Mass shootings are the latent and intrinsic violence of the patriarchy spilling over the boundaries in which the patriarchs work to contain it.
Tag: dialectic
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…
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.
Dialectics
I’m going to start delving back into the theoretical underpinnings of my Satanic philosophy, but I need to do it better than the last time I attempted such a thing, and that will require laying some groundwork. When I started this project last year, I dove right into the philosophy, but didn’t spend much time at all covering the underlying concepts, and the result was some obscure, muddy writing. So I’m going to spend a few weeks here and there covering some of the foundational concepts upon which my philosophy is grounded. I’ve already covered Nietzsche at length, so at least that’s out of the way. Here, I’ll be exploring the nature of dialectics, and the Hegelian approach to dialectics in particular.
Cain Murders Abel
What were Cain and Abel told by their parents in their childhood? All children wish to know about the world, and inevitably ask questions to that effect. Parents, in response, tell stories that signify their knowledge thereof. Did Adam and Eve tell them about their life in the Garden of Eden, how they sought knowledge and were for that reason exiled from paradise?
Satanism, Christmas, and the Birth of Christ Jesus
I despise Christmas. For a duration fast approaching an entire sixth of the year, the worst aspects of capitalism, religion, music, and human social culture combine and worm their way into individual lives in a way that cannot be avoided if one wishes to participate in society at all, and all under the auspices of a holiday for a religion that is not mine but that nevertheless infuriates me because of the degree to which it’s been appropriated and corrupted. It’s a striking example of the way the Hegemon cannibalizes what it ostensibly holds sacred and distorts the meaning of what it claims are the foundations of Truth so as to serve its own ends.
Another Account of the Creation
As mentioned in the previous essay on the Book of Genesis, there are two distinct creation narratives present at the beginning of the book, both well-known in popular culture. The second continues from the first—-starting in the middle of chapter 2, verse 4—-but immediately distinguishes itself from the first in several ways:
Satan the Accuser
Much of Satanic symbolism is oriented around an archetype of Satan that I refer to as Satan the Adversary. This is Satan as the Rebel Angel, whose rebellion against God and subsequent fall from heaven is described in Milton’s epic poem Paradise Lost. As compelling and inspiring as I find this archetype, my own philosophy is predicated upon another: Satan the Accuser.
Six Days of Creation and the Sabbath
Earlier this year I purchased a copy of the Christian Bible as part of a broader study of religions and their sacred texts. Unlike other Satanists, I do not consider the Bible as something wholly abhorrent, false, or misleading. To the contrary, I find it to be an interesting and compelling work of great literary merit, a useful window into history and into the beliefs of a substantial subsection of humanity, and even a source of personal insight and inspiration.