A Satanist Reads the Bible

You’re wrong about something. That I can say with certainty. There are things I’m wrong about and I don’t know it; there are things you’re wrong about and you don’t know it. How are either of us ever going to find our way if we don’t challenge what we think we know, as often as possible?

The gap between what we’re able to achieve as a species and how wrong we’re capable of going in our thinking never ceases to amaze me. On the one hand, we’ve put people on the moon, and on the other--well, a quick look at the political climate in my own country, the United States, is certainly evidence of how much trouble we have thinking clearly and critically.

This will be a shorter and somewhat atypical episode because I’ll be writing here about the blog and podcast themselves and my plans for them for next year.

My aspiration for religion is that it be a reflection both of who we are and of our highest aspirations for ourselves as humans, but in terms of morality, traditional religion seems to fail at this. 

My question is, should Paradise Lost , John Milton’s 17th-century epic poem concerning the fall of Satan from Heaven, be considered a sacred text, especially with regard to the Satanist?

The fact that this same book, the Bhagavad Gita , “The Song of the Lord,” was a major inspiration for both Gandhi and the man who assassinated him has fascinated me ever since I learned it. I’ve examined the text before, in a piece about hedonism ; here, I’ll be taking a broader look at the text and also the matter of the proper interpretation of sacred texts.

I’ve written this story before, but I’ve also mentioned that I never want anything to be fixed or definitive in this religion that I am creating for myself. Religion is a question that I am seeking to ask as sincerely as anyone ever has. So the above title is not so much a statement but a question that I am asking myself: What exactly do I mean by all of this?

Odd that this has never come up in the year now, almost, that I’ve been doing this. No one’s ever asked me what I do for a living, what my day job is. I’m a teacher, primarily working as a private tutor for gifted children and those with learning disabilities. I have some other gigs as well, but these days, I primarily think of myself, at least in terms of what I consider to be my “job,” as a teac...

This week I’m taking a break from my usual focus on the sacred texts of the Abrahamic tradition and turning my attention to those of Hinduism. In reading the Text, I’ve come to a new and different understanding of what hedonism might mean for me in the context of this Satanic religion that I’m building for myself. Hedonism is traditionally thought of in terms of indulgence in sense-pleasures, but...

I really enjoyed writing the last piece I did on the Marvel Cinematic Universe and philosophy, so I’m doing another one. This one will be focusing on the villain Ronan the Accuser and the conflicts that he’s involved with in primarily in the first Guardians of the Galaxy movie (though he appears in the movie Captain Marvel as well), and using that as a jumping-off point for exploring the ethics of...

Christianity is not the religion of Jesus. It is not the religion that he followed. It is not the religion that he preached. It was not the religion that he would have had his followers pursue during his life or after his death. What do we know of Jesus and the religion that he promoted?

A Satanist Reads the Bible is getting big enough that I’m starting to get requests for topics, and one of the requests I’ve gotten a few times now is to do an examination of different denominations of the Christian religion. I think that this is an excellent choice for a topic.

The Bible has its own narrative of the origin of language, or at least the origin of its diversity, and it paints a problematic picture both of God and of language.

The following is an introduction to a project I’d like to attempt: an in-depth look at the philosophical implications of the Marvel Cinematic Universe movies, and in particular their villains.

Sometime when I was very young, my mother began bringing me to church. The church was of the Christian Science denomination, in which she herself had been raised. She did not adopt the doctrine of the religion wholesale, but rather maintained a loose and abstract belief in God and Jesus. She told me many years later that she was not trying to indoctrinate me into the religion, but rather only to e...

I’m going to start delving back into the theoretical underpinnings of my Satanic philosophy, but I need to do it better than the last time I attempted such a thing, and that will require laying some groundwork. When I started this project last year, I dove right into the philosophy, but didn’t spend much time at all covering the underlying concepts, and the result was some obscure, muddy writing....

What’s interesting to me is that the story of a great flood is one that many people have been telling for a very long time. But in many traditions, and in the Abrahamic tradition in particular, there is an aspect to the story that is particularly troubling: God became displeased with us. So They murdered almost the entire world.

Yes, food and cooking is the real subject for this week’s story. I’m definitely having some fun with this one, but at the same time I think that the topic has been very useful in terms of exploring Satanism in an authentic and meaningful way. One of my favorite pastimes is cooking, and this is a skill that is particularly reflective of Satanic values. In fact, I think that the practice is a kind o...

It is important to remember that what we see of Christianity today are outcomes from a series of disputes that has lasted millennia. There were disputes as to what had actually occurred during the life of Jesus (cf. difference between the Synoptic Gospels, and between those and the apocryphal Gospels), disputes as to how to interpret and follow the new teachings (cf. the Epistles), disputes as to...

Some people claim to have a spiritual authority that permits them to teach of spiritual matters to others. I think that some people do indeed have this authority, by virtue of their experience and education in such matters and the authenticity of their character, while others are charlatans.

What were Cain and Abel told by their parents in their childhood? All children wish to know about the world, and inevitably ask questions to that effect. Parents, in response, tell stories that signify their knowledge thereof. Did Adam and Eve tell them about their life in the Garden of Eden, how they sought knowledge and were for that reason exiled from paradise?

I’ve written often on the subject of the Hegemon, my collective word for religious and cultural hegemonies that appropriate and contort religions and their sacred texts for the purposes of power and manipulation, but it’s largely been in the abstract. Today I’ll take a look at a real-world, concrete example.

I despise Christmas. For a duration fast approaching an entire sixth of the year, the worst aspects of capitalism, religion, music, and human social culture combine and worm their way into individual lives in a way that cannot be avoided if one wishes to participate in society at all, and all under the auspices of a holiday for a religion that is not mine but that nevertheless infuriates me becaus...

In the summer of 2013, I arranged a pilgrimage to a religious monument: the Boudhanath stupa in Kathmandu, Nepal. At the time I was still primarily a Zen Buddhist by training and belief, and had been so for about the prior thirteen years. The stupa is more closely tied to Tibetan Buddhism, but I also had some connections to Shambhala Buddhism, the sect founded by Chögyam Trungpa which sought to me...

Skeptics of all stripes will rightly scoff at the word “sacred.” It has often been used over the course of history as a hollow justification for the rationally unjustifiable. But taken in its proper context, its reality and relevance to our lives is unavoidable.