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 transmission of knowledge.
Author: A Satanist Reads the Bible
The Faith of a Satanist
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?
A Theory of General Demergence
This essay is also available as a podcast on anchor.fm, Spotify, and other platforms North of Denver, housing subdivisions give way to rolling plains, long reaches of tall brown grass over a gently rolling landscape crossed by the draws of long-dried creeks and rivers. These tracts are not the boundary of Development but only an interruption. Continuing…
Abdication of the Voice
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 it was just an excusable means of procrastination). I became fascinated in particular by certain patterns I was noticing in the questions posted on the music theory subreddit, patterns which matched up with sentiments expressed by many of my music students. I’ve been studying music and music theory for decades and worked primarily as a professional musician up until the pandemic, so this is an area in which I consider myself to be an expert, and I spent some time answering questions on the subreddit by way of correcting various misunderstandings about what music theory is and how it works. As I thought about it, I began to develop a theory about the nature of those misunderstandings, and that theory is the subject of today’s episode.
Pema Chödrön and the Sublation of Mental Illness
This essay is also available as a podcast on anchor.fm, Spotify, and other platforms Hail and welcome to A Satanist Reads the Bible. I’m back after a somewhat longer-than-expected break. Fortunately this one wasn’t the result of any sort of catastrophe in my personal life but rather from a confluence of factors: one, I’ve been focusing a lot…
On Lies
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.
The Theology of White Jesus
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 and which we explored and developed through several conversations.
Plato’s Timaeus and the Metaphysics of Satanism
‘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 words of former U.S. President Bill Clinton, it depends on what the meaning of the word “is” is.’
Contra Templum
This episode concerns the recent activities of the Satanic Temple, which is likely the most popular and most well-known Satanist organization.
The Soul in Ancient Thought
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.