This month’s series will largely be a continuation of the November series, which was originally planned to be an exposition of some of the problematic aspects of religion.
Tag: bible
Theologia ex Luce et Tenebra
The theopoetics of Satan the Accuser, with opening and closing invocations performed on the oud.
We need not reach into the primordial to apprehend bereshit, the continuous beginning which opens from the first chapter of Genesis. We need only wait for the dusk to see that which God has divided between.
Entering the Circle: Towards a Satanic Theology
Ever since I transitioned this project from being primarily a blog to being primarily a podcast, I’ve been using the tagline, “Exploring the Bible, Christianity, and other religions and sacred texts through the lens of Satanism in order to reinvent religion for myself.” Aside from some of the early creative and constructive work, I’ve mostly emphasized the exploration part of that tagline, but this episode and the next will be focusing more on the invention aspect. My intention here is to construct a sketch of a Satanic theology, and to that end, I’ll be discussing what theology means, both in general and in relation to the specific source I’ll be drawing from; discussing some of the potential qualities that a Satanic theology would have; and offering some preliminary results. A proper and complete Satanic theology would be better suited to something the length of a book, and perhaps that’s a book that I’ll write one day, but given the space available to me here, I’ll have to confine myself to a more limited collection of ideas. I’ll also be introducing the approach I’ll be taking next episode, which will likewise be a theology, but a very different one and much more experimental in character.
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.
Why I Might Be Wrong
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.
Joel Osteen and Christian Hegemony
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.
The Book of Job, pt. 2
Part 1 of this series covered much of the background of the Book of Job, some matters of translation, and the first two chapters, which cover much of the story of the book as it is commonly told. From here we’ll proceed through the parts of the story that have remained largely untold.
Faith and Sacrifice, pt. 1: Sacrifice in Sacred Literature
“Take your son, your only son Isaac, whom you love, and go to the land of Moriah, and offer him there as a burnt offering on one of the mountains that I shall show you.” Abraham awoke in the early morning. He remembered his dream and he knew immediately what had befallen him. He arose,…
Bizarre Bible Stories #2: A Gay Orgy with Jesus
A Biblical scholar, Morton Smith, was doing research in a library Jerusalem in 1958 when he chanced upon a letter that appeared to have been written by one of the 2nd century church fathers, Clement of Alexandria.
You Are Going to Die Soon
It is commonly thought that the Bible details the blissful afterlife of the righteous in Heaven and the torturous existence of the damned in Hell; in fact, the Bible has nothing of the sort to say about Heaven, and has little to say on the topic of the afterlife in general.