The idea of Salvation comes, I believe, from the one whom suffering breaks apart. He who masters it, on the contrary, needs to be broken, to proceed on the path toward the rupture.-Georges Bataille, Inner Experience Within some cleft of history emerged the fallenness of humanity. First we become aware of impersonal minds, entities, abstract…
Why I Am Still a Satanist
On November 11th of last year, the pundit Ayaan Hirsi Ali released an essay on the media platform UnHerd titled “Why I am now a Christian.” In the essay, Hirsi Ali—formerly a prominent ex-Muslim atheist—announces her conversion to Christianity and explicates the reasons for her change of faith. I don’t find her reasons to be…
The Golden Verses
(written with Cora Howell) Have you ever heard someone say that you should follow the Golden Rule? Even if you don’t follow the Bible or its teachings, I bet most of you would know that rule as being something along the lines of loving your neighbor as yourself or treating others how you want to…
Reflections on the Eve of Insanity
On October 7th of this year, Hamas militants, in coordination with other Palestinian militias, launched a surprise attack on Israel from Gaza, planned in part by Iran (Said, Faucon, & Kalin, 8 Oct 2023), resulting in at least 800 civilian deaths and many hundreds of additional military deaths, though the exact numbers are heavily disputed….
A Modern History of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict
Hail and welcome. I started working on an essay addressing the ongoing Israel-Hamas war shortly after fighting broke out in mid-October. I was initially hesitant to tackle the topic but it’s a compelling force in current events and I wanted to understand more about it. These essays serve as focal points and expositions of such…
Morality and Narrative in Scorsese’s Bringing Out the Dead
Hail, back today with another film criticism episode, this time looking at the 1999 film Bringing Out the Dead by Martin Scorsese as part of my series of episodes looking at the religious themes from Scorsese’s films. Now, when it comes to Scorsese and religion, The Last Temptation of Christ, the subject of my last…
Hypostatic Struggle in Scorsese’s Last Temptation of Christ
Another episode of A Satanist Goes to the Movies. As I mentioned in the episode on Hitchcock’s Rope, this is a project I’ve been wanting to do for a while, a look at the religious themes in the films of Martin Scorsese and in particular at a trilogy of films, The Last Temptation of Christ,…
The Year in Iraq
I got an interesting request recently. I’ve mentioned in past episodes that I was, for a time, enlisted in the United States Army as a propagandist, but I’ve never gone into depth on that experience. One of my patrons requested an episode covering that part of my life, and was actually not the first to…
Hitchcock’s Rope and the Symbolic Order
In this episode I’ll be delving into film criticism with an analysis of the 1948 film Rope, produced and directed by Alfred Hitchcock and starring John Dall, Farley Granger, and James Stewart. Rope has fascinated me since I first saw it earlier this year; it’s now one of my favorite films and, in my opinion, and although it enjoys considerably less fame than staples like Psycho and Vertigo, Hitchcock’s best. Its central theme, as I’ll be arguing here, is the relation between the life-world of human symbolic reality and the Real itself, and as such makes an excellent example for exploring some of the themes of metaphysical idealism from my recent episodes.
The Garden of Eden
Hail and welcome. I’m back again today revisiting the content of my earliest essays, and for this one we’ll be focusing on the story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden as it appears in the second and third chapters of the Book of Genesis. The first things we want to ask when…