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Baphomet Has Fallen
How much good faith is required for an American state government respecting a religion's symbols?
The Satanic Temple, specifically the Satanic Temple of Iowa, put a statue depicting the pagan idol Baphomet in the Iowa Capitol, following the letter of the law allowing religious symbols. Thing is, it's explicitly an atheistic (or rather "non-theistic") religion; they have as much belief in the reality of Baphomet as they do the Flying Spaghetti Monster (mHNAty). They use literary symbols and provocative symbols to promote science and promote humanist atheist goals of tolerance and justice. It was designed to provoke a response, and it has; a Christian broke it. Deseret News reports that:
The state of Iowa finds itself in the position of avenging the rights of atheists to display a pagan idol they don't even believe in, which mocks people of genuine Christian faith with a dark symbol drawn from mythology.
Take that to its logical conclusion.
A Christian church could create a parallel object to be installed in the Iowa Capitol, a similar deliberately provocative anti-atheist symbol to be promoted as a sacred symbol of a pseudo-atheist "Church of the Human Condition" which exposes the failures and tragedies of the Enlightenment and promotes learning how to morally philosophize using the Jefferson Bible and select readings from Ayn Rand in after-school clubs. I can think of a few:
Desecrating any of these would bear the same fourth-degree criminal mischief charges, with up to a year in prison and a $2,560 fine, and exposure to lawsuits by the artists and owners of the symbols.
But aside from the turnabout, I'd like to remind that atheism is treated as a religion de facto by its adherents and proselytes, and de jure by the government in having Freedom of Religion under the First Amendment. Anyone who says it is not a religion must, by implication, accept that the broken Baphomet statue is only a violation of Freedom of Expression (under the same Amendment) so any cries of Christian hypocrisy at its destruction are inaccurate on their face due to the uneven parallel. Only by accepting that atheism is a religion can atheists claim a sacred right to offend Christians.
Something that has always annoyed me about "satanists" is that in the Christian mythology, Satan is literally a standin for evil. It's not "here are some things, and the ones we think are bad are the ones Satan likes", which would allow the atheists to be like "no you were wrong, the things you don't like are good, actually!".
Within the Christian framework, the very concept of evil stems from Satan. It's darkness, absence of love, absence of joy, eternal torment. The way that you experience this evil might look like fun (hookers and blow), but the order that these people seem to want to have is reversed. It's not "we looked at hookers and blow and decided it's evil" it's "the very embodiment of evil is leaking into our reality and it is manifesting itself as hookers and blow."
Evil -> hookers and blow.
Not: hookers and blow -> evil.
So when these people say things like that they are "satanists" who believe people should be allowed to do hookers and blow because restricting them from hookers and blow is oppressive or whatever, they're just...wrong about the order of operations here. Maybe an argument could be "hookers and blow are not actually a manifestation of pure evil. WE are the pro hookers and blow group and think that hookers and blow is good". It is just completely nonsensical within the Christian framework they're trying to work in to try and say that Satanism could even possibly be interpreted as anything other than a pointer towards "true evil, regardless of what you might currently think true evil looks like".
I wish I could say I hated these people, and I wish I could get riled up to want to smash this statue because it embodied something I am theologically opposed to, but it doesn't. I hate this stupid statue because it is cringey. I would feel approximately the same as if people wanted to put up a video game or marvel avengers shrine in the capital. A funko pop of a video game character would probably have more validity than this absolutely cringe "baphomet" statue..
Yeah, the statue is cringey, but it could be seen as the Krampus goat associated with Saint Nicholas in some traditions and thus appropriate for the season (if the Satanic Temple guys had any sliver of a sense of humour).
What made me eyeroll about the juvenile behaviour was the arrangement of the candles in front of ol' Baphy: to be taken as the digitus impudicus (tall central candle between smaller ones). Oooh, that's showing the Bible-thumpers! 🙄
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You're giving these people entirely too much credit. They're not Satanists of the Anton LaVey hedonist school (which is a pretty thin reed as it is) but a political group masquerading as a religion so they can pull publicity stunts like this. As much as people complain about the encroachment of politics into mainstream Christianity, it's really just ancillary to what the bulk of the Church's activities are. For instance, on the About Us page of their website they state:
This is pretty unremarkable on its own, but when you consider that there are only three things on that part of the site, and there's an entire tab dedicated to advocacy, it's pretty clear that this so-called "religion" doesn't have that much going for it. That being said, this is really just a case of the usual religious zealots being hoisted by their own petard. The courts had already ruled that secular Christmas decorations were okay on public property and not an endorsement of religion. That wasn't enough for some of these people, who apparently needed a nativity scene in front of city hall in order to feel vindicated. Unfortunately for them we don't live in a country with an official religion, so it was difficult for courts to permit such a blatant endorsement of one religion (especially since we know what the reaction would be if a municipality decided to forgo Christian imagery in favor of Muslim). So they had to reach a compromise whereby outside groups could put their own displays on public property, provided that no religion was favored over another. And thus we get blatant political trolls like the Satanic Temple who only build these displays for the purpose of pissing off Christians they don't like. They don't care that the statue was vandalized because that's what they were expecting. Since Satanic Temple has nothing to offer members other than smug political advocacy, it would be hard to attract enough donations to pay for all of this stuff if they couldn't sell the whole business as a war against religious zealot morons who don't respect the separation of church and state. These displays would go away. But, much as we see with the continued "War on Christmas" rhetoric, both sides are incentivized to at least keep the battle at a low simmer.
A good way to meet some goth baddies and industrial music fans, in my experience.
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What about the tree? It’s very suspect that it would be the good one who would forbid knowledge of good and evil. If you strip god of definitional goodness, his opponent appears as a prometheus-like figure. His defiance and refusal to serve is heroic, even assuming they are both morally neutral.
One might even say that morality exists to enslave, to chain a human will that should transcend all barriers, to boldly choose for itself what it shall be, what image it shall carve on the blank face of an uncaring universe. What greater heroism could there possibly be than to face squarely the reality that there is no greater meaning, no gods, only men, and that one's own desire is all the justification one needs or can ever have.
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Luciferians etc. are ancient heresies within Christianity, so our guys aren't even being original.
We got yer Sethians, the Ophites, the Luciferians and a bunch more I can't remember or be bothered to look up.
I do wonder what the non-religious society such organisations dream of would mean in practice; so far as I can tell, it's "free love and legal weed" and not much more - what do they think a scientific, rather than religious, world-view for the majority of citizens would work out like in practice? Okay so we have abortion/reproductive justice, LGBT+ rights, no more War on Drugs, experts and technocrats setting political and governmental policies - what else? How is that greatly different from today? Are we talking about "if not for the Christians we'd be colonising Alpha Centauri" style notions or simply "I want to have consequence-free sex, whatever drugs I like, and nobody to tell me what to do"?
Ironically the most secular society today is the PRC, which is... not anything like what they dream of.
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Upvoted for capital-T Truth.
We can argue about the allegorical meaning of Genesis 2 and how it relates to human sexuality until we are blue in the face, but you should always start with the literal meaning.
The literal meaning of Genesis 2, if you give it its usual context in the Christian story (as, for example, represented by its use as the first lesson in a standard Christmas carol service), is that the original sin was independent moral discernment. Satan's promise is not money, or sex, or power - it is to possess the moral wisdom of God. There are plenty of other scriptural passages reinforcing this. And certainly when I was taught Christian morality, both as child in nominally-Christian schools in the UK and as a potential convert in university, the key message was that the only real sin is rebellion against divine authority, and the drinking and sabbath-breaking flows from that.
All the Abrahamic religions are fundamentally about total submission of human will to God's. Judaism, Islam, and Protestantism all have a tradition of religious scholarship where all moral wisdom that humanity will ever have is already written down in a closed canon of fundamental works (either directly from divinely-inspired authors, or preserved commentary based on lost divinely-inspired sources) and the work of religious scholars is just to interpret it. Catholicism and Orthodoxy both claim that there is a still-living tradition capable of generating new moral wisdom, but that there is no access to God outside it.
This is why "Abrahamic religion bad" comes so easily to non-religious Americans - the great American social experiment is fundamentally about allowing independent moral judgement at the lowest possible level.
In those days there was no king in Israel; all the people did what was right in their own eyes.
Judges 21:25
The final verse of the book of Judges, the majority of Judges describing the people of Israel committing horrible atrocities.
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My long-ago religion lessons were that the sin of our First Parents was disobedience and lack of trust in God; they believed the lies of the serpent because they wanted more than they were being given. And then they ended up losing everything.
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Yeah, also see the meaning of Islam, 'Submission [to the will of God]'.
“Is life so dear as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty or give me death! “ - Satan
Is that from Milton?
It's the quintessential myth of america, the most famous quote from the revolutionary war.
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It's a fairly famous quote from a Revolution-era American politician.
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Yes. And what God's worried about is competition.
Genesis 3:22: "And the Lord God said, Behold, the man is become as one of us, to know good and evil: and now, lest he put forth his hand, and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live for ever:"
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