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.
Tag: christianity
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.
The Book of Job, pt. 1
The Book of Job, which relates the story of a devout and wealthy man from the land of Uz whose devotion to God is tested by profound suffering, is easily the most fascinating and enigmatic book of the Old Testament. In looking into it, I found that, once again, what is said of the text and what the text actually says are two very different things.
Paradise Lost as a Sacred Text
Should Paradise Lost, John Milton’s 17th-century epic poem concerning the fall of Satan from Heaven, be considered a sacred text, especially with regard to the Satanist?
The Tragedy of Christian Science
Sometime when I was very young, my mother began bringing me to church. The church was of the Christian Science denomination, in which she herself had been raised. She did not adopt the doctrine of the religion wholesale, but rather maintained a loose and abstract belief in God and Jesus. She told me many years later that she was not trying to indoctrinate me into the religion, but rather only to expose me to religion in general and to give me some moral grounding
Summa: A Satanist Reads the Nicene Creed
Summa is a choral setting of the Latin translation of the Nicene Creed, composed by the Estonian composer Arvo Pärt in 1977. He later arranged it for strings, and that rendition is perhaps the more popular, but I have never been able to appreciate the music apart from the text. It is one of my favorite works of music, but I can’t listen to it without hearing the ideological dissonance within it. The music seems to be expressing something to which the text is antithetical.