves avoids the thought.

It might seem reasonable to conclude that if the embryo were but a lump of body matter with no brain, it would feel no pain and have no level of consciousness. But, already at four weeks the brain of the embryo is identifiable and the nervous system is beginning to form. The mother may yet have just begun to consider a pregnancy test, and it would be too late by this definition. The heart, then? That comes one week later. It is evident that at this point there are signs of life beyond a petri-dish cell-multiplication experiment, even if is on human life support.

Such an observation leads naturally to a second-best option: the distinction between abortion and murder may be the time where the fetus can survive without its mother provided it receives medical life support. (Satan is willing forego the objection that a newborn cannot survive without support either, because it is identical to the aforementioned polarized view.) This stage of pregnancy determines the current abortion time limit in the USA.

Yet, medical advances have continually lowered the age at which a fetus can be saved and suffer only minor inconveniences as an adult. As of this writing, a few fetuses have survived at an age that is lower than the abortion time limit of some countries. Nothing seems to indicate that even younger fetuses or even embryos cannot be saved as methods are improved. The assessment of when life can be sustained outside of the uterus moves steadily closer to the polarized claim that life begins at conception. Come the day when scientific advances allows the construction of an artificial uterus, pro-choicers must face the uncomfortable realization that any argument stating that abortion is only legal until a child may live outside of a uterus is functionally identical to the hitherto religious, extremist position: that life begins at conception.

When Norway became the first country to non-provisionally legalize abortion in 1964, providing abortion within the first 12 weeks of gestation, Norway bypassed such considerations by choosing the time limit so that the mother would suffer minimal medical risk. This limit is still effective today, nearly sixty years later. A similar problem as the above haunts the Norwegian argument, however: by virtue of medical advances, abortions performed weeks later than 12 weeks pose no higher risk to women today compared to the medical situation of the 1960es. The time limit steadily moves towards the other extreme where, ultimately, doctors may perform a no-risk abortion if the mother changes her mind on the due date.

Satan thinks that although medical science manages to save prenatal lives at a still earlier stage and manages to perform safe abortions at a still later stage, science does not exactly help the pro-choice arguments by doing so. Satan thinks that pro-choicers will eventually face an uncomfortable dilemma: either they change their minds and ban abortion with all the suffering this entails, or they must argue why the mother’s body takes precedence, i.e., why prenatal murder should be legalized.

The Devil prefers the latter but thinks of prenatal murder from a different perspective.

Death is not a unique point in time. It is a process. Death may seem instant, but the body undergoes a series of changes before the actual process of dying is complete, often beginning before the person becomes aware of the imminent inevitable. Not even a decapitation is an entirely instant death. There is no specific time during the process of dying that one can establish a time of death without applying a “dead enough” argument. What constitutes “enough” is constantly being pushed by medical science. Some conditions that once made the medical staff cancel life support are now considered generally temporary due to improved treatment.

Birth, like death, is not a unique time point incident either. It, too, is a process during which one cannot meaningfully establish a point in time when there is “enough life,” especially because a child needs support for several years following its birth. It is impossible to answer such a question or even reach a consensus. Satan thinks it is no coincidence that abortions usually cause varying degrees of mental trauma to the women who had them, because more often than not do they feel they somehow committed a wrong regardless how reasonable or even necessary their decision may have been.

Satan thinks the current pro-choice argument of life-capability outside of the uterus is a pseudo-argument serving to justify an arbitrary time to terminate the birth process. It strikes the Devil as an argument similar to allowing organ harvesting from a seriously injured person on the grounds that the person would die without treatment. Satan thinks there is no point in time during pregnancy where one can unambiguously state that abortion is not murder.

Were it not because anti-abortionists care little about the loss of human life while their true agenda is to force their religion and its entire package of methods to control people (not least their sex lives) down everyone’s throat, Satan might even agree with them on the murder perspective.

Satan would prefer that pro-choicers face the ethical challenges of their choice. (And, now He is at it, that anti-choicers would for once take responsibility for the consequences of their decision: causing abortions to just become more dangerous because abortion rates have been found not to drop in regions where abortion is outlawed.) He thinks pro-choicers try to hide behind the illusion that the murder is performed in such a way that it seems defensible and somehow not as murderous as stabbing a child in the back because one does not want this child around. Humans are a hypocritical species and the human brain includes a string of defense mechanisms that make you believe that crime is what only others commit where as you yourself have good reasons. But, barring medical emergencies, abortion is a choice.

At this point it may sound like His Infernal Majesty is opposed to abortion. He stays true to Christian myths, however, and takes no issue with murder. Satan sees such trivial human actions from a broader perspective: the human cost of having a child at the wrong time, in the wrong place, or for the wrong reasons is high at the individual level of the child and the parents; and the social costs of unwanted children and parents who cannot cope is difficult to imagine. Satan thinks the alternative to legalized abortion causes collateral human damage that far exceeds the sacrifice of the unborn. Abortion is not a question of whether to murder. It is a question of who to murder on a broader scale. Satan thinks pro-choicers should admit this instead of thinking the world permits binary arguments.

Satan thinks sex is overrated

Posted on by A lesser demon

Man is just another animal and is subject to the same laws of Nature as any other animal. Evolution rewards those best fit for survival—whether they be physically strong or capable of outsmarting their contestants—by allowing these specimens to produce offspring. The laws of Nature affect individual species differently and become manifest as widely varying strategies for survival. The human animal belongs to a group of species whose evolutionary strategy tends to moderately favor attempts to prevent other males in the flock from mating with a female, both through social competition and at a biological level by means of sperm cell competition and a penis whose shape has evolved to eject the semen of other males.

Primitive Man did not know this, and the Devil wryly notes that Man for the most part still is and doesn’t. Social rules had somehow evolved to demand that women become the property of specific males; that was just how it was and always had been as far as humans were concerned. The human brain did not evolve in order to understand Nature but to survive in it, and is thus incentivized to formulate guidelines for survival in terms that the brain can easily process, not in terms of what makes actual sense: the language of the brain is symbols not facts; it is religious. Religious answers are simple, easy to understand, and wrong, but from an evolutionary perspective “right” is not called for. The brain does not seek natural explanations for phenomena that appear axiomatic, such as social structures, when “that’s what the gods demand” suffices. Early law and order was religious, and although Satan hates to admit it, He thinks that probably it was the best early Man could accomplish in the absense of genuine insight.

Satan can relate to the desire to keep one’s piece of (pointed) tail nearby for easy access to sex, but He suspects that there may be another, bitter motivation to keep one’s conquest out of the reach of challengers: pain, infertility, birth defects, and death. The human animal had a relatively long lifespan even in ancient times and was thus considerably harmed by diseases that have less impact on shorter-lived species. For example, a cancer developing over the span of a few years is inconsequential to a rat, which breeds and dies of natural causes before the disease becomes disabilitating, but may be deadly to a human being. Humans knew nothing about the biological causes of the diseases that struck them; they just knew that they were bad and hence evil. They could only struggle to learn preventive behavioral heuristics and on rare occasions identify natural antidotes but more often potions and rituals with adversarial effect or none at all: they were believed to ward off evil and once having done that, little could be done save wait and see how much damage the demons had done to their hosts.

A few heuristics were effective, however. Sexually transmitted diseases are easily prevented through sexual abstinence, either entirely or by keeping the number of sexual partners low. In fact, if the Devil had wished to prevent the spread of STDs, He would have recommended a strategy of abstinence, too. Such a thought would never cross His mind, however, as it runs counter to His demand for perversion and debauchery; besides, in Hell, we are exposed to all curses imaginable, and a full array STDs are but a minor welcome package which is routinely handed out to the newly damned souls when we pass the gates into our infernal empire. It makes perfect sense to Satan that primitive Man would recommend a ban on widespread sexual activity as a means to keep the demons of STD at bay and encode such a ban into their social, and hence religious, laws: sexual abstinence would be required by the gods, and sinners who broke the law would soon find themselves tormented by evil spirits as it began to hurt when they urinated. Satan likes the idea that He has thus been partly instrumental in the evolutionary establishment of the aforementioned social rules, sexist or not.

Satan imagines that the STD view may explain the aversion to homosexual activity in some religions, too. Homosexuality does not jeopardize the social structure by creating illegitimate children and would seem an obvious outlet for recreational sex, and has indeed been practiced in some societies for that very reason. Unrestricted recreational sex increases the risk of contracting an STD, however, and it is fair to assume that some societies eventually concluded that homosexuality was an agent of genital inflammation, and hence an abomination worthy of the flames of Hell.

The Devil contemplates that religious bans on sexual activity might once have been a necessary evil and not the attempt to control a population via feelings of guilt that some critics of religion suggest—although the ancient emergency solution cum religious rule eventually proved remarkably effective at that. Religion may once have played an important role in containing STD outbreaks, but today mankind masters birth control and contraceptives, and recreational sex poses virtually no risk as long as condoms are used. Most STDs are easily treated and medicine renders even the deadly HIV virus harmless and impotent. Science once again obsoletes religion, and today there is no excuse against the recreational sex that most humans long for except conservative, religious sentiments.

The Devil no longer looms over the lovers’ bed. Sex needs no longer be accompanied with fear of the gods and shame for breaking the divine rules. Satan thinks that true emancipation from the religious yoke involves recreational sex with no worries. He finds no reason to be associated with sexual activity or sexual identity, including “deviant” forms such as LGBT and whichever alphabet soup gets appended. Old Nick can fully sympathize with the queer or transgender boy who seeks comfort under His scaled wings, but the Devil thinks that such a need reveals inculcated shame that the fellow should first work to ignore. Anyone is welcome among His followers but Satan hopes for deeper reasons than belonging to a sexual minority or thinking that Marquis de Sade is kinky. Satan wants people to be comfortable with their particular sexuality and refuse to let the herd define it, be that through social prejudice against certain sexualities or by following a fad such as the sudden bisexual female trend in the early 21st century where women inspired by Hollywood-managed lipstick-bisexual artists declared themselves bisexual in droves. Sexual curiosity, inspiration, and experimentation is fine, compulsion less so.

“Look,” says Satan, “humans think wearing lace and leather and slapping their partner’s butt would make me raise an eyebrow, but come on. Anglerfish sex involves the male partner attaching himself onto the female and fusing into her, feeding on her as a parasite until he releases his sperm. Flatworms are hermaphrodites and will fight in order to choose their sex during mating. Snails stab each other during sex. Female praying mantis and female black widow spiders are notorious for their tendency to kill and eat their mates. Now there’s some grounds for invoking my name.” Satan thinks humans should realize that their mating habits are utterly uninteresting, and He sometimes wonders how humans are capable of mating at all considering their inability to find a comfortable sex position.

Satan thinks that as long as His followers identify themselves with Him merely because of their sexuality, they probably have a long journey ahead of them before they escape the clutches of religion.