Quote:You just made a big deal about the snake being Satan teaching us how to think, now you don't care?
The snake being satan teaching us how to think = what Christians believe = what I care about = not what the Bible says.
Duh. There is no contradiction.
Quote:Using Satan at all is buying into the Christians worldview and culture.
lol no. Believing that Satan is an actual fallen angel who actually exists and does bad things to people because he's so angry at an actual God would be buying into the Christians worldview. Using the concept to show how Christianity is evil is ... well, using their own categories to criticize them. I already said that. I like that. If you don't, that's fine to me, but I grew up with these categories and therefore I like to see them put to good use, as it were. It's like a sentimental thing for me.
Quote:That's not movement forward, there is no synthesis to be found there.
Oh yeah? Christianity attacking the ego (I'm a terrible sinner and I can't help it) is the thesis, Satanism reclaiming and exalting the ego (I am my own God) is an antithesis. The synthesis consists in recognizing that both positions are based on an illusion, and overcoming this illusion(
anatta).
Quote:Re: demonization: it's the long Christian tradition of turning anything non-Christian into demons or Satan. Think Beelzebub, Abaddon, etc.
Satan is a Christian category that encompasses everything non-Christian. Of course atheism is satanic to a Christian. Of course a Christian would think that my opinions on everything are satanic. It's fun to make it easier for them to come to that conclusion by using their lingo, by saying that Satan is the good guy and that the snake and original sin are awesome because they mean freedom and that I'd love to go to hell i.e. be separated from their God forever because their paradise sounds terrible to me and that therefore "salvation" definitely isn't anything I want or need and Jesus can blow me. Yeah, I like saying that to Christians because that's often the only way for them to understand me. I've been in lots of discussions about things like the existence of God or the afterlife and such things, but after a while I noticed that all of these discussions miss the point. It's much easier to make my case by explaining, in concepts that they understand, that even if they were right, I still wouldn't want to be a Christian, and that therefore they're wasting their time by trying to sell me their bullshit about how the Earth's axis somehow proves the existence of their creator God.
Quote:I see no reason to self-engage in such things for the same reason I don't engage in agitprop.
But you should.
Quote:And all of the satanists I've met have. And I'm talking Laveyan satanists, not theistic satanists. But I'm talking about Satanism, not any individual Satanist. And the former holds that it is possible to affect the world through acts of raw emotion.
That must be a regional variation then.
The Satanists I know would say that emotion can change your behavior in a magical way and give you success in what you do. But be assured that I don't respect belief in metaphysical crap like actual magic or "affecting the world through acts of emotion" (wow, that's a nice definition for idealism).
Quote:By that logic, you owe your mother a favor for not aborting you in the womb. The point being, you wouldn't miss your life if you didn't have it, so you don't really owe your mother anything. You like the ability to think because you have it, and you can't conceive of not having it.
Well that's absurd. There isn't enough criticial thinking in the world. This is why Fox News and the Pope are successful. I can easily conceive of the absence of critical thought, I just have to remember the way I used to think about things when I was a kid. I can also witness it by entering a church.
Quote:If you didn't have it, you wouldn't miss it and you wouldn't envy it if you saw it. Upholding critical thought as something "beautiful" in and of itself doesn't make much sense.
True, animals don't want to be people. But people know that they're better than animals.
Quote:I never said "paradise is not thinking". What I said was there's no point in upholding the ability to think over lacking that ability when it isn't necessary.
Name a condition that makes thinking a necessary ability (necessary for what?)
Quote:If you're thinking that already, there's not much point in eating the apple.
Yeah I admit that imagining myself as I am in a pre-Fall situation is quite absurd.
Quote:The only reason I ask is because it seems the only thing you like about Satanism is the fact that it mocks Christianity and you have some kind of pathological fear of that particular religion. Everything else you say seems to be confounded by that.
You know that's funny because all the fear in my life disappeared when I left Christianity. I'm not afraid of it, I have a personal grudge with it. But I'd like to know why you interpret that as fear.
And no, I also like other things about Satanism: Its life-affirming attitude, its opposition to servility and what it calles the nine satanic sins and the way it leads morality ad absurdum by telling you to do what thou wilt.
Quote:Since when?
Since I, and many others, experienced it like that. You were asking for my position, right?
Quote:Hardly. I fail to see how ethical egotism is progressive in any sense.
Note that I didn't call it progressive, I said it was a step forward from Christianity. It achieves that by simply allowing you, even telling you to do what thou wilt. Individualism is better than servility. I mean the most rational attitude (the synthesis, if you want) is recognizing that the entire egoism-altruism dichotomy is stupid.
Quote:I fail to see how making something the entire point of your constructed religion is "a mistake".
The entire religion is a mistake. But an awesome one.
Quote:Christianity, Judaism, Islam, etc. don't support any particular political or economic form; it's only their churches that do.
Satanism explicitly favors Lassiez-Faire capitalism as the only sensible economic order. Really, satanism is the only religion I've ever encountered that was actually incompatible with Communism, and yet the anti-theists here have an overwhelmingly apathetic reaction to it. I just don't get that.
KlassWar wasn't talking about support for an economic form. I'm pretty sure he meant that the Abrahamic religions are products of a feudalist (actually, more like a slaveholding) economy and therefore confined to an extremely primitive worldview, whereas Satanism is a product of bourgeois society and therefore inherently more progressive. It's a good point. Laissez-faire capitalism is a million times more progressive than slaveholding, and a capitalist mentality is a million times more progressive than a slave mentality.