A Satanist Reads the Bible

What does it mean that I went to war for a country where this kind of person—a fellow American citizen and one among those whose rights I literally swore to defend with my life—does not feel safe? Does not feel free? Video available at https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCo1avyQsMpFL4u4XtaW3SXw Transcript (with sources) available at https://asatanistreadsthebible.com/

Last week, I opened my essay with a description of the murder of George Floyd by the police officer Derek Chauvin by way of introducing the ongoing political unrest in the United States that was instigated by Floyd’s murder, and that by way of introducing a White House photo shoot at St. John’s Episcopal Church in Washington, D.C., which took place in the midst of the protests and which, for me, e...

Racial hegemony and police violence in America are inextricable from religion, and Satanism, while not necessarily partisan in either direction, is necessarily political. Christianity cannot be disentangled from American politics, and so neither can Satanism.   Visit asatanistreadsthebible.com for a transcript of this essay with complete citations and references.

What is the ego? What is the self? How is it that we can gratify, intensify, or encourage the self without knowing and understanding what it is?

I’m not certain where I first arrived at the idea of observing the Ramadan fast, although it likely came up during my research over the past couple years. Primarily, it was a simple matter of curiosity, as is the case with many things in my life, so I approached it as a sort of spiritual experiment. I didn’t have any specific outcomes in mind, but I thought that it might serve as a means of struct...

A mistake to which I think that I am especially prone is that I anthropomorphize the universe, turning its grandeur into something altogether human.

In my last essay, I took a general survey of the history and philosophy of capitalism as formulated by Adam Smith in the aforementioned book, which is usually referred to by the shortened title of The Wealth of Nations. If you haven’t listened to that episode, I highly recommend checking that out before continuing with this one, in which I intend to begin looking at critiques of capitalism. Transc...

I’m continuing this week with my American Mythology series, which explores the myths present in contemporary American philosophical and political thought. My objective in my explorations of religious texts has been to demonstrate that what is said of the texts and what they actually contain are often two very different things, and my objective in these essays is essentially the same, only addressi...

The New Testament Book of Revelation is one of the most distinct and bizarre books of the entire Bible, and I think that its writer was saying the same things about what was to come that I had learned from both my Christians teachers and from history.

The 17th-century English philosopher John Locke is one of the most important names in modern philosophy. Following Descartes, he is often taken to be the second major philosopher of the modern era. Additionally, his philosophy was of particular influence on early American political thought, and he was even involved in the design of one of the colonial American governments, that of Carolina. Today,...

Though the 19th century German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche did not call himself a Satanist (and likely wouldn’t have, Satanism being then associated with the Romantic, which he detested), his role as a virulent critic of religion and culture, as well as his intelligence and radical individualism, have made him an icon of Satanic thought. His works appear on the official Church of Satan reading...

Over the coming weeks and months, I’m going to be shifting the focus of my work towards more political matters, applying the way I approach problems in general to the historical and contemporary political situations in the United States, and the mythology that surrounds them. In order to ground my work in this area in its historical context, the specific matter I’ll be discussing today will be the...

The interrelated concepts of faith and sacrifice have remained, throughout my explorations into religion, matters of endless fascination. In the installment, I adapt the story of the Binding of Isaac, as Kierkegaard had done, and take an overview of the history of faith and sacrifice, especially as they occurred in the Hindu religions. Then, I turn to the details of the views of two particular phi...

This situation has forced me to consider why I’m doing the whole Satanist Reads the Bible project in the first place. I’ve never really had to think about it before because it’s always been fun, interesting, and meaningful work, but very rapidly over the last couple weeks, my sense of meaning and purpose in the world has fallen out from under me, and I’ve had to adjust to that with regards to ever...

One of the ways I pay the rent is by working as a composer and musician for theater and dance productions. It’s something I’ve been taking time off from since before I started the whole Satanist Reads the Bible project—I had had a busy year and got burned out on it—but back in December I got an email from one of my music mentors asking if I wanted to join in as a musician on a production of a piec...

Coming back to it now, I read Harris’s text with disappointment but even greater disappointment in myself. Harris’s rhetoric is terrible, and though at the time I thought myself a competent critical thinker, I was nevertheless entirely blind to what I can now only call incompetence by way of still feeling too generous towards him to call him a sophist.

What is the ethical standpoint of Satanism? Being that Satanism is generally less codified than other religions and exists in several different forms, there are many possibilities. My goal here is to explore a few of them and to arrive at a possible ethical framework that naturally follows from Satanism in general, as well as from my own particular satanic theory. Works Cited or Consulted Baggini,...

A Biblical scholar, Morton Smith, was doing research in a library Jerusalem in 1958 when he chanced upon a letter that appeared to have been written by one of the 2nd century church fathers, Clement of Alexandria. Morton Smith's translation of the letter: http://www.earlychristianwritings.com/text/secretmark.html

Development and analysis of the concept of moral alienation, both in prior philosophy and as a new idea regarding morality in a world of extreme complexity. Works Cited or Consulted Arendt, Hannah. Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil . Penguin Books, 2006. Elon, Amos. “The Excommunication of Hannah Arendt.” Eichmann in Jerusalem , by Hannah Arendt, Penguin Books, 2006. Leopold,...

For a long time, I had a post-it note on my bathroom mirror on which I had written: “You are going to die soon.” I had put it there after reading a quote by Steve Jobs expressing a similar sentiment. “Soon,” of course, is a relative term. Statistically, it’s most likely that I’ll be around for another 44 years (I checked the actuarial tables), but if I thought that the end of the world was going t...

I have my disagreements with LaVey, as I’ve described elsewhere, but this is one point where I’m in complete agreement. My objective here today is to explore that relationship with as much nuance as I can manage. Works Cited or Consulted Belief and Identity. (2019, August 3). A Satanist Reads the Bible . https://asatanistreadsthebible.com/belief-and-identity/ Bodman, W. S. (2011). The poetics of I...

Most of my research has focused on stories in the Bible with which I am already familiar. Often I find in the text aspects to these stories of which I was not previously aware (such as Noah’s sacrifice to God after the flood), but I also find stories that I have never heard mentioned before at all. One of these follows after the stories of the Great Flood and the Tower of Babel in Genesis, about w...

Not everyone has had to struggle this much to attain some measure of happiness in their lives, and many people have had to struggle a great deal more, but I’d venture to say that almost no one in this life shows up and gets a free pass at happiness Works Cited Csikszentmihalyi, M. (2009). Flow: The psychology of optimal experience (Nachdr.). Harper [and] Row. Kaufmann, W. A., & Nehamas, A. (20...

One of the reasons that I venerate the Hindu religions may be that I find Satanism present even in its earliest sacred texts, which are as well the earliest extant sacred texts that we have access to. Works Referenced Communities Still Reeling After 2 Deadly Attacks On Worshippers. (n.d.). Retrieved January 2, 2020, from https://www.wbur.org/hereandnow/2019/12/30/religious-attacks-texas-new-york D...

Let’s start with Karl Popper and the Paradox of Tolerance. This is something that has vexed me ever since I found out about it. The idea is this: think of society as having a sliding scale between tolerance and intolerance, with regard to people, with regard to ideas, politics, religion, race, sexual and gender identity, and so forth. The more the scale tips toward tolerance, the more intolerant i...