Community members in a Tennessee school district want to banish Satan from their children’s halls after the formation of a new club was announced.
The After School Satan Club (ASSC) wants to establish a branch in Chimneyrock elementary school in the Memphis-Shelby county schools (MSCS) district.
The ASSC is a federally recognized nonprofit organization and national after-school program with local chapters across the US. The club is associated with the Satanic Temple, though it claims it is secular and “promotes self-directed education by supporting the intellectual and creative interests of students”.
The Satanic Temple makes it clear its members do not actually worship the devil or believe in the existence of Satan or the supernatural. Instead Satan is used as a symbol of free will, humanism and anti-authoritarianism.
The outrage these assholes are feeling is what the rest of us feel every time we see them trying to force their dogma into every facet of society.
Except ours is actually justified.
Neither is justified, theirs is just hypocritical
Excuse me, but being outraged at having your rights attacked – your actual rights, in contrast to the religious nutjobs’ imagined “right” to inflict their beliefs on others – is entirely fucking justified!
Sorry you’re right, I misread the post. I thought the poster was saying that we feel outrage by their clubs. On reread it’s clear I interpreted it wrong (my own fault) and agree.
If it makes you feel any better I was interpreting it the same way and appreciate your sacrifice.
I’m amazingly good at forgetting my own mistakes. It’s how I maintain such a high opinion of myself despite being so deeply flawed.
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Need more groups.
Every city that allows religion in a public school needs a ASS club
Me and my wife are both members of TST and we LOVE the work they do. The Tenets they promote are loving, self-respecting, and do justice towards an ideal world of Individualism, anti-authoritarianism, and critical thinking - i.e. everything that Christianity and modern conservatism in general are eager to suppress. We regularly donate to them, and we constantly purchase stuff through their store to help support them.
Out of curiosity, how does one join the Satanic Temple? I never hear anything about them except when they show up in the news, and the more I hear about them the more I love them.
Another member here, are donations tax deductible?
I want the Samuel Alito’s Mom’s Abortion Clinic lunchbox, and I want it now! That merch is AMAZING!
Open question to anyone: how much shit do you get being TST members? Do you just keep it on the downlow? I can very much imagine consequences if it got around at work, etc. Any repercussions may be illegal, but a lot of people are “ask questions later, sort it out in court if it gets there” types.
The uproar is the point.
The Satanic Temple makes it clear its members do not actually worship the devil or believe in the existence of Satan or the supernatural.
But somehow conservative Christians believe that there are huge swaths of people who agree that their religion is 100% correct but worship the weak bad guy character.
(Which is not to mention that there are actually multiple bad guys who got combined, Satan and Lucifer and The Snake were originally different people)
This is a long standing joke - what do you call someone who believes in Satan?
A Christian.
God is omniscient and thus knew exactly what Lucifer would do. Angels don’t have free will. Lucifer did exactly what God intended. God wanted Man to have free will. Free will requires the choice between good and evil. Man is the “bad guy” as well as the “good guy”.
That last part is intriguing. Do you have any more info that I could read about how/when their unholy trinity was combined into one evil deity?
The wiki article does a decent job. Basically the mentions of him in the texts describe different beings because they were written by different authors for different audiences with much different views. The serpent story has echos of other bronze age ones in that area and the text says as much that El put him there. The story in Job looks like a Cannite legend that got reimagined in Judaism. At some point the people of the region believed in desert spirits that would inhabit people causing them to go crazy and kill other people.
Due to the first exile Judaism started inventing an explanation for why they weren’t allowed to freely practice by imagining a being that was opposed to El. Because the pattern had broken. The pattern of the past was: everything fine, Jews sin, god punishs, jess repent, everything fine. However, this time they were trying to repent and weren’t able to. Which meant that something was blocking it. Hence Satan. The accuser.
By the time Paul came around the Book of Enoch was popular and to him Satan was a leader of a celestial army of angels. Which is why Paul said that had they known they were killing the son of God they still would have. That were not just following El. Off his writings we see things like Revelations and John where Greco-Roman celestial powers were merged with Satan and Lucifer together.
There was never an idea that someone had 2900 years ago and Christianity is following it. Like all myths it is a combination of different fables, attempts by people to explain their world, and thinkers continuing on a tradition.
I really wish Lilith stayed in the story, I always liked that version of the garden better.
Just curious, do you think she was part of one of the originals and not just a combo of some “heretical” Jewish texts and ideas of the Middle Ages? Legit asking.
I just think it’s a better version of the story. If your going to be writing some religious fantasy, might as well make it as interesting as possible.
Which wiki are you talking about exactly? Did I miss something?
Just the regular wikipedia article about Satan subcategory Historical Development
I can’t comment on Lucifer and Satan but serpent reverence showed up in a lot of ancient matriarchal religions before they were displaced by modern patriarchal ones.
This doesn’t apply to only Abrahamic religions but shows up in Greek mythology too. Apollo slaying Gaia’s serpent messengers at the temple of Delphi for example.
Gnostic teachings, which are a form of Christianity, see the serpent as divine wisdom (Sophia) and the old testament God as the demiurge (Devil). Jesus as the good God. And Lucifer as the light of reason and not a villain.
But Gnosticism is basically a dead form of alternative Christian belief. So I have no idea what the modern church’s take is on these three entities.
I know that many of the modern misconceptions (according to Biblical canon anyway) about Hell came from Dante’s Inferno. So perhaps it’s also something like that?
Oh, it starts way before Dante. Hell is actually a sort of mismatch of different beliefs. Babylonian, Norse, Buddhist and Greco-Roman belief systems all had an underground afterlife with variable ideas of punishment for the wicked. The Bible just mentions “Gehenna” which was actually a real place on earth where trash was burned. Basically think of someone talking about the local dump. Thing about trash though is it doesn’t really burn eternally, it just burns away and it was likely being used as a metaphor. The usage of it also doesn’t really mention an eternity, links it with the devil or any of that. People really like rhe idea of someone getting their jist desserts after death so a idea of “bad people just stop existing” was probably kind of doomed to not be super popular. Basically that just leaves a door open for folk belief to stuff somebody else in the Hades/Hel/Ereshkigal role and carry on having a hell just like they did before.
All told Christianity and it’s family of belief systems is actually a fairly late adopter of the belief in something like a hell. It’s closest thematic relative is probably Buddhist Naraka which was first written about around the 400 BC but there’s not a lot of scriptural evidence that anything like that was intended for Christians. At best Judaism has an idea of an afterlife where one is consumed by shame but it sounds more like what happens when a kid is told their parent is disappointed in them and to go to their room.
Got sources for this? Not that I don’t believe you I’m just interested in reading up on exactly what you’re referring to.
“Well, they are Satanists. They are just lying.”
Reading the outrage comments always tickles me lol. Welcome to the point, bitches!
It’s a bit frustrating that it doesn’t make any of them actually reflect on their hypocrisy though. They just double down on the hypocrisy with no questions asked.
I’ve been saying it for years, through even the most liberal of us attacking me for it -
It’s because this is and always has been the point and the end goal.
You can’t use your technicalities to push your way around and do what you want! That’s our whole thing, man!
Were are they? I want popcorn! Edit nvm, The article was longer than i The post.
The Satanic Temple does a little trolling.
As a treat.
It’s not trolling though. They teach kids good things.
As someone planning to move to this area soon I want my kiddo involved!
Be careful you don’t encourage it, or else they won’t want to. :P
People are cats.
I’m cool with banning satan shit if we ban all other religious shit in politics and law. Fuck your imaginary friends.
The Satanic Temple is an atheistic organization that uses Satan metaphorically, mostly to troll Christians.
DO YOU WORSHIP SATAN?
No, nor do we believe in the existence of Satan or the supernatural. The Satanic Temple believes that religion can, and should, be divorced from superstition. As such, we do not promote a belief in a personal Satan. To embrace the name Satan is to embrace rational inquiry removed from supernaturalism and archaic tradition-based superstitions. Satanists should actively work to hone critical thinking and exercise reasonable agnosticism in all things. Our beliefs must be malleable to the best current scientific understandings of the material world — never the reverse.
https://thesatanictemple.com/pages/faq
As you can see from this uproar, it works quite well too.
Yeah, I know. Good.
That is the exact goal of The Satanic Temple. They would be incredibly happy to have their own symbols removed, as it would mean all religious symbols would be removed from government institutions. They are trying to scare Christians into voting against their own legislation, basically.
The first amendment in the constitution makes it so the government has to give equal rights to all religions, so the Christians can’t remove the Satanic symbols without also voting to remove their own.
The Satanic Temple isn’t religious.
I know, but they’re using religious pretense in the service of freeing us all from religious oppression.
Satan accepts everyone
Not his fault that God is picky
Satan doesn’t whisper “Believe in me”.
He shouts “Believe in yourself”.
Satan is rad as hell.
God is the dickhead that puts a dangerous tree in the garden despite knowing exactly what’s going to happen. God is the asshole that wipes out everyone (even the animals) except one drunkard and his family because God apparently fucked up again. God is the one who creates a place of infinite punishment for finite crimes.
God is the real villain of the Bible.
And Satan is the hero that fought an omnipotent being knowing he would lose because he wanted freedom more than he wanted victory.
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Preach
The number of adults in the US that think Satan is a literal being is way too fucking high.
It started as an editor using ‘adversary’ in the place of what was probably the goddess Anat appealing the head of the pantheon to kill the son of the protagonist like in the earlier Canaanite A Tale of Aqhat as an intro into what was an adaptation of the also earlier Babylonian Theodicy in Job.
But we couldn’t have a polytheistic holdover, so suddenly there was a supernatural ‘adversary’ (‘Satan’) in a story.
Which in turn spawned fanfiction during the prophet ages where they referred to the supernatural adversary of Job.
Then Hellenistic ideas around Hades (both the place and figure) get added into the mix, and we get the Enochian literature about fallen angels, where the guided katabasis influenced Virgil which later informs Dante’s Inferno.
Then King James messes up translating Isaiah and the Latin for the morning star (Lucifer) gets mistaken for a proper name, further tying the supernatural adversary to being one of the Enochian fallen angels. And we get Milton’s Paradise Lost.
It’s all just mistranslations and fanfiction.
And yet millions of people believe it’s actually a thing so much so that they freak out at the idea of any references to it as literally being dangerous.
In 2022.
An age filled with things beyond the wildest imagination of those in antiquity dreaming up miracles and wonders.
We’re so beyond fucked as a species.
To those people, if there’s no Devil then it means all the bad stuff in their heads and hearts is just them. All the temptations are them. All the hatred, including self-hatred is them. There’s no Devil that made them do it or think it, no external tempter or defiler to resist. They can’t take that.
It is 2023
💀
Well you can’t believe Satan is real without believing God is real, and that number is too high too.
Milton’s*
Thx. Phone autocorrect is a pita.
I understood some of these words.
But that was fun to read
After School Satan Club would be such a great name for a band.
Sad that something like this is even needed but the US is full of bigoted hypocrites that want to turn the country into a religious state.
Sad that something like this is even needed but the
USworld is full of bigoted hypocrites that want to turn thecountryworld into a religiousstatewasteland.The majority of western countries are nowhere near as religious as the US. Maybe something like Poland.
Italy, especially south Italy, is ridiculously religious. We’re also one of the few modern countries that actually have laws on blasphemy.
We keep telling people we’re not a religious state but then everyone brings out the knives when someone says maybe having a cross in every class isn’t exactly peak neutrality.
Hahahah good luck to them if they try to pull any of this shit in Western Europe 🍿
It would be sad how badly these idiots fail to see the irony when it’s spelled out for them if it wasn’t so funny.
They can’t spell, and even if they can they can’t read and don’t listen.
The kids are alright 😃
They can’t without getting rid of all other extra curricular activities & I love that for them.
Don’t underestimate the evangelicals, they will cut off their nose to store their face and will cancel all the after school programs over this.
They literally can’t get away with cancelling all after-school programs.
Yeah but then they won’t have a nose and we’ll have a court case to win so
Just remember what the SCOTUS looks like now.
If SCOTUS did that then I’m sure there would be (checks notes) no consequences whatsoever.
Yeah, I’m not convinced they aren’t itching for the right case to come along to strip seperation of church and state to declare an official state religion.
Thanks Obama
Please tell me that’s sarcasm? The GOP literally just refused to confirm anyone he nominated.
And he should’ve gone to war with them over it instead of assuming that he would win support at next election. McConnell’s “rationale” was “let the American people decide!”
How? What political calculus results in McConnell releasing the hold?
Not all, right? Just the religious ones I hope.
Usually the way it works if the school district digs in it’s heels is, TST sues the district. The district realizes it cannot win in court because there is a staggering amount of precedent and law against them. Then the district itself shutters all after school programs officially. Except of course the teacher running the Christian club invites kids to off campus gatherings that occur after school. Then the district gets sued again.
No because this isn’t a religious club.
The Satanic temple is a non-theistic religious group, that’s the entire point. They use religious groups’ own tactics against them. If the school allows the Christian church to host a club, then they must allow the Satanic temple to host a club. TST doesn’t have anything against after-school clubs and the school could simply choose to ban activities funded by religions.
This isn’t a Temple though, it’s an After School Satan Club.
Satanic after-school clubs are usually established in a school district in response to the presence of religious clubs, such as the Christian evangelical Bible group the Good News Club. The temple says it “does not believe in introducing religion into public schools and will only open a club if other religious groups are operating on campus”.
It’s more of an anti-religious club really.
Right, because they’re not evil, but it is still a club organized by a group that is recognized as an organized religion by the US government and has all the protections that come with it. The school will have to choose between allowing all religious groups into schools or none.
I’m just pointing that out since other commenters are insisting that they will have to ban all after school activities as a result which isn’t true
Alright, gotcha. Good point.
Actively missing the point… “In a meeting with more than 40 pastors and other religious leaders, the district board chair, Althea E Greene, said: “Satan has no room in this district.””
