A Satanist Reads the Bible

I mentioned in a prior episode that my theory of ecumenical phenomenology, which I’ve been exploring over the last few episodes, is rooted in two separate theories—platonism and phenomenology—along with a third which, given a small tweak, translates between them, allowing the phenomenological ideas to answer the questions posed by the platonist ideas and vice versa. Today we’ll be exploring that t...

Transcript available at asatanistreadsthebible.com

Heidegger wants to redirect us from our normal ways of thinking about things and he does this by using language in ways both novel and tied to ancient Greek, ways that focus in particular on processes, and he focuses on processes because he had come to see the world as something active and dynamic but found the rest of his society looking at the world as something static and dead. Transcript with...

Back in January of this year I released an episode, “Pema Chödrön and the Sublation of Mental Illness,” and mentioned that it marked a significant but nevertheless largely invisible shift of the trajectory of the show: instead of just collating the ideas of others, as I had mostly been doing since 2018 when I started this whole thing, I would start using episodes to develop and present my own theo...

The story of Judas may have been the first thing I noticed about Christianity that didn’t quite add up. Transcript available at asatanistreadsthebible.com

I’ll be arguing that the current opposition to the basic rights of the fertile is not fundamentally about the rights of the alleged fetus people but rather a significant component of a broader campaign, fundamentally patriarchal and ongoing since the Neolithic Revolution, to enslave and exploit human labor, and that the desired status quo of those opposed to these rights itself constitutes the ens...

Resources for trans and queer people in crisis ( https://www.americanbar.org/groups/diversity/sexual_orientation/resources/transgenderrights/ ) In March of 2022 Senator and former Florida Governor Rick Scott released his new 11 point plan to reshape the Republican Party. It’s clear from this that Scott has aspirations beyond his current senate seat; with this plan, he has set out a vision not just...

Mass shootings are the latent and intrinsic violence of the patriarchy spilling over the boundaries in which the patriarchs work to contain it. Transcript with citations available at asatanistreadsthebible.com

What can Ancient Egypt tell us about the development of religion and civilization? The answer is: a great deal, more than I could possibly fit into a single episode. As part of a broader research project into economics, I’ve been studying various histories, and the history of Ancient Egypt has been particularly fascinating and informative. One of the world’s earliest civilizations, it extends over...

The situation is this: our lifespans create a partial social amnesia, in that, while we have other documentation of the past, living memories of events are limited to the generation of humans presently alive on this planet. This prevents us from getting a clear picture of how the human condition has changed over the course of our history and in particular in the very recent past (i.e. the modern e...

The notion that the general public should have a general education is a modern one. In ancient Mesopotamia, education in writing had been reserved for the ruling class, the wealthy elite, the religious elite, and a class of scribes, and similar situations remained the norm throughout most of history. As we’ll continue to see in this essay, the elite have reasons for minimizing the transm...

We certainly should not follow Kierkegaard so far into faith that we abandon reason, but we must recognize that this was the failure of Kierkegaard and his beliefs and not of faith, which he saw clearly. Rather, we must ask, given our belief in reason, in what may we have faith? Transcript with citations available at asatanistreadsthebible.com

The study of emergence in philosophy and the sciences generally concerns properties which do not exist at the individual level but which emerge at the collective level. I posit the existence of a contrary phenomenon,  demergence , in which properties that exist at the individual level  disappear  at the collective level or transform at that level into something very different. Trans...

Hail and welcome. Over the month of December I put a great deal of time into working on a new music project, Cyrus Dark and the Symbols of Reverence, which I’ve mentioned a few times on the show and on my Patreon feed. During breaks between tracking parts and mixing songs, I surfed various musician subreddits (ostensibly as a way of keeping my brain in a musical mindset during a break; more likely...

The focus of today’s essay is on an idea I’m calling the  sublation of mental illness . In many ways, this will be a follow up to an essay I published in January of 2020: “Satanism, Mental Health, and the Search for Happiness.” I consider that one of my best essays, and it took on a special meaning for me over the two years following its publication as my everyday struggle with mental illness...

I think that certain groups, my audience among them, should exercise caution and should pay very close attention to what’s being said on the radio, at political events, and in popular books. By way of doing exactly this, I’ll be looking at a recent book by popular Christian pastor John Mark Comer entitled  Live No Lies: Recognize and Resist the Three Enemies that Sabotage Your Peace. Transcri...

Today I’m going to be returning to the subject of Critical Race Theory, which was the subject of my recent episode  The Critics of Critical Race Theory . The focus in this episode will be on a particular idea that is not one that I came up with but was rather hit upon by my partner during a long nighttime drive, an idea which I’ll be referring to as the  divine reward attribution fallacy...

'Let’s begin with a simple metaphysical proposition: Satan exists. In order to determine what we can say about this proposition—whether it’s true or false, whether it’s knowable or unknowable—it’s hardly surprising that we have to determine exactly what is meant by the word “Satan;” perhaps more surprising that we also have to determine exactly what is meant by the word “exists.” In the immortal w...

This episode concerns the recent activities of the Satanic Temple, which is likely the most popular and most well-known Satanist organization. Transcript with citations available at asatanistreadsthebible.com

Reading the Phaedo, it struck me how similar Plato’s ideas about the soul are to those of Christianity, and this in turn led me to an investigation in which I compared ideas about the soul and the afterlife held by the ancient Hebrew people to those held by the early Christians, and those in turn to those presented in Plato’s dialogues and the other works of Ancient Greek philosophy. Transcript wi...

This essay, and likely others in the future, will focus on... the music of Deathspell Omega and its relationship to my religious Satanism. Transcript with citations available at asatanistreadsthebible.com

I find that LaVey’s ideas clearly fall in line with those that were either exclusive to Rand or shared between her and Nietzsche, and this is the thesis that I’ll be defending in this essay. Transcript with citations available at asatanistreadsthebible.com

I’ll be looking into the history and tenets of Critical Race Theory and the opinions of its critics, and seeking to determine whether it is indeed a “prejudicial ideological tool,” as the GOP suggests. Transcript with citations available at asatanistreadsthebible.com

I thought the best way to get back to work would be to get back to my roots, and indeed to the roots of all Western philosophy, that being the ancient Athenian philosophers Socrates and Plato, whose work is of central relevance to Satanism, as I’ll be exploring in this essay. Transcript with citations available at asatanistreadsthebible.com

This is the question I’ll be examining in today’s episode: do artificially intelligent programs or entities have souls? And furthermore, what does AI mean for our own souls? Transcript with citations and references available at https://asatanistreadsthebible.com/