For those unfamiliar, The Satanic Temple is an atheistic organization. Here are its tenets. I often ask people what they disagree with and get very little in the way of meaningful response.
THERE ARE SEVEN FUNDAMENTAL TENETS
I
One should strive to act with compassion and empathy toward all creatures in accordance with reason.
II
The struggle for justice is an ongoing and necessary pursuit that should prevail over laws and institutions.
III
One’s body is inviolable, subject to one’s own will alone.
IV
The freedoms of others should be respected, including the freedom to offend. To willfully and unjustly encroach upon the freedoms of another is to forgo one’s own.
V
Beliefs should conform to one’s best scientific understanding of the world. One should take care never to distort scientific facts to fit one’s beliefs.
VI
People are fallible. If one makes a mistake, one should do one’s best to rectify it and resolve any harm that might have been caused.
VII
Every tenet is a guiding principle designed to inspire nobility in action and thought. The spirit of compassion, wisdom, and justice should always prevail over the written or spoken word.
https://thesatanictemple.com/blogs/the-satanic-temple-tenets/there-are-seven-fundamental-tenets
DO YOU WORSHIP SATAN?
No, nor do we believe in the existence of Satan or the supernatural. The Satanic Temple believes that religion can, and should, be divorced from superstition. As such, we do not promote a belief in a personal Satan. To embrace the name Satan is to embrace rational inquiry removed from supernaturalism and archaic tradition-based superstitions. Satanists should actively work to hone critical thinking and exercise reasonable agnosticism in all things. Our beliefs must be malleable to the best current scientific understandings of the material world — never the reverse.
https://thesatanictemple.com/pages/faq
She’s 13. Does anyone know if she’s allowed to become a member? The website isn’t clear on that.
It might help to better understand the origin of the term.
It first appears in Job in reference to a supernatural ‘adversary’ who petitions Yahweh to be able to kill Job’s children and ruins his livelihood causing him to tear his clothes in grief and setting up the rest of the book which is a dialogue on the injustice of suffering.
The later dialogue part of Job is pretty much a direct adaptation of the earlier Babylonian Theodicy, a dialogue on suffering.
But this earlier opening has a remarkable parallel with the earlier Canaanite Tale of Aqhat, where in the opening the goddess Anat petitions El as the head of the pantheon for permission to kill the son of Danel, which he finds out about at the same time he finds out his livelihood is ruined, when he tears his clothes in grief.
So it pretty much looks like what we have in Job was a combination of two earlier polytheistic stories where a lazy editor under later monotheistic reform needed to get rid of a different god in the story while keeping the role, so switched out the name for a generic term of ‘adversary’ (Satan).
This addition of a supernatural adversary caught the imagination of later development of the theology and led to a great deal of fanfiction, much like how the failure to translate ‘Lucifer’ falling in Isiah back to “the morning star” led to even more fanfiction because of parallels to the Enochian apocrypha.
TL;DR: While you may no longer have a faith-related uncomfortableness about some supernatural ‘evil’ entity, understanding that the very origin of all that warning and indoctrination you suffered which has left a remnant avoidance of the term was itself an adaptation of polytheism in the tradition - something you were likely also conditioned to reject by the same indoctrination - might help in further distancing yourself from that remnant concern. ‘Satan’ is not only silly in a rational consideration of cosmic forces, but is a ridiculous part of the Abrahamic tradition down to its very first appearance in the tradition.
Thanks for this! Today I learned