A Florida county planned to allow religious groups to hand out Bibles in public schools. Atheists planned to take advantage of the required religious freedom to hand out secular material as well, and the school board was unfazed — yeah, go ahead, you can send out your tepid separation of church and state pamphlet while we give ’em a whole book of lurid sex and violence and gay stonings and babies smashed against walls.
But then the satanists offered to send out Satanic Children’s Big Book of Activities, a little coloring book, and…
The school board folded. Bam. Down for the count. They canceled all the distributions of religious texts.
Satanism. It’s atheism’s secret weapon.
Since the Satanists were late to the party they should be given extra time for their literature.
The ST has had quite a few successes. A droll idea, and they keep it deadpan.
I agree, the Satanists really get the point across.
LeVayan satanism is quite atheistic. The ST don’t follow LeVay strictly but also don’t believe Satan is a supernatural being. So it would seem there is one group that is treated worse than atheists. That is atheists who use the imagery of Satan as a guiding philosophy. Either way, I’m so glad they help kill off this practice of bring religion to public school.
Unfortunately, the kid on page 4 of the Satanic colouring book appears to have one of Aurini’s toy skulls on her shelf.
Man, he’s really trashed the market for toy skulls.
Je Suis Satan?
The book is actually pretty good!! The satanists have design skillz!!!!
It is nice to see a school board using a constitutional all-or-none approach. They did the right thing by choosing to say no to everyone since they weren’t willing to allow the Satanists in.
Like one of my friends once told me: The drag queens are the secret weapon of the gay rights movement. After you’ve seen bearded transvestite nuns, the guy in the three-piece suit doesn’t seem threatening at all.
(For the very few who don’t get the reference, look up the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence. As a Californian, I tend to assume everyone knows the Sisters.)
the guy in the three-piece suit doesn’t seem threatening at all.
Ah, yes. The satanists are throwing bricks at the Overton Window.
Presumably, they wouldn’t have had a problem with mormons distributing their shit, even though satanists probably share more of their mythology with them than the mormons do.
pflynn, don’t fall over yourself giving props to the school board. They were legally challenged, and forced, to offer the public platform. And they kept it going as long as they thought the xians still have a big advantage.
I love how Satan himself is single-handedly preserving American separation of church and state. Hahaha. I can’t wait for some right winger to work that into a political talking point…
I am Satan. A local mormon woman told me so some years back. So far, I don’t see a lot of benefits attached to the title. Perhaps I need to write some pamphlets that could be distributed in local schools.
razzlefrog,
And peacefully too!
God has had to have millions killed in his cause.
I love the Satanists. They are getting good things done, perhaps more than many, many other groups. They are a kick in the nuts to the bigots.
I give them money. You should too. Go Satanic Temple, go!
7. Marcus Ranum,
Quick! Someone tell David Silverman!
Then perhaps American Atheists could stop making those goddam ugly billboards.
Good for the Satanists!
@12: Yes. Personally I think the use of public schools to offer up a captive audience, even if it is open to all points of view, is a violation of their responsibilities., in a moral sense, if not apparently a legal one.
Public schools are not the public square. Adult speech to students should have demonstrable, secular educational value, or it should stay out. You can define demonstrable, secular educational value very broadly, and religious proselytization still fails spectacularly.
@19.
That’s what I like about the Satanists, (Assuming my view of them as an elaborate piece of satirical performance art is accurate). They force people to admit that they don’t actually want the things they say they do. *I* don’t want religious literature handed out to kids for the reason you give. I’ll accept equal opportunity as a consolation price but I don’t really want it. But come the satanists, and suddenly it’s very clear *no-body* really was equal-opportunity religious literature handed on at schools; not if its *really* equal-opportunity.
It’s religious freedom judo.
From what I can tell the Satanic Temple has a closer relationship to The Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster than LaVey Satanism. LaVey Satanists seem to waver between supernaturalism and atheism, with the original text deliberately written so one can take it either way.
Which, ironically, would seem to put the LaVey Satanists in with the Unitarian Universalists.
I am glad I refreshed because Sastra just wrote pretty much exactly what I was thinking when it comes to The Satanic Temple. I think they do a good job, and I believe it is harder to dismiss than The Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster. The logic is not really any different, but I find people often simply dismiss the Flying Spaghetti Monster as not being a “real” belief, and let themselves ignore the argument, whereas many Christians believe in the literal existence of Satan and believe Satanic followers are real.
Considering what the Freedom From Religion Foundation wanted to distribute, a pamphlet of sex and obscenity in the bible with a cartoon of a drooling bible assaulting a woman, I’d say the Satanists actually get the issue and know more what is and isn’t appropriate for a school than the FFRF.
Seriously, the Satanists seem far more skilled at using both mass media and jurisprudence to advance secularism and separation of church and state than American Atheists, or indeed any of the main secular/atheist organizations, do.
It’s pathetic.
@21, tulse
Or maybe more like Aikido.
Like my dear old mum would say:
HAIL SATAN!
Biblical satan is probably the most likable person in that book. I mean his big crime was saying “fuck that” when god demanded unconditional reverence. And this is portrayed somehow as the root of all evil in Christian mythos. Which does explain the authoritarianism I guess.
Because it needed to be said, and there is no better way than with music:
Win for secularism courtesy of the satanists. Love it.
When will we see them get an invite to an atheist/secular/skeptic conference so they can share there ideas and experiences with these communities?
While not really related to this story at all, since the topic of Satan has come up I figure I might as well link to an interesting series of podcasts about Satan. I think some people here would enjoy these.
Philip Harland’s A Cultural History of Satan.
vytautasjanaauskas @28:
I was just wondering about this a few days ago. I didn’t grow up in a religious household, so I’m in the dark on some of the details of christianity. I wondered what Satan did that made him the embodiment of evil.
When a religion’s Big Bad is less violent, less evil, less genocidal, and less judgmental than that same religion’s ostensible God, there is A Problem (TM).
I wonder sometimes if the ancient-aliens people read the Bible and went “wait, this doesn’t sound like an omni-everything God; this sounds like an attempted coup d’etat…” That actually makes more sense than the traditional story we’re told, aliens and all.
@20 Oh, I’m fine with what the Satanists did in the current circumstances.
But I wish for a more stringent test that also excludes secular people like fast food vendors and other merchandisers. We should take seriously the issue of students as a potentially vulnerable captive audience. It’s an aspiration for a better place than we are now, with branded vending machines and other advertisement rampant.
As an aside, this is a restriction on speech for outside adults coming in. I believe the current state of the law on speech of students, teachers, and staff is OK, if enforced properly (which is a different problem).
Tony
Isaiah 14:12-15
As far as I know, that’s the closest the Bible ever gets to describing what Satan did wrong.
Which never made sense to me. We were taught that the thing that makes humans different from anything else in creation is that humans have free will. I asked our religious studies teacher (who was also a priest) at the time how Lucifer could rebel if he didn’t have free will. The answer I got to that question trashed any chance of me being a good christian.
Eh?
Isaiah 14:3–20 have nowt to do with Satan. They’re mocking the king of Babylon. Smells like one o’ them Christian retrofits, to me.
@35
That passage from Isaiah actually describes the Prince of Tyre though. To be fair, the attachment of the passage to Satan is very old.
The “standard” view of Satan isn’t really Biblical. I believe the oldest version of it is in the Book of Enoch. Satan gets angry at YHWH because Satan is required to bow down to the Man (Adam). He’s thrown out of heaven, takes a good chunk of the angels with him, and spends the rest of eternity trying to mess us humans up. It’s pretty clear that at least some of the New Testament authors believed this story. The New Testament also references Enoch quite a bit. It’s probable that this view of Satan borrowed from other religions where an evil anti-God is needed to explain the presence of evil in the creation of a powerful but benevolent creator’s creation. Judaism was originally polytheistic, and YHWH was neither all-powerful nor all-good.
*shrugs* I am not a biblical scholar. It is very likely that I’ve been led astray by the quote being about the “Day Star,” being one of Lucifer’s names/titles. Either way the whole Satan thing makes absolutely no sense to me.
jste, ChristineRose, Daz:
I appreciate the responses folks.
Unless of course, I’m wrong about that too.
As far as you know isn’t very far.
This verse has nothing to do with satan!!!
Although xians quote it often as if it does. It’s not like they are overly concerned with what their magic book says. It came from Making Stuff Up from a bad translation, the Septuagint. It’s about a Babylonian king who supposedly got beat up.
Even the brighter among the xians know this.
Here is what a real magic website says, i.e. Wikipedia.
It’s not hard to see this. It’s right in the bible for anyone who reads it in context. Right before the Shadenfreude, it refers to the King of Babylon, the nemesis of ancient Israelis because he destroyed the First Temple and took the elite back to Babylon.
This is what happens when you;
1. Believe what xians say.
2. Believe what they told you in Sunday school.
Very little of modern xianity is actually found in the bible, including the Trinity. It’s all Made Up Stuff piled on more Made Up Stuff.
Satan, in fact, evolves throughout the bible. He wasn’t the talking snake. He started out as god’s buddy. There was never a War in Heaven. He was never a fallen angel. He doesn’t rule in Hell. In fact, he doesn’t even live in Hell. The later NT version was conflated with various Greek, Pagan, and Zoroastrian ideas by syncretism.
Listverse is a far better source than the vast majority of churches and theological seminaries.
Which gives you a good idea of how solid the intellectual foundations of xianity are. LOL.
Actually, this time around what happened was I half remembered something, and was then somewhat lazy about verifying it. Thank you, and ChristineRose, for the corrections. I shall endeavour to be less lazy when commenting in future.
Well, there’s lot’s of mythological cobbling of apochropha and text and weird ideas of just what who Satan was. (i.e. the serpent comes from one culture, these angels and adversaries from another, the drinking buddy in Job from a third, the the Rebel Angel of Revelations from who knows where)
But I figure Satan is evil pretty much by definition. God is the big good, so by definition Satan is the big bad. Neither one actually has to *do* anything the deserve the labels. They just are by definition.
…. or …. God is the authority and way things are. Satan is the one who opposes it. The more and more you insist authority and things as the are are good, the more you have to cast Satan as then one who wants to overturn everything is bad.
…or…. it’s revelations 12:7-9 “And there was war in heaven: Michael and his angels fought against the dragon; and the dragon fought and his angels, 8 And prevailed not; neither was their place found any more in heaven. 9 And the great dragon was cast out, that old serpent, called the Devil, and Satan, which deceiveth the whole world: he was cast out into the earth, and his angels were cast out with him.”
And that’s pretty much it.
Which hasn’t happened yet. Revelation is a future prediction.
Xians get the idea of a War in Heaven from…John Milton and Paradise Lost. He retconned Revelation and wrote a novel.
They neglected to put Paradise Lost into the bible though. Too many people were looking by that time.
I wondered what Satan did that made him the embodiment of evil.
He said “no” to yahweh.
It’s all Made Up Stuff piled on more Made Up Stuff.
You mean Jar-Jar Binks isn’t really in the bible?!?!11!
@49, Marcus Ranum:
Neither are the names of Santa’s reindeer. So those who seek to add non-canon reindeer are merely wrong, not infidels. :D
raven
I bet you know.
How did {the Pope in Rome} get to be {the Whore of Babylon}?
Well…..yes…. But as the question was “what’d satan actually do” I wanted to avoid interpretation for just what is actually literally in there. It’s kind of hodge-podge and any sect or scholar or group of people hearing the stories will make up their own interpretations. That’s what folklore is “The devil” is first mentioned in Job with utterly no introduction whatsoever. There are translation explanations that he might not have the The Devil but just a devil and devils weren’t demons but some form of umpire angels from an earlier polytheism religion.
It’s actually a fascinating anthropologic hodeg-podge but it is a complete hodge-podge.
But of course modern christian have made leaps and connections. The serpent in the garden (who got cursed to be a snake) became this devil from Job and this Great Deceiver of Revelations (which why do you think it hasn’t happened yet? That’s an early interpretation but, seriously, that interpretation was only botched dictates of early priests in itself) all came into weird retcon whole even though those entities came from entirely different origins.
But in actuality, there isn’t much. The serpent in Genesis; The devil in Job; Satan tempting Christ in the Desert; and the weird bit in Revelations. From there it’s *all* interpretation.
@50:
L. Frank Baum had other names for Santa’s Reindeer Glossie and Flossie, Racer, Pacer, Fearless, Peerless, Ready, Steady, Feckless, and Speckless,. But, fuck yeah, Rudolph is *not* cannon. Fuck Rudolph! (One of my obsessions was the origins of Mrs. Claus. I was very disappointed when my theory that she was an American invention during the cold war utterly unraveled…)
woozy #52
I’d really like to subscribe to your newsletter.
but I’m drunk
maybe tomorrow
Zeno @9, not sure why you thought this thread really needed some cissexist bullshit, but thanks so much for reminding me that the gay community has never stopped both hiding behind trans* people’s skirts, and ridiculing us for existing/participating in our oppression at the same time.
Bless your heart, as they say.
I’ve always loved the Lucifer/Satan mythos, and since i don’t give a rat’s arse if it’s biblically cannon or not (like i care where myths come from) i’m free to enjoy all the extra-biblical mythology surrounding the character. It’s just fun xD In fact i must remember to re-read The Sandman.
Growing up in a catholic environment, the non-biblical parts of the Lucifer myth were actually considered pretty mainstream and accepted, i don’t remember ever hearing as a child that “oh no, you see, that’s not in the bible” for stuff that clearly wasn’t in there…Then again catholics are good at treating their own extra-biblical myths as cannon.
My parents weren’t all that happy with my obsession with judeo-christian myths when i was young…i even think for a while my mother was a bit, but genuinely, preocuppied that i seemed to like Satan so much xDD
Day Star = Venus (a male god in the Cainite pantheon) = Light-bringer = Morning Star = Lucifer (Latin for light bringer)
Apparently what’s going on in that passage is that the king is being compared to the planet Venus, who is the first thing to light up the sky in the morning but who is subsequently crushed by the light of the sun, just as the king ruled for a short while but was crushed by some Judean fantasy about ruling the world forever. The vulgate rendered it as Lucifer, so that’s how Satan got to be the planet Venus.
Jesus is also Venus in Revelation, BTW. Makes for a bit of inconsistent translation and caused a minor scandal when the Revised Standard Version opted for consistent vocabulary.
Mrs Santa is actually Asherah, aka Mrs. El (or Mrs. Jahwe, depending of what OT name you use for Zod).
She moved to the North Pole when the Caananites turned into misogymic assholes.
Jar-Jar Binks played an important role as guide for the three wise men, but he looked to Jewish, so he got redacted by the Christians.
The Vicar @50: At first glance I read that as Satan’s reindeer. That’s a Bible fan-fic I’d like to see.
NelC, considering that a not-small percentage of (mostly evangelical) Christians believe that Santa is in fact Satan, “Satan’s reindeer” is a perfectly cromulent term.
True.
1. But if your immortal soul depended on the right beliefs, the stakes are higher, heaven or hell for all eternity. In theory anyway.
2. If you claim your cult is based on the bible which is inerrant, magic and without mistakes, then it matters. In theory anyway.
What we see is that xianity and religion evolves. Evolves rapidly on yearly and decadal timescales since it isn’t anchored in reality. The latest is when fundie xian cultists discovered that the whole purpose of their religion was to…hate gays. That is already winding down and it isn’t much over a decade old.
More proof that xianity is simply a human fictional construct. I’ve read one of the Sandman novels of Kadrey just a week ago. It looks like the xian gods are joining the Norse and Greek Olympian gods. They are still around although these days they are mostly…literary, comic book, and movie characters. Mythological beings in mythological worlds. God meet Odin, Marduk, and Zeus. You have a lot in common.
Yeah, that’s the thing, though. That’s why it doesn’t really make any point to say that the Isiah quote about the Prince of Tyre “has nothing to do with Satan” or that the war in Heaven hasn’t happened yet. That may have been at the origins but to the modern theology of modern every day believers now, it’s no longer the case. Now the passage *does* mean Satan. Now Paradise Lost (and Dante’s Inferno) are accurate portrayals. Now that poor talking snake is now Satan.
No. You are simply completely wrong here.
It matters a huge amount if you claim your religion is true and based on the bible. It matters a huge amount if you claim wrong believers will go to hell and be tortured for all eternity. It matters a huge amount if you claim there is an all powerful Invisible Sky Monster.
It’s only irrelevant if you think its all fiction all the way down.
You are forgetting that billions of people actually claim to believe this mythology is real and take it very seriously. While we think religion is all just fiction, the adherents disagree and sometimes rather violently.
It also makes a difference if you’re academically interested in how the mythology has evolved.
…which the faith-heads aren’t. Comparative myth/religion studies are more damaging than any amount of logic or counterapologia!
@60 raven
Oh, i agree, however, at least in my experience that doesn’t seem to be the case…many believers in my culture seem to have been overtaken by the popular concept of Satan/Lucifer that permeates our culture and what they claim to believe about him has more in common with that than with what is actually in the bible, and this doesn’t seem to be a problem for them (although since they probably haven’t read the bible, that’s not quite that surprising), although it ought to, because by adopting the popular myth they are basically…well….pagans….
@Tony 32
Satan basically did two things God didn’t like:
1) He had pride/ambition, he wanted the top job.
2) He tempted Eve with knowledge.
Being ambitious and seeking knowledge will apparently get you cast into the pit of hell. Scientists beware!
@ChristineRose
The literal translation of my daughter’s name is morning star (Hoku au). Coincidence?
birgerjohanssen @57:
Mrs. Santa is Lois Lane?
Satan’s reindeer?
Do Satan’s reindeer live in Finland?
Aside from some Christmas themed sweaters, these were the main hits on the first two pages of a Google search for ‘Satan’s reindeer’.
Sure. This just shows the origins of xianity and its intellectual basis. Which doesn’t exist. Plus the vast majority of xians have no idea what is in the bible or even what their own sect believes.
1. All faith claims reduce down to voices in someone’s head. It’s all Made Up Stuff.
2. Many sects have people in charge of Making Stuff Up, The RCC has the Pope and priests, Mormons have their own Chief Revelator, and the various Protestant cults their own committees.
Which doesn’t really matter either. The members are all cafeteria xians who pick and choose and Make Their Own Stuff Up. Half of all Catholics don’t even know what Transubstantiation is. Most (89%) don’t believe the birth control rules are right. For that matter, roughly half of all US xians don’t believe satan and hell even exist.
This is what happens when you can’t reality test.
1.
win.
http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x26jyvx_mr-bean-funny-judo-class_fun
*thinks back to grad school*
yeah, that sounds about right.
I’ve used the book of Job to great effect to deconvert xians.
all you have to do is get people to analyze the characters in that book. That’s all it takes for a lot of people to finally start getting that the bible is fiction, especially anyone who ever took a course in analyzing literature.
Don’t tell Ed Brayton.
Yazidi and Satan http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yazidis
The reason for the Yazidis’ reputation of being devil worshipers is connected to the other name of Melek Taus, Shaytan, the same name the Koran has for Satan.[58]
Furthermore, the Yazidi story regarding Tawûsê Melek’s rise to favor with God is almost identical to the story of the jinn Iblis in Islam, except that Yazidis revere Tawûsê Melek for[citation needed] refusing to submit to God by bowing to Adam, while Muslims believe that Iblis’ refusal to submit caused him to fall out of Grace with God, and to later become Satan himself.[59]
Tawûsê Melek is often identified by Muslims and Christians with Shaitan (Satan). Yazidis, however, believe Tawûsê Melek is not a source of evil or wickedness. They consider him to be the leader of the archangels, not a fallen angel.[22][23] They are forbidden from speaking the name Shaitan. They also hold that the source of evil is in the heart and spirit of humans themselves, not in Tawûsê Melek. The active forces in their religion are Tawûsê Melek and Sheik Adî.
Nothing. A reinterpretation in Persian terms happened.
Isaiah? Here’s some Isaiah, chapter 45, from just before this reinterpretation:
See? Strict monotheism, without any room for a devil figure.
What was the answer?
…which got chucked out of everyone’s canon except that of the Ethiopian church. It describes a flat-Earth universe in so much detail that it simply got too embarrassing, you see.
Basically, only English-reading Christians have ever heard of Paradise Lost. It’s really not widely read elsewhere.
That goes back to Luther…