The word “sin” drips with centuries of religious baggage, conjuring images of fire and brimstone preachers and penitent souls begging for redemption. But what lies beneath the surface of this concept? In this episode, we’ll embark on a journey through the history and philosophy of sin, tracing its etymological origins, its central role in Christian…
Tag: religion
The Golden Verses
(written with Cora Howell) Have you ever heard someone say that you should follow the Golden Rule? Even if you don’t follow the Bible or its teachings, I bet most of you would know that rule as being something along the lines of loving your neighbor as yourself or treating others how you want to…
The Lessons of Ancient Egypt
What can Ancient Egypt tell us about the development of religion and civilization? The answer is: a great deal, more than I could possibly fit into a single episode. As part of a broader research project into economics, I’ve been studying various histories, and the history of Ancient Egypt has been particularly fascinating and informative. One of the world’s earliest civilizations, it extends over 3000 years of history, from the Bronze Age and through the Iron Age into classical antiquity. As I mentioned in a recent episode, the Great Pyramid was more ancient to Cleopatra, the last pharaoh, than Cleopatra is to us.
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…
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.
Science and Religion
The Nye-Ham debate is emblematic of the broader relationship between science and religion. These two fields of discourse are generally perceived as being both fully disjunct and largely in conflict with one another. Certainly, science and religion do come into conflict—the Young Earth creationist claim and the scientific consensus claim about the age of the Earth cannot both be correct—but the relationship between the two fields of discourse is generally more complex than that and, while conflicts do arise, I don’t see them as being necessary or intrinsic to either science or religion.
An Answer to the Pathologies of Ideology
Photo by Stillness InMotion on Unsplash This essay is also available as a podcast on anchor.fm In the first two parts of this month’s series, I’ve explored what I’ve referred to as the pathologies of human ideology, those aspects of human ideology with a strong potential to turn their ideologies toxic. With an emphasis on their manifestation in religion,…
Nihilism
I’ve never pinned down what exactly I mean by nihilism in anything more than a cursory way. This episode will remedy that deficiency and explore why nihilism, such as I construe it, is a pathological ideology.
What Is Religion?
Do American Jews, Christians, and Muslims believe in the same god? Nominally, at least, the answer seems to be an obvious yes: I think Americans whose religion falls into the Abrahamic tradition in general identify their god as being the same god worshipped by other such Americans. But in practical terms, that may not be the case; even American Christians may functionally believe in a different god than other American Christians.
Foundations of Satanism: William James and Satanic Pantheism
This episode begins a three-episode series that will explore the foundations of Satanic religion, as I understand it. Each episode will concentrate on a different aspect of Satanism and will be written in a different style. This one will be somewhat like my typical essays, especially those that focus most closely on Satanism and philosophy of religion, and here I’ll be exploring the religious philosophy of one of my most significant influences, the American philosopher William James.