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…
Category: philosophy
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…
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.
Friedrich Nietzsche, Ayn Rand, and Anton Szandor LaVey
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.
Socrates
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.
AI and the Soul
This is the question I’ll be examining in today’s episode: do artificially intelligent programs or entities have souls, in Louvois’ sense of the word? And furthermore, what does AI mean for our own souls?
Artificial Intelligence and Societies of Control
Artificial intelligence is not something that emerges into the world in a neutral way, or which affects the world in a neutral way. Artificial intelligence is something created by humans within the context of a particular society and period of history; that context determines the nature of the particular artificial intelligence that we create, as well as the environment in which it operates and the scope of its potential influence. This being the case, a proper understanding of how artificial intelligence influences human society and the possibilities for how it may do so in the future begins with a study of human society as it presently exists. This is a very broad topic and a full survey is well beyond the scope of the entire Satanist Reads the Bible project, but we can hone in on some key points that are particularly relevant to the subject of artificial intelligence.