What do you REALLY believe?

[tyrannosaurus vex]

It's just kind of funny to watch Satanism (which for fuck's sake is as valid a "belief structure" as anything else judging by the fact that everything is bullshit anyway)

The gravitational attraction force between two point masses is directly proportional to the product of their masses and inversely proportional to the square of their separation distance. The force is always attractive and acts along the line joining them from their center.

My shirt is black.

I like coffee.

get slammed for being an "inferior" idea,

"Acknowledge the power of magic if you have employed it successfully to obtain your desires. If you deny the power of magic after having called upon it with success, you will lose all you have obtained."

but not until its premise has been ignored,

It doesn't have a premise. The Satanic Bible is a book of homilies and bullshit platitudes, like an inverted Chicken Soup for the Soul (PITCH BLACK ICHOR FOR THE SPHINCTER)

Okay, should, or should not, a La'veyan Satanist profess Satanism? Should, or should not, a La'veyan Satanist invest in stocks and shares? Should, or should not a Satanist join PETA?

I agree, teenage Satanism that only costs you the price of some black nail polish and possibly a month's rent if your parents kick you out of the basement, is a pretty useless thing to follow, if you leave it at that. I also agree most Satanists are hopeless narcissists with no grip on anything resembling the "superiority" they claim. But I also know it's a narrowly focused religion with a few good ideas, and I wouldn't write it off as utter bollocks, especially considering Discordianism.

I mean... what's more Discordian than a fake religion that even jakes its own members?

Not being so completely on the fucking nose about it? Pulling the stick out of your ass?


(Me at about 15, that's an inverted pentagram )

When did LaVey advocate the use of an apostrophe in the middle of  his name? Just curious.

Anyway, you're missing the point of the whole shebang of "Satanism," just like 95% of Satanists do. The Satanic Bible is full of bullshit platitudes. It isn't supposed to be taken seriously, at face value, for what it spouts in the pages of that book (that was half ripped off from Ragnar Redbeard anyway) or any other book. Read some of the ancillary material and you might start to get an idea. The whole thing is a show, and it's done for the specific purpose of releasing the practitioner from organized religion without shocking their systems by severing the motions of going through religious ritual.

Basically it's like methadone for Catholics. For example, you're addicted to saying Hail Marys as if that's got any chance of ever helping you. Satanism comes along and says (outright, mind you) "Fuck Hail Marys. Repeat this stupid mantra here: it's bullshit, but it'll make you feel better." The trick is not losing sight of the fact that it's all bullshit. Eventually you'll have established the ego that your religion denied you, and you won't need Satanism either, except maybe as a party gag. Which is exactly how LaVey used it.

Of course, I'd never go back to being a "Satanist" now, and I can't defend those who get all stonefaced serious about it. And also the elitism thing is a little stupid but it's hardly like Satanists are the only group of people guilty of that (see: everyone else, including us).

[Diogenes]

get slammed for being an "inferior" idea,

"Acknowledge the power of magic if you have employed it successfully to obtain your desires. If you deny the power of magic after having called upon it with success, you will lose all you have obtained."

I don't disagree with everything you said, but this one is only as slammable as beliefs/things written about in other religions. E.g. "thou shalt not suffer a witch to live" and Moses parting a fucking ocean.

If you contend that Satanism is inferior because it has references to the supernatural, you can't really call it inferior (on those grounds) to others that do the same.

Edit: I understand that you're not necessarily doing that though.

"Other people do it too" is no basis for a belief, does it really belong in one that portends to be a state of justified rebellion?

Anyway, what I really want to say is that Satanism has zero (I think the word is) Deontological merit. Everything Satanism IS, Is effectively the wearing a pentagram yeah satan fuck you buddy stuff. Because there's no actual advice there.

It depends. The Satanist Bible is full of advice. There are commandments etc. I don't agree with them, but either way it's more than wearing a pentagram. I don't mean to defend it, I just think that if it should be laughed off, then only as much as numerous religions that have inspired worse acts of douchebaggery in the past.

As far as I see it, the only thing that separates the Holy Bible from the Satanist Bible is that one was a modern writer and the other was some ignorant desert nomads. They're both full of crap and horrible ethics, with some valid advice/philosophy to be found somewhere, which is what followers usually focus on.

[Dysfunctional Cunt]

I look at it this way, until god, satan, the goddess or the flying spaghetti monster shows up with some really good special effects that convince me they are the shit, it's all supposition to make people feel better. 

I mean each and every religion has a few core concepts.  This is where Cain would be better to describe than I, but you know what I mean.  Don't shit on each other, don't kill each other, don't steal, don't lie, don't be a fucking tool, don't fuck people's spouse's and so forth.

If it were truly as serious as some of these religions make it out to be, I have to think that one of these supposed godly beings would have toasted us a long time ago if they were sweating the little shit not to mention the big stuff...

[Slyph]

get slammed for being an "inferior" idea,

"Acknowledge the power of magic if you have employed it successfully to obtain your desires. If you deny the power of magic after having called upon it with success, you will lose all you have obtained."

I don't disagree with everything you said, but this one is only as slammable as beliefs/things written about in other religions. E.g. "thou shalt not suffer a witch to live" and Moses parting a fucking ocean.

If you contend that Satanism is inferior because it has references to the supernatural, you can't really call it inferior (on those grounds) to others that do the same.

Edit: I understand that you're not necessarily doing that though.

"Other people do it too" is no basis for a belief, does it really belong in one that portends to be a state of justified rebellion?

Anyway, what I really want to say is that Satanism has zero (I think the word is) Deontological merit. Everything Satanism IS, Is effectively the wearing a pentagram yeah satan fuck you buddy stuff. Because there's no actual advice there.

It depends. The Satanist Bible is full of advice. There are commandments etc. I don't agree with them, but either way it's more than wearing a pentagram. I don't mean to defend it, I just think that if it should be laughed off, then only as much as numerous religions that have inspired worse acts of douchebaggery in the past.

As far as I see it, the only thing that separates the Holy Bible from the Satanist Bible is that one was a modern writer and the other was some ignorant desert nomads. They're both full of crap and horrible ethics, with some valid advice/philosophy to be found somewhere, which is what followers usually focus on.

Shit, you know, I have absolutely no idea where I picked up that apostrophie thing. Weird 

Alright, let's look at the Satanic commandments.

1. Do not give opinions or advice unless you are asked.

Trite.

2. Do not tell your troubles to others unless you are sure they want to hear them.

Trite. Also, sort of inhibited.

3. When in another's lair, show him respect or else do not go there.

When in another's RITUAL FORTRESS OF WANTON LUST AND MONSTROUS FUCKING CRUELTY use a coaster.

Trite.

4. If a guest in your lair annoys you, treat him cruelly and without mercy.

Unclear. What, fucking castle doctrine the motherfucker? Throw him out? Say something cutting about his weight?

Also kind of trite.

5. Do not make sexual advances unless you are given the mating signal.

Hahah. What?

6. Do not take that which does not belong to you unless it is a burden to the other person and he cries out to be relieved.

Don't steal unless you can rationalise it.

7. Acknowledge the power of magic if you have employed it successfully to obtain your desires. If you deny the power of magic after having called upon it with success, you will lose all you have obtained.

Trust in confirmation bias. (Bullshit.)

8. Do not complain about anything to which you need not subject yourself.

Spend all day wanking and eating expensive german biscuits.

9. Do not harm little children.

Duh.

10. Do not kill non-human animals unless you are attacked or for your food.

Don't kill animals unless you want to.

11. When walking in open territory, bother no one. If someone bothers you, ask him to stop. If he does not stop, destroy him.

KA-ME-HA-ME...

[Salty]

There is no "no basis" when it comes to believing. That's what makes it a belief.
      /



Satanism has a few useful ideas, especially when you're young and stupid. There's a very strong Think For Yourself element to it, there's no central leadership and you're expected to figure shit out on your own. And there's silly hats, of course.

Christianity and Wicca and the multitude* have a few useful ideas here and there too, but they're all equally covered in bullshit and often give their adherents justification to excuse activities that would otherwise be seen as amoral, stupid, selfish, cruel, or just plain wrong. Though some use to commit acts of charity and kindness. Or any number of things people like to do.





*Except for Discordiansim, ever. Sure, uh-huh, yep, you bet.

[hooplala]

I don't care for philosophical satanists, but I get a big kick out of actual devil worshippers.

I mean, let's be honest, they're basically Christians with a persecution complex.  It's not like they disbelieve in God, they just choose to worship the Other Guy.  It takes a certain amount of balls to knowingly choose to follow the admitted loser.

So yeah... I find devil worshippers amusing, but I find philosophical satanists tedious.





*edited for spelin

[Diogenes]

I don't care for philosophical satanists, but I get a big kick out of actual devil worshippers.

I mean, let's be honest, they're basically Christians with a persecution complex.  It's not like the disbelieve in God, they just choose to worship the Other Guy.  It takes a certain amount of balls to knowingly choose to follow the admitted loser.

So yeah... I find devil worshippers amusing, but I find philosophical satanists tedious.

I would say I'm on the same boat as you.

[tyrannosaurus vex]

Actually "Don't complain about that to which you need not subject yourself" is the single most important rule I follow to this day and it annoys me to no end when other people can't so the same. Fuck! If you're broke because you overspent on a stupid fucking car loan, don't bitch about it... return the car or let it get repossessed and buy a clinker instead. Also do not complain about your weight when you can't quit eating cupcakes. In short, if it is within your power to fix a problem, choosing to complain about that problem instead makes you a waste of DNA.

HAIL SATAN OR KILL ME

[Slyph]

Actually "Don't complain about that to which you need not subject yourself" is the single most important rule I follow to this day and it annoys me to no end when other people can't so the same. Fuck! If you're broke because you overspent on a stupid fucking car loan, don't bitch about it... return the car or let it get repossessed and buy a clinker instead. Also do not complain about your weight when you can't quit eating cupcakes. In short, if it is within your power to fix a problem, choosing to complain about that problem instead makes you a waste of DNA.

HAIL SATAN OR KILL ME

"All this charity/hard work/sport/thinking is really tiring. Shit. It's hard work."

[hooplala]

Actually "Don't complain about that to which you need not subject yourself" is the single most important rule I follow to this day and it annoys me to no end when other people can't so the same. Fuck! If you're broke because you overspent on a stupid fucking car loan, don't bitch about it... return the car or let it get repossessed and buy a clinker instead. Also do not complain about your weight when you can't quit eating cupcakes. In short, if it is within your power to fix a problem, choosing to complain about that problem instead makes you a waste of DNA.

HAIL SATAN OR KILL ME

"All this charity/hard work/sport/thinking is really tiring. Shit. It's hard work."

Actually I think Vex has a valid point with that one, even in regard to things like charity work.

[navkat]

I don't care for philosophical satanists, but I get a big kick out of actual devil worshippers.

I mean, let's be honest, they're basically Christians with a persecution complex.  It's not like they disbelieve in God, they just choose to worship the Other Guy.  It takes a certain amount of balls to knowingly choose to follow the admitted loser.

So yeah... I find devil worshippers amusing, but I find philosophical satanists tedious.

Yeah, before I actually read the Satanic Bible when I was like 15, this was my thought too. I was like "What's in it for these guys? Why believe in Xtianity and then worship The Bad Guy on purpose?" I kept thinking there had to either be some believed benefit or that the satanists were just warped.

From the mouths of babes, right?

[TRPP Keegan]

Satanism (which I would call my secondary religion) for me was always a less retarded version of Just-in-Case Christianity. The rationalization that I should be a Christian because I don't know for sure if heaven exists always bothered me, but when I found I could flip it around and just say "Hey, Satan's a pretty chill (Hah.) dude. If I worship him by just doing whatever then if Hell is real and I go there it will be because I chose to go there, and not for being a bad Christian, so I'll probably get some VIP treatment instead of that whole Lake O' Fire rigmarole.".

Plus it's funny to see peoples reactions when religion comes up. The people who chuckle are usually the ones who are worth hanging around with.

[Telarus]

This sums it up pretty good for me. Oh, BTW, I was tapped to a piece in Generation Hex but I wisely stayed away from that idiotic publication to submit the piece to Key64 (the "key 23 reboot" which ended up crashing because of the Generation Hex drama).

http://imomus.livejournal.com/143938.html

Yes, Satanism just strikes me as... silly, I'm afraid. Why abandon the idiocy of God if you're not also going to abandon the idiocy of The Devil? Sure, I love mystery, and I love "the old religion", the Greek pantheon, the Celts, Shinto, all that stuff. What I hate, though, is the way Christianity vilified fertility religions and made them "evil". You can still see the result of that in the way various speakers at the Disinfo conference, included on the DVD, have a certain "evil glow" in their eyes, or believe they possess an "evil charisma". America's idiotic binary culture forces you to be good or evil, with or against, constructive or destructive. The result is that alternative culture people internalize the stigma of otherness, becoming Fashion Goths and Slayer fans.

Just as the principal danger of anti-capitalism is that it makes you think like a capitalist, so the principal danger of Satanism is that it makes you think like a Christian. I am very, very evil, you think. Well, no you're not. If Christianity is silly, just walk away from it, and from its stigmas too; its dark underbelly, its Satanism. I mean, I'm all for people like Rushkoff reviving ethics and comparing the early internet to the Talmud. Interesting metaphor. And I must say Robert Anton Wilson comes across in his clip like a sweetie, an old Silenus or Pan type. But—well, here comes the inevitable Japan bit—I'm really so over this Western demonization of paganism, this I'm-so-evil thing. Shinto in Japan is a quiet, gentle, mainstream influence, and you can embrace its fertility messages, its nature messages, and its animism messages without having to become an outsider, or waggle your eyebrows like a second-rate magician practicing in front of the mirror. In other words, what in the West would be an alternative culture which you'd have to be a deviant or a nut or an outsider to embrace is, in Japan, something central which you can conform towards.

I dislike Satanism for aesthetic reasons too. Occult sections in bookstores are usually magnets for the spottiest, stupidest, most badly-dressed people. Occultist websites are appalling cautionary tales, evidence that, whatever else he does, Satan makes you commit every graphic design sin known to man. But I particularly resist precisely this thing that Jason Louv is advocating in Generation Hex, the stringing together of Satanism and alternative culture. I resist it because it's just fucking boring to see the counterculture summed up with a skull. But also because alternative culture has some important work to do, work it needs rationality and clear-headedness to carry through, and work which it needs to believe in its own ethical goodness to bring to mainstream acceptance. Wouldn't it be terrible if everyone, for instance, who thought there were other shibboleths than endless economic growth, all turned out to go to secret meetings and make secret signs to each other and think they were "evil"? Wouldn't it be a bit of a blow to the open source software movement, for instance, if you could say of its hobbit-like proponents, as these Satanist kids josh about Jason Louv, "Jason Louv drinks with nobody but the devil, I tell you! Satan mixes his cocktails! A horned beast with a dark and terrifying cock stirs his vodka martini and a putrid she-devil with monkeys for tits pours his lager! No man on earth dare sip from the same cup!" I mean, that wouldn't just be disinformation and defamation, it would be something much worse: distraction.

[Telarus]

Not to mention that, y'know, Lavey incorporated quite a bit of Ayn Rand's pseudo philosophy into the core Satanist tenets. And so now the "hardcore" Satanists all have hard-ons for her fraudulent ass:

http://www.satanservice.org/theory/cosobj.txt

[tyrannosaurus vex]

Not to mention that, y'know, Lavey incorporated quite a bit of Ayn Rand's pseudo philosophy into the core Satanist tenets. And so now the "hardcore" Satanists all have hard-ons for her fraudulent ass:

http://www.satanservice.org/theory/cosobj.txt

That article spent 4.5 paragrahs denouncing Objectivism and providing example after example of how Rand's philosophy differs fundamentally from Satanism, and one paragraph uttering an out-of-place disclaimer about Satanism having a lot in common with Objectivism despite the content of the rest of the article, but giving only a ghost of an example. I wouldn't classify that as definitive of Satanism at all, though, I'd just classify it as a terribly written article.

This sums it up pretty good for me. Oh, BTW, I was tapped to a piece in Generation Hex but I wisely stayed away from that idiotic publication to submit the piece to Key64 (the "key 23 reboot" which ended up crashing because of the Generation Hex drama).

http://imomus.livejournal.com/143938.html

Yes, Satanism just strikes me as... silly, I'm afraid. Why abandon the idiocy of God if you're not also going to abandon the idiocy of The Devil? Sure, I love mystery, and I love "the old religion", the Greek pantheon, the Celts, Shinto, all that stuff. What I hate, though, is the way Christianity vilified fertility religions and made them "evil". You can still see the result of that in the way various speakers at the Disinfo conference, included on the DVD, have a certain "evil glow" in their eyes, or believe they possess an "evil charisma". America's idiotic binary culture forces you to be good or evil, with or against, constructive or destructive. The result is that alternative culture people internalize the stigma of otherness, becoming Fashion Goths and Slayer fans.

Just as the principal danger of anti-capitalism is that it makes you think like a capitalist, so the principal danger of Satanism is that it makes you think like a Christian. I am very, very evil, you think. Well, no you're not. If Christianity is silly, just walk away from it, and from its stigmas too; its dark underbelly, its Satanism. I mean, I'm all for people like Rushkoff reviving ethics and comparing the early internet to the Talmud. Interesting metaphor. And I must say Robert Anton Wilson comes across in his clip like a sweetie, an old Silenus or Pan type. But—well, here comes the inevitable Japan bit—I'm really so over this Western demonization of paganism, this I'm-so-evil thing. Shinto in Japan is a quiet, gentle, mainstream influence, and you can embrace its fertility messages, its nature messages, and its animism messages without having to become an outsider, or waggle your eyebrows like a second-rate magician practicing in front of the mirror. In other words, what in the West would be an alternative culture which you'd have to be a deviant or a nut or an outsider to embrace is, in Japan, something central which you can conform towards.

I dislike Satanism for aesthetic reasons too. Occult sections in bookstores are usually magnets for the spottiest, stupidest, most badly-dressed people. Occultist websites are appalling cautionary tales, evidence that, whatever else he does, Satan makes you commit every graphic design sin known to man. But I particularly resist precisely this thing that Jason Louv is advocating in Generation Hex, the stringing together of Satanism and alternative culture. I resist it because it's just fucking boring to see the counterculture summed up with a skull. But also because alternative culture has some important work to do, work it needs rationality and clear-headedness to carry through, and work which it needs to believe in its own ethical goodness to bring to mainstream acceptance. Wouldn't it be terrible if everyone, for instance, who thought there were other shibboleths than endless economic growth, all turned out to go to secret meetings and make secret signs to each other and think they were "evil"? Wouldn't it be a bit of a blow to the open source software movement, for instance, if you could say of its hobbit-like proponents, as these Satanist kids josh about Jason Louv, "Jason Louv drinks with nobody but the devil, I tell you! Satan mixes his cocktails! A horned beast with a dark and terrifying cock stirs his vodka martini and a putrid she-devil with monkeys for tits pours his lager! No man on earth dare sip from the same cup!" I mean, that wouldn't just be disinformation and defamation, it would be something much worse: distraction.

If Satanism had anything to do with worshiping the Christian devil or defining one's behavior as strictly "whatever the Christians don't do," I'd agree with that assessment. It just misses the mark entirely. Satanism is to Christianity what Weird Al is to the artists he makes fun of. I'll grant that it's derivative, unoriginal, and ultimately boring, but it's still a different product from the original, intended for a different purpose, and done for the fun of sheer mockery.

Maybe I have a different view of it because I didn't get the chance to have a well-rounded, "any path is as good as any other" upbringing. It rages against Christianity specifically, a religion that was never particularly important to many people in the first place. It's maybe a bit like a manual on fixing wagon wheels with nothing but sagebrush for spare parts. It wouldn't mean much to somebody living in the 21st century.