For those unfamiliar, The Satanic Temple is an atheistic organization. Here are its tenets. I often ask people what they disagree with and get very little in the way of meaningful response.
THERE ARE SEVEN FUNDAMENTAL TENETS
I
One should strive to act with compassion and empathy toward all creatures in accordance with reason.
II
The struggle for justice is an ongoing and necessary pursuit that should prevail over laws and institutions.
III
One’s body is inviolable, subject to one’s own will alone.
IV
The freedoms of others should be respected, including the freedom to offend. To willfully and unjustly encroach upon the freedoms of another is to forgo one’s own.
V
Beliefs should conform to one’s best scientific understanding of the world. One should take care never to distort scientific facts to fit one’s beliefs.
VI
People are fallible. If one makes a mistake, one should do one’s best to rectify it and resolve any harm that might have been caused.
VII
Every tenet is a guiding principle designed to inspire nobility in action and thought. The spirit of compassion, wisdom, and justice should always prevail over the written or spoken word.
https://thesatanictemple.com/blogs/the-satanic-temple-tenets/there-are-seven-fundamental-tenets
DO YOU WORSHIP SATAN?
No, nor do we believe in the existence of Satan or the supernatural. The Satanic Temple believes that religion can, and should, be divorced from superstition. As such, we do not promote a belief in a personal Satan. To embrace the name Satan is to embrace rational inquiry removed from supernaturalism and archaic tradition-based superstitions. Satanists should actively work to hone critical thinking and exercise reasonable agnosticism in all things. Our beliefs must be malleable to the best current scientific understandings of the material world — never the reverse.
https://thesatanictemple.com/pages/faq
She’s 13. Does anyone know if she’s allowed to become a member? The website isn’t clear on that.
Me when I found out satanists don’t actually worship Satan:
TST is different than the Church of Satan, which does worship Satan. If you’re looking for a place for more literal satanism.
Edit: Might be wrong about CoS. But if you really wanna worship Satan you don’t need to have a specific church name for it, I say fill your boots!
CoS or Levayan satanism does not worship Satan. Like TST, they don’t even believe in a literal Satan. Although they do have a concept of magic. Some in CoS take that tongue-in-cheak. Some take it more literally.
IIRC, Luciferins do believe in a literal Satan.
CoS does not worship Satan
Do they actually even call themselves satanists?
Not to be confused with the Church of Satan.
The Satanic Temple is way better.
Just putting it out there for anyone who doesn’t know.
Can you please elaborate? I hear this a lot but mostly from people who know little to nothing about CoS. They just read that comparison chart that TST threw together with hard bias.
My understanding, though it may be totally wrong, is TST is atheist and TCoS is theist. Everything else derives from that. TST is humanist.
TCoS supposedly isn’t all that active except for their admittedly amusing Twitter. They also seem anti fun and stuffy whereas TST pushes “Satanism” as tongue in cheek social activism.
Both are atheist, tho if memory serves TCoS has rituals and associations with “magick” and the occult in the past
From their webpages, I would think they use the acronym CoS, and not TCoS. I was wondering if web searches were deliberately not showing relevant results.
my dumb ass keeps reading it as “Circle Of Steel” and wondering what any of this has to do with Fallout
CoS is 100% atheist and always has been. The “magick” people reference is mostly mentally manifesting your hopes and dreams to come true. There’s no supernatural anything involved.
So, “law of attraction” type bs?
Like, “Man, I really hope I get that raise. Let me think about it really hard and focus on how to earn it,” type bs.
Yeah that’s “the secret” law of attraction junk
Do you think that’s how people get raises? By thinking about it really hard and focusing on how to earn it? And not, you know, by jumping ship and moving to another company where you can earn a 40% raise?
I’m sure brainstorming about how to earn more money would provide a few different options, yes. Expecting a raise to just miraculously appear certainly isn’t the way to go. It’s not like just thinking about getting a raise will make it happen. It’s about setting it as your prime directive and thinking about HOW to make it happen. Your destiny is your own hands.
Or just a good way of triggering those damn pearl-clutchers. 🤣
The Satanic Temple is incredibly based. I’ve been a member since they started trolling Iowa legislators a year or two ago with Iowa Satanic Temple School in response to the school choice nonsense.
Seems like the kids are actually allright
🎶Jamie had a chance well she really did🎶
🎶Whoa oh🎶
🎶Instead she acted with compassion and empathy towards all creatures 🎶
🎶Whoa oh🎶
Me and my wife are both Members of the TST and we’re wholeheartedly proud of it. They are doing such great things for religious equality and attempting to stop the overreach of Christianity within our schools and government. We donate to them regularly and I’m so happy to be supporting a group that is genuinely doing great things for our individual rights and the betterment of our communities as a whole.
🎵 Be gay, do drugs, hail Satan 🎵
Great song!!
As far as membership goes, yes kids are allowed. You can buy a membership card and certificate on their website, or you can just go and participate in one of their public events as long as the event doesn’t mention any age requirements. My local chapter definitely does family friendly events.
They organize events on Facebook groups in my area typically. Just search for TST and your state name and you should be able to find a local chapter that does some sort of events.
Thanks, much appreciated.
In this thread: people who have never taken a deep dive into the myriad forms of ethics and morality that have existed throughout history
Like, a whole bunch of the arguing in this thread boils down to “when does utilitarianism overrule moral absolutism” or “is it always the case that one should use deontology, vs consequentialism, vs virtue ethics”
These are really complicated questions that have been considered and discussed at great lengths and I see a lot of comments in here making statements assuming one or the other is absolutely correct, without addressing the underlying justifications for their personal ethical and moral convictions
In this thread: people who have never taken a deep dive into the myriad forms of ethics and morality that have existed throughout history
I think you’ll find that in every thread. Personally, I’ve taken much deeper dives into game lore.
Personally, I’ve taken much deeper dives into game lore.
This is what I absolutely love about sci-fi and fantasy. It lets writers kick about stuff that can be dry and boring if you go into it from the pure academic route, and it lets writers get around knee-jerk reactions to certain ideas by first fooling around with them in a neat fantasy or sci-fi universe.
Basically, it can make a lot of history and mythology and science fun, and once someone’s into lore from a pure entertainment standpoint, then they start following stuff back to get the historical or scientific parts of it if they want to go deeper.
Well, you’re missing out. There are some really interesting arguments out there for why we should or shouldn’t behave in certain ways. I love that so many exist and none of them are objectively falsifiable, so you get to decide for yourself which to follow
That’s the nature of literally every social issue.
Can you provide an objective, philosophical reasoning for why able bodied people should pay taxes to support disabled people?
That’s something I fully believe in, but I’m not able to formulate any good arguments as to why I think it’s the right thing to do. It’s simply what I was raised to believe in.
I think it’s important for us to recognize that most of don’t actually have objective moral explanations to back up our values. For most of us, the values we hold are simply matters of belief in what’s good, in much the same way a Christian believes in the good of God.
People consider their own lives to have value beyond their ability to produce wealth. Every individual has the expectation that if they were to become disabled or too old to work, they would receive assistance from society to help keep them alive. So you can try to form a moral argument about why caring for someone else is correct, or you can turn it inward and say that you expect to be taken care of if you get hurt and leave it at that. What’s the point of doing all this work if your value ends when you can no longer work?
Because leaving it at that doesn’t provide an external justification for my feelings. That’s literally the exact problem I was trying to explain: people are more concerned about subjective internal opinions than they are with objective external reasoning.
I’m setting a reminder to come back to this when I’m at a keyboard instead of on my phone. Because yes, I can provide such an argument! Multiple, in fact! You might not agree with the foundational assumptions behind the arguments but that’s the point of philosophical debate. It will just take some time to present the necessary ethical and moral framework that leads to the conclusion “we should pay taxes to help the disabled”.
People have been working on those sorts of questions for generations upon generations. And we can answer some of them without ever using terms like “good” or “right”.
Read my username as a poor phonetic spelling of a philosopher’s name for a preview of what I’ll say :D
People have been working on those sorts of questions for generations upon generations. And we can answer some of them without ever using terms like “good” or “right”.
I’m aware of that. My point was that most people are either not aware of those arguments or able to formulate them cogently.
I am not arguing that there is no such justification; I am arguing that most people have not educated themselves on such justifications, and as such their values are merely beliefs, and not objective truths as many people want think of their own beliefs.
Oh ok. I misunderstood your comment. We are on the same page then. Heh
As someone who grew up in a conservative Christian church and became an atheist as an adult, I still have an innate emotional reaction to the name The Satanic Temple that I struggle to get over, even as I’ve fully gotten over earlier emotional reactions like making jokes about Jesus the same way I might about anything else (which I couldn’t do at the beginning of my atheist journey).
Good on your daughter for not caring about that and fully evaluating it based on its tenets.
It might help to better understand the origin of the term.
It first appears in Job in reference to a supernatural ‘adversary’ who petitions Yahweh to be able to kill Job’s children and ruins his livelihood causing him to tear his clothes in grief and setting up the rest of the book which is a dialogue on the injustice of suffering.
The later dialogue part of Job is pretty much a direct adaptation of the earlier Babylonian Theodicy, a dialogue on suffering.
But this earlier opening has a remarkable parallel with the earlier Canaanite Tale of Aqhat, where in the opening the goddess Anat petitions El as the head of the pantheon for permission to kill the son of Danel, which he finds out about at the same time he finds out his livelihood is ruined, when he tears his clothes in grief.
So it pretty much looks like what we have in Job was a combination of two earlier polytheistic stories where a lazy editor under later monotheistic reform needed to get rid of a different god in the story while keeping the role, so switched out the name for a generic term of ‘adversary’ (Satan).
This addition of a supernatural adversary caught the imagination of later development of the theology and led to a great deal of fanfiction, much like how the failure to translate ‘Lucifer’ falling in Isiah back to “the morning star” led to even more fanfiction because of parallels to the Enochian apocrypha.
TL;DR: While you may no longer have a faith-related uncomfortableness about some supernatural ‘evil’ entity, understanding that the very origin of all that warning and indoctrination you suffered which has left a remnant avoidance of the term was itself an adaptation of polytheism in the tradition - something you were likely also conditioned to reject by the same indoctrination - might help in further distancing yourself from that remnant concern. ‘Satan’ is not only silly in a rational consideration of cosmic forces, but is a ridiculous part of the Abrahamic tradition down to its very first appearance in the tradition.
Thanks for this! Today I learned
My wife has the same issue as you do because of the same reason (although she became an atheist in her teens). She’s working to get over it because she knows my daughter is firm on this.
Yeah I think if my daughter was interested or wanted to join it that would definitely spur me in that direction more.
I’m glad to hear I’m not the only one. It’s been helpful to read the responses on this post and this comment. I don’t have anything to add other than to let you know you’re not alone, either. We’ll both continue to learn, grow, and question, and hopefully someday we’ll get beyond our emotional reactions to what is just a name.
Fuck yeah hail satan 🤘
In a TST kind of way.
They don’t list an age at all. membershp is fre and it doesn’t look like they ask.
they probably don’t care.
I know they didn’t on their website, I just want to make sure. I’d hate to give her a membership card and then tell her it was withdrawn because they found out she was under 18.
I didn’t know they were purely atheistic. I though it was religious, but subverting the christian interpretation of the bible so that Lucifer/Satan would actually be the good guy, written about by unreliable narrators.
I even had a whole circular theory about it. Like, Lucifer being the angel that brings the light of reason, and the serpent who argue that humans should, in fact, know right from wrong… and who would have been cast out for rebelling against a malevolent god who thinks wanting to use reason to determine and enact justice rather than blindly take it on “faith” that the unfair natural law is part of an inherently good yet unscrutable “plan” is an unforgivable sin of pride worthy of eternal damnation… A malevolent creator who’d have used this ‘faith’ flaw in our brains to build an army of authoritarian followers, and manipulated the narrative to systematically assassinate the character of an “adversary” that is actually our best ally in any struggle for self-determination and justice against the oppressor.
I read waaaaaay too much into the name. Now I’m actually a bit disappointed.
Edit: wait am I thinking of another form of satanism?
Edit2 : nevermind, apparently I’m describing a blend of Luciferianism and the Church of Satan. Imma take whatever appeals to me, add a bit of discordianism to make the incompatible bits stick together better and I think that’s gonna be my religion for a while.
Edit3: apparently it gets me even closer to the Our Lady of Endor Coven.
I’m only aware of LaVeyan Satanism as an alternative.
There’s actually a bunch
So I’ve been seeing from over comments. It’s been nice to learn of them.
Please note Church of Satan (LaVeyan) is strictly atheistic.
Thankfully I can ignore this detail by the power of Our Lady of Chaos and Discord, Hail Eris.
https://satanicdelco.com/ Satanic Delco? 🤷♂️
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I’m a fan of TST, and agree with all of their tenets, but I have no intention of ever “joining” or affiliating myself with it as my “religion.”
I don’t need or want anything like that in my life. I don’t want to be a part of any kind of temple or church, regardless of how atheistic they are.
I’ll be honest, when opening this thread I was not expecting people to not universally agree on tenet number 3 there. I was even going to make a joke on your first paragraph and how they might take issue because of that tenet because nobody can be that absurd, right? RIGHT?
Humans, man…
