Novem5er wrote:But the After School Satanism program is not about recruiting kids. It's about holding up a mirror to the public school system and saying "religion does not belong on campus". It's about scaring a school district into shutting down all religiously affiliated programs.
I get that, or at least, I get that this is what people are being led to believe about it. Two points: those of us at RI are familiar with countless examples of intelligence agencies creating religious or political fronts for their activities, as well as for memetic/mimetic engineering purposes, so there's no reason to give this movement a free pass simply because it puts its satanic aspect front and center. (That's called glamour magic, & it worked for Savile for four decades).
Secondly, even if the above is what ASS is about, truly, it is going to backfire precisely because you can't simply say "fuck them" about billions of people's beliefs that go back throughout history. This isn't a question of whether believing in hot pepper birth control means it works, it's about how believing in hot pepper birth control means people are going to use hot pepper birth control, regardless. Ditto with child sacrifice, tho honestly, there is every reason to believe that this does work, and without getting metaphysical about it, in psychological terms of giving power/relief to the abusers. As for no one doing this sort of stuff for world peace, I beg to differ. Ever heard of US foreign policy?
As happens, I just got a response from the satanic temple to the piece at my blog, comment here. It fails to address the debunking of ritual abuse, of course, and any of my other points (except to compliment me on an unspecified "many" of them).
Here's a sample from the piece:
if The Satanic Temple is sincerely using Satanic imagery in this video, and maybe even Satanic principles in their quasi-religion, to show people how silly Evangelicals are and to prove that rationalism conquers all, then I think they have made a leap of faith easily as audacious as belief in the Virgin Birth or the Holy Trinity. The images, words, and beliefs which make up the body of Satanism, old and new, have to have come from somewhere. It doesn’t matter whether it gets called the archetypal realm, the hidden dimensions, or the collective unconscious, whatever this reservoir of human experience actually IS, it’s immeasurably older, deeper, and vaster than the flimsy veneer of scientistic rationalism or secularism that’s being promoted by the Satanic education agenda. So to use these symbols believing they will only resonate with stupid, credulous people is to dismiss practically the entire body of humanity prior to the past few decades as stupid and credulous and beneath serious, scientific-rationalist consideration.
Scientific Rationality Advocates want to shut the lid on humanity’s “superstitious” past, which would include our shared ancestry and a large portion of our unconscious life. Trying to argue this to the SRA-ers maybe futile, however, because I am not sure terms like the past, ancestry, or unconscious life have any meaning to the neoliberal rationalist “set.” Strangely, the ASSC presents Satanism as a kind of politically correct, neoliberalist religion for anyone interested in real progress; and yet Satanism in its pure form is anything but divorced from our primal origins. It celebrates carnal desire and places man among the beasts, albeit, in agreement with the Neoliberal perspective, at the evolutionary apex. What makes this modern neoliberal übermensch so persuaded of hir superiority over the ancestors and other animals? The conviction that scientific rationalism is somehow a less superstitious, faith-based set of beliefs than the beliefs of their ancestors. Which is probably what human beings have always believed, as they struggled to divorce themselves from the past through the assertion of a belief in Jehovah, Christ, Newton, Marx, or “individual freedom,” or whatever was the current “enlightenment” of the time.
This politically correct new form of “secular” Satanism wants to dismiss religious beliefs as atavistic delusions that any thinking person ought to be able to move past once and for all, simply by deciding to do so. This is like telling a lifelong drunk that all he has to do is make up his mind to stop drinking. It’s puerile, and, like dismissing a thousand generations of ancestors as superstitious idiots, it’s the very opposite of an empathic approach to our shared human experience.[3] A person becomes an alcoholic not through rational choice but because of factors in their past that compel them to act self-destructively at an unconscious level. A person adopts a set of beliefs at the same level, if not for the same reason, which means that, at base, all belief is “religious” belief, and that one man’s idea of rationality is always going to be another man’s idea of dementia. Whatever’s being stirred in the unconscious by the imagery in the ASSC video, or by the “barbaric” names of Satan, Lucifer, Beelzebub, and so on, drives people into real forms of behavior that have real consequences, exactly as Christianity does. It is also generally the same sorts of pathological behavior which Satanism Redux seems committed to eradicating though its Unholy Inquisition.
We have Hellboy, Constantine, Black Sabbath, and countless other comics, music, and movies that are a little hell-bent (to steal the phrase). I love that fundamentalist Christians can say "omg that's evil!" and say, no, it's a comic book and btw the good guys are fighting AGAINST Mephistopheles.
