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Notes -
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..
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.
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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