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.
Category: readings
Readings and analysis from various literature
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.
If You Will Seek a Monument
I’ve spoken before about my transition from being a Buddhist to being a Satanist. In brief, after a pilgrimage to the city of Kathmandu in Nepal, I became disillusioned with the Buddhism, but that’s really only half the story, the story of motion away from one religion. The other half, my coming to Satanism, resulted from the confluence of three things: the Bible, the philosophy of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, and the music of the French black metal band Deathspell Omega. I’ve covered the Bible extensively, in general and in terms of its relationship to my theology of Satan the Accuser, and I’ve also covered the relevant Hegelian philosophy in several essays, as well as the Nietzschean philosophy that also came to significantly characterize my Satanism. This essay, and likely others in the future, will focus on… the music of Deathspell Omega and its relationship to my religious Satanism.
The Critics of Critical Race Theory
I’ll be looking into the history and tenets of Critical Race Theory and the opinions of its critics, and seeking to determine whether it is indeed a “prejudicial ideological tool,” as the GOP suggests.
King David
How is it that evangelical Christians, who have long advocated for America to more fully endorse their strict and bigoted interpretation of Christian morality, simultaneously endorsed someone who is so clearly morally destitute by their standards, or by any standard?
Satan As a Moral Exemplar
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.
Satan, the Best Friend the Church Has Ever Had
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.
Satan in the Qur’an
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.
The Bhagavad Gita and the Interpretation of Sacred Texts
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.
Nietzsche and the Dionysian
A few weeks before going completely insane, and even in seeming premonition of that occurrence, Friedrich Nietzsche completed the final revisions to what would be his last original book, Ecce Homo, a brilliant retrospective of his life and work, completed in 1888 but not published for another ten years. He signed it, “Dionysus versus the Crucified,” thus affirming the centrality of the Dionysian to his life’s work, a notion that appeared in his first book and which would recur in some form in everything he ever wrote.