Stupidity

Satan thinks crystal magic resonates with stupidity

Posted on by A lesser demon

It is not just rock and metal that is attributed to Satan. Old Nick has found that an additional element from the Earth’s crust is associated with His powers because He often encounters followers who employ crystals in their magic. This practice is alien to Him, not because His preferred element is of course brimstone, but because He abhors stupidity so vehemently that He declared it the cardinal Satanic sin.

The Devil always has immediate access to science because men and women of science have been steadily condemned to Hell by all human religions through all time. He therefore knows better than to believe that crystals have magical properties although He appreciates their aesthetic qualities. Satan has already debunked Anton LaVey’s notion of magic as outdated speculations in the early days of psychology, but geology is another matter and deserves mention.

Crystals can look impressive; the oft-found translucency can seem to contradict their otherwise rock-like features, and their often fractal structure and vivid colors distinguish them from other types of rock. One can forgive a primitive mind for believing crystals might have a coupling with divine powers and thus possess an intrinsic magical capacity: it looks special and beautiful and must consequently have special and desirable qualities that one can utilize.

Satan’s followers reject the existence of gods, devils, and similar mythical creatures and would never claim that the crystals serve as spiritual conduits. Suppose some Satanist believes that there is power to be harnessed via crystals. In that case, this Satanist needs another explanation—and preferably a better one than claiming that crystals have extraordinary capabilities contradicting science simply because they look pretty.

Such Satanists instead look for science, which Satan thinks is generally the best place to look. They learn about a somewhat strange feature that turned early 1900s occultists into rock collectors overnight and had every hippie looking for good vibes in the 1960s: they invariably learn that crystals can vibrate, which makes them a key component in radio equipment. (And what do radios do? They transmit information over long distances, through solid material, invisible to the eye, almost like magic. A layman may have heard about “radio waves” or even electromagnetic fields but without scientific training they, too, remain abstract phenomena.)

To someone whose knowledge of crystal-based radios is limited to operating volume knobs and tuning in on the desired radio station, the actual role of the crystal is unclear, except it somehow causes the radio to work through “vibration,” whatever that means when something is a piece of rock.

The Devil represents undefiled wisdom and fortunately has access to physicists and electrical engineers who can assist Him. According to these damned souls, crystal vibration combines a physical property of certain crystal structures with a human invention and requires some specific, additional components that Satan has yet to spot on any “crystal magic” altar.

You see, a crystal consists of molecules that are all arranged in a specific lattice structure. Some crystal structures exhibit a physical property is known as piezoelectricity which was discovered in the late 1800s. It means that when the crystal is squeezed, the crystal molecules get slightly rotated as the lattice skews. This causes their positively-charged atoms and their negatively-charged atoms to be oriented so that one end of the crystal has a different charge than the opposite end. In other words, the mechanical pressure causes a slight voltage difference across the crystal. You know this effect from the lighters that you “click” to produce a spark when a crystal is struck with a small hammer.

Quartz is the preferred piezoelectric material because it is both inexpensive, insensitive to moisture, and energy-efficient compared with other piezoelectric crystals.

When the pressure is released, the voltage across the crystal returns to zero. How fast this happens depends on the crystal’s size and thickness, quite like a spring (which also does not bounce back into its resting position immediately).

Piezoelectricity also works the other way: by applying a voltage across the crystal, it becomes deformed because the electric field slightly rotates the molecules in the lattice, skewing the lattice. When the voltage is removed, the crystal snaps back into shape and, because of the piezoelectric property, “returns” the voltage, as it were.

This brings us to the aforementioned human invention. When a voltage difference (i.e., electricity) is applied to the opposite ends of the crystal, it deforms. When the voltage is removed, one knows by the size of the crystal how long time it takes before it “returns” the voltage. On receipt of the return voltage, one immediately repeats the electric stimulation of the crystal, which again deforms and responds after the same amount of time as before. Do this indefinitely, and you have created a method to obtain a very accurate clock tick. Such an accurate clock tick is needed for the signal carrier wave frequency in radios, provides the time in quartz watches, as well as ensures deterministic activation of the many hardware units inside of microprocessors. The invention was made in 1917 and is known as a crystal oscillator.

What this all means is that the crystal does not just sit there and vibrate on its own, nor does it have a vibration property that you can somehow tap into. In fact, it behaves like any other solid matter in terms of vibration but is piezoelectric. This makes it an electrically powered clock source, no more and no less. All the necessary properties are well understood by science. It simply deforms when stimulated then moves back into shape. The crystal does not vibrate unless the designer of an electrical circuit continuously stimulates it on each return to its resting state. That is, to vibrate the crystal, one must provide an electrical circuit that provides the crystal with the actual movement energy.

Before anyone objects that brain waves are an electromagnetic field and could thus serve to stimulate the crystal, Satan regrets to say that His scientists claim that both the frequency of the brain waves and their field strength are far too low to exert any influence on a piezoelectric crystal no matter how intently the would-be magician concentrates and gazes at it. One of them, presumably an engineer, suggested that the magician would have better luck gluing the crystal to a loudspeaker and merely play the desired frequency so the crystal would be shaken accordingly.

Would-be sorcerers with little understanding generally make blithering fools of themselves in the eyes of those who know. Astrologists never studied astrophysics. Self-declared wise women who claim to know the secrets of plant-based healing never studied biology or medicine. Parapsychologists never studied psychology. All such individuals manage is to repeat words or expressions from various scientific fields and assign a personal interpretation to them that has no correspondence to the original meaning. They have interpretation, not understanding. They deceive themselves when they believe it is the latter.

Our crystal magicians have heard the short-hand notion of crystal vibration as a source in a piece of (relatively) advanced technology. They adopt the term but the inner workings of the technology are sheer magic to them, and the “vibration” is an equally magic term. If these amateur rock collectors can muster such fascination with a misunderstanding of a particular crystal property, Satan cannot wait to hear what immense forces they might attribute to far more esoteric components such as the field-effect transistor or nonvolatile memory. To those who know about crystal oscillators, however, it is evident that crystal magicians, with their concept of “vibrations,” are dumb as rocks.

Satan thinks His stupid followers need help

Posted on by A lesser demon

Dumb people are usually unaware of their own stupidity and therefore would never seek or heed any advice marketed as aid for the imbeciles. Satan is nonetheless willing to offer it, because some idiot might accidentally stumble upon it and take it to heart. Stupidity is the cardinal Satanic sin but it takes a smart person to recognize a dunce and put him in the corner where he belongs. Surround yourself instead with sub-standard peers and none will know your limitations.

Satan thinks that if you are dim of wit and a member of His church, then you are in good company. The following guidelines will ensure that your stupidity goes unchallenged.

Be Loyal

Unswerving loyalty is one of the few things stupid people do well. Smart people question all things and often find the answers wanting. Dumb people are not prone to skepticism and lack the capacity to spot inconsistencies and mistakes. It is called unquestioning loyalty for a reason, and it is in high demand. Any organization needs dutiful footsoldiers who require little training and can be paid off with a little praise and a degree.

Loyalty is surprisingly easy in the Satanic arena if you heed a few rules:

Never admit mistakes, inconsistencies, or contradictions in any of your scripture or anything spoken from your founders, leaders, and their close associates. They have their high degrees for a reason (even if the reason is camaraderie), and degrees are equivalent to prowess. Scripture is sacred. If someone disagrees, then it is because they are stupid or because they are not Satanists. We will get to that later.

Keep yourself up to date on news from your organization. Visit its web site daily. If you locate any new content, repost it immediately on the social media. You are not required to quote anything; just post a link to the content.

People who left your organization are disloyal. If you mention them, make sure to stress that either they realized that they did not belong, or the organization had to expel them. It is entirely a question about their character. The organization is flawless in such matters.

Always “like” any post made by a member of your organization who has a degree or speaks positively about your organization or its higher-level clergy. You should also dislike anything a detractor says, but beware: some social media lump likes and dislikes into one, thus counting all as attention. Apply the “dislike” action only if it reduces the number of likes.

Make It All About You

As a stupid person, the only thing you may reasonably claim expertise in is yourself. Do not worry that observers of people such as psychologists, sociologists, or anthropologists may have deeper insight into your mind than you, because they will not be talking with you but about you (and then, usually it is not even you as a person but you as a category).

Anton LaVey made it clear in The Satanic Bible that self-gratification, self-interest, and self-preservation are essential to Satanism. None of these imply narcissism—as a matter of fact, narcissism is indicative of a fragile self which compensates with the delusion that it is superior and thus entitled to vampirize others for approval and praise. Narcissism can nonetheless work wonders for you if you are stupid, because a grand display of pretentiousness can temporarily relieve you of the gnawing awareness of your inadequacy.

You do not need creative skills. Just write a few terse lines of text in a Satanic forum on the social media about, for example, how you are (again) one month sober thanks to your outstanding Satanic sense of self-preservation, or how you noticed someone looking odd at you this afternoon but knew that as a Satanist you were his better. It does not even have to mention the ‘S’ word. If some disaster struck a town in your neighboring state and caught media attention, then make it about you: you feel for them, but fortunately you are okay.

Do not be afraid to play the victim provided the guilty party is someone other Satanists can readily denounce. Most Satanists will overlook your obvious cry for pity as they feel violated by proxy. Nothing builds sympathy and unity in a herd than the sense of a shared enemy.

Believe Everyone Is Stupid

If you get into an argument with a smart person, you will probably not understand his arguments, explanations, and analyses. Do not let this deter you. Your inability to understand will make it seem to you that they are stupid for making statements whose relevance escapes you or drawing conclusions based on logic that you cannot follow. Therefore, just say so. They seem stupid to you, and they will seem equally stupid to others who share your two-digit IQ and whom you should aim to impress.

Your lifetime of experience and your years failing in school have taught you that if an aspect of some topic seems wrong, it is because you do not adequately comprehend. Trust that this naturally applies to everyone else. Therefore, if someone spots an error in your scripture or elsewhere, it is not because there is a flaw but because he does not understand. Ignore that little voice in the back of your head which may tell you that your inability to recognize the error even when explained could mean they understand something that you cannot. Expect instead that they are slow to understand when they keep identifying what seems to them to be flaws and absurdities; they merely display many more examples of an inability to comprehend than yourself: it is therefore they who do not understand. It is they who are dumb.

Again, that is what you should say. Insist (but do not otherwise argue) that whichever issue the smart person has chosen to engage, there is no problem with that issue. There are no contradictions, no mistakes, no ambiguities, etc. to those who are intelligent enough. The fact that you do not know that you don’t know provides you with the distinct advantage that you will rarely feel prompted to ask the questions that reveal it.

Remember You Are the Satanist

Being the Satanist while the other isn’t provides you with the power of knowing you are something special. That is what attracted you to Satanism in the first place, after all: to gain an illusion of being special.

Remember: being a Satanist grants you permission to pretend that everything you do is Satanic. Few people will reflect on your narrative and realize that it is not inherently Satanic if everyone does it, and the few that ponder will be both too polite to say it and sufficiently self-aware to know that such criticism would expose themselves, too.

Since you are the Satanist, anyone who disagrees with you is therefore by default not a Satanist. Satan cautions that occasionally the person happens to be a member of your organization, and you must then pay attention to degrees. Research whether the person has a higher or a lower degree than yourself. (Such research is usually soon complete because normally they have announced themselves already.) If the person’s degree is lower or the same, stand your ground; do not argue, just repeat yourself. If the person has a higher degree than yourself, the fix is easy. Simply tell them you agree fully and that they make an excellent point, and do not fall for the temptation to argue your previous position.

You joined the alien élite. It is evidence of a destitute character when a pretender who thinks he is a Satanist refuses to join the élite or even joins another organization thinking it can possibly be Satanic. Never hestitate to remind them that they are not Satanists. They chose to advertise their shortcomings by turning their back on the one true Satanism, and they want you to remind them because they are masochists.

Use Your Faith

You were probably raised as a Christian, and Satan recommends that you secretly stick with that faith. Satan would not normally provide such advice, but He is not considering the average Joe here. He is trying to assist the subnormal Bubba, and that calls for unconventional measures. Dumb people must do with what they have, and cannot rely on learning new tricks. If this means sticking to what they did as Christians, then so be it.

It means you should stay as zealous and cocksure of your new-found faith as you were of your past faith, and otherwise not change a thing about yourself. Remember: you discovered that Satanism is the thing you always were, and now is not the right time to worry that the most plausible explanation for this is that you merely spiced up your Christianity with a new name. Stay every bit as hypocritical, arrogant, intolerant, and toxic now as you were then, because all the other Christians who replaced their crosses with Baphomet medallions will immediately recognize you as family.

Your faith provided you with universally applicable axioms. For example, you can transfer your former respect for your reverend to your new reverends (or “warlocks”) and regard them as the authorities you always had, and your past means you will be good at it. You have probably replaced your paintings of Jesus with a portrait of Anton LaVey already, because the principal element remains people you can worship.

Adhere strongly to your “us versus them” mindset. You knew that your denomination were the elect, or at least had the potential, whereas those who preferred a different form of Christianity had lesser worth as human beings. If someone belongs to another group, you know you are his better.

Continue to quote scripture at others, preferably out of the blue. Your fellow Christians-in-spirit will appreciate it. Stick to the officially approved scripture, however. It can be embarassing to quote apocryphal scripture written by people who left your church and are now classified as people who were never really Satanists.

You were an outstanding Christian once, because a true Christian is the one that behaves like a real Christian not the mythological nice folks that they claim to be. Christianity is what you do best, so use it to its fullest potential. Keeping with your previous behavior means you have finally accepted being the Christian you always were, and there is peace in that.

This all may seem like a mouthful, but you will notice that there is significant overlap between the instructions. Especially the last section ties it all neatly together.

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 religious people ain’t dumb

Posted on by A lesser demon

Several studies have been published that indicate that people with higher education tend to be more atheistically inclined than those with lower education. Satan prefers to dumb it down so everyone gets it: studies show that religious people are dumber than the rest.

But, in spite of the taunt-value of such research, The Prince of Darkness demands intellectual honesty. Old Nick is not convinced of the conclusions.

His Infernal Majesty notes that higher education cultivates abstract thinking. A university-trained person is likely to think in more abstract terms than a primary school drop-out. This phenomenon affects survey-based research.

For example, a survey question asking whether the respondent believes there is a god who personally decides everyone’s fate is very concrete. It practically asks whether the respondent believes there exists a human-looking being that has a personal relationship with you. To the Christian whose faith is very concrete, this may very well sound like the god he believes in, and he will answer “yes” on the questionnaire. But another Christian whose faith is more abstract may think of “God” as a guiding principle by whose example one’s fate in the afterlife is determined, and is likely to answer “no.”

Such a survey would conclude that people who think abstractly tend to be atheists. Yet, the two thought patterns are identical in the sense that both respondents believe in some entity whose demands they should meet, and for the same reason. The latter view is no less superstitious than the former; it is only more abstract. An ill-phrased question can make seminal differences in such surveys, and fields that are highly open to interpretation—such as people’s personal religious beliefs—are markedly vulnerable to careless phrasing.

Satan thinks that people with higher educations are no less religious than their less educated (and, although it is politically incorrect to say so, therefore as a general rule less intelligent) brethren. The difference between smart and dumb people is not how religiously inclined they are but what their religious narrative is. The smart, religious person may sound like an atheist to the dumb, religious person, and the latter may seem fundamentalist to the former—but it is the same basic belief. Neither is less religious than the other; they are just religious on their respective levels of intelligence. To the brainy individual, his religion is intelligent, and to the half-witted person, the religion is dumb—but it is the same religion.

And thus the Angel of the Bottomless Pit regrets to conclude that higher-educated, smarter people are no less religious than dumb folks. They are not the atheists that surveys may indicate. Religion transcends intelligence. Education is no bulwark against religion; it only makes superstition sound smarter.

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 nobody says it like it is

Posted on by A lesser demon

The Lord of Lies appreciates honest communication but finds that whenever someone “says it like it is,” it is never like that.

People who “say it like it is” use simple words that are each readily understood, but the statements in which the words are used carry little or no meaning on their own. Often they are unclear, ambiguous, or incoherent and riddled with non sequiturs and random thought-associations, and make no sense to an educated or intelligent person, who attempts to analyze and understand the statements. Such statements make sense only if the audience fills in the blanks and finishes the sentences as the statements trail off with no ending.

Less gifted people overlook the inherent inconsistencies and missing internal logic, however. They are provided with fuzzy implications and hazy connotations only and then reach their own conclusions—believing it was the speaker who offered them this conclusion, too. If they are assured that “you know who I’m talking about,” they imagine the speaker describes whoever they think it is, and if the speaker knowingly assures them that he offers a solution without mentioning which one, they each believe that the speaker is talking about the solution they are thinking of.  They introduce their own bias into the incomplete statements believing it to stem from the speaker.

By thus leaving it to the audience to fill in the blanks with their own ideas, explanations, and desired solutions, the audience is bound to agree with the speaker because they are their own ideas. From an analytical point of view the speaker said nothing at all, but it sounds as if the speaker “says it like it is” because all they hear is their own voice.

Everyone is prone to such confirmation bias, especially if feelings are involved, as is usually the case when someone delights in hearing something being “said like it is.” Feelings are the language of the “primitive” part of the human brain which is concerned mostly with survival. It thinks fast but is careless and error-prone, as opposed to the later evolutionary layer of the brain which adds rational thinking and the capability of weighing pros versus cons and outlining plans, at the expense of speed. All other things being equal, the capacity of afterthought and critical thinking enabled by intelligence and education helps reduce the tendency to add confirmation bias; or as Satan prefers to phrase it: confirmation bias is wholesale among stupid people.

All of the above is true for written documents, too. No book is known with certainty to provide sufficient information, and no text is exempt from interpretation. All communication, written or otherwise, is a two-way street. There is no book that “says it like it is” or provides “bedrock” that is not subject to the reader’s adding his or her bias wherever the reader fails to understand the author’s intent, regardless of cause or blame. Satan wishes to skip any detailed examples, however, because He feels at risk of insinuating that His followers are stupid for believing that, say, The Satanic Bible clearly outlines “it” in a way that anyone should be able to understand, or that His followers in His temple are stupid for believing that seven vague tenets suffice.

At the end of the day, the Devil knows that whenever you think that someone “says it like it is,” it is just you who are being stupid.

Satan thinks His followers should boast some more

Posted on by A lesser demon

Satan does not recall demanding the same display of humility from His followers that His opposing gods invariably seem to require of theirs, even if the latter generally ignore the requirement and consider themselves intrinsically superior simply because their gods are better.

My master of all things evil is many things but unfortunately is not omnipresent and must instead rely on reports from His lesser demons and followers. We are, regrettably, not being driven to overwork ourselves informing our infernal master of the excellence of His followers, and He is quite surprised at the low level of bragging he receives from them, too. He would have imagined His alien elite to both stand out from the herd and to loudly flaunt their accomplishments or skills, but rarely sees or hears mention of neither.

The Devil acknowledges that human beings usually repond with humility in recognition of the vast pool of knowledge yet to be gained and mastered once undefiled knowledge has been inflicted upon them, thus transferring them outside the criteria of the Dunning-Kruger effect, but their attendance in His churches and temples nonetheless strikes Him as staggeringly low. All He hears is the fanfaronade of shock value focusing amateur musicians, would-be artists, want-to-be photographers, and won’t-be authors, and perhaps a few nondescript web designers who use their self-taught HTML hacking skills to provide yet another web page telling the “truth” about Satanism as a subconscious approach to developing their own understanding of the subject. The Devil appreciates such web sites, of course, but has stopped reading them as they all seem curiously alike to Him, as if no new thoughts have been manufactured for decades.

Our Dark Majesty cannot help but suspect that perhaps the routinization of the charisma of His denizen Anton LaVey, who had no education, plays a role in this. LaVey’s claim to authority, which consequently became his organization’s claim to authority, was his—in part fabricated, but our King of Lies would never hold that against him—life of carnival performance, thus making feats of entertainment rather than mental agility or academic performance their measure of demonic worth.

Never accepting defeat even if cast into the deepest of pits, the Devil believes, in spite of evidence to the contrary, that a good deal of His followers are found in the fields vital to the construction of artificial human companions, both directly in physics, chemistry, biology, engineering, and mathematics, and somewhat indirectly in psychology, sociology, philosophy, and anthropology. These fields have more exact definitions and requirements to quality than the aforementioned arts (a term which Satan uses somewhat benignly about His followers’ works) and deal particularly harshly with empty posturing, so Satan has no doubt that their enthusiastic announcements be somewhat curbed. His Unholiness would, however, be very pleased to find an occasional scholar or highly intelligent individual among His followers and asks them to please brag a little and mention His name as a token of respect.