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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..
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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