Comment on Aliens decide to communicate with us

• takeda@lemmy.world ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  I met a member. And he explained to me that they are pretty much atheists but from the point of the law they enjoy religious protections.

  Basically if you call yourself atheist, you won’t get any religious protections, because you don’t have any religion. Everyone knows that FSM is a joke, so that also wouldn’t fly either. So they created a religion. They chose Satan, to get expected reaction from devoted Christians, they don’t believe in Satan though (unlike wackos from the Church of Satan). You can read their 7 tenets, which sound quite reasonable: thesatanictemple.com/…/there-are-seven-fundamenta…

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  • MightyGalhupo@lemmy.world ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    This is actually really reasonable. What are the “religious protections” you speak of?

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    • takeda@lemmy.world ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Things that you normally don’t think about. For example if you tried to get a job and the owner refused to hire you, because you don’t believe in his religion, you can sue that they are discriminating. If you are atheist, that won’t work, because you don’t have a religion.

      If a certain group claims to be offended by something, because it affects their religion, atheists have no say, because they have no religion.

      There’s no tax exemptions, money that might be directed to religious institutions won’t go to atheist organizations, because again that’s not a religion and so on.

      As for the other commenter’s, about putting Capitol displays and after school programs is meant to emphasize separation of church and state and religion in schools. The “abortion rituals” are for fighting recent SCOTUS ruling, that it apparently infringes their religious freedoms and prevents practicing their religion (kind of contra to Christians imposing their beliefs on others). Though, with current SCOTUS and states that are banning abortion, I don’t know if it does much.

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      • MightyGalhupo@lemmy.world ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

        This is wonderful how had I not heard of this before

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      • unreasonabro@lemmy.world ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

        called fighting fire with fire ;)

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    • PsychedSy@sh.itjust.works ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      They put cool shit up in state capitols (see: snaketivity), have “after school satan” clubs, abortion rituals. All sorts of shit to use the cover of religion to assert freedoms.

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      • MightyGalhupo@lemmy.world ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

        That sounds amazing

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• Kiwi_Girl@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  They might mean this: thesatanictemple.com/pages/about-us

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  • 0x4E4F@sh.itjust.works ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Ummm… doesn’t that contradict what satanism is all about?

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    • takeda@lemmy.world ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      That’s because they don’t believe Satan or dark magic exists.

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    • Monument@lemmy.sdf.org ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      All religion is as meaningless as the meaning we attach to any word.

      U.S. Christian Nationalists are engaged in a campaign of legal and political efforts to change U.S. law and public policy in such a way that it removes divisions between public policy and religious doctrine, or uses public money for Christian causes. The Temple of Satan was (at least partially) founded to combat those efforts and to set people free by spreading knowledge. They do this by subverting the laws that privilege Christians (religious holiday displays, religious after school clubs, etc); by working to shine a light on what Christian’s are doing while offering a community and guidelines for moral living without fear of gods concocted by prehistoric man. In many of their materials, they allude to being the snake in the garden of Eden, whose only crime was sharing information with Eve. In the one bit of research I did for this comment, I also learned that satan is just the Hebrew word for “accuser” - and originally they just pointed out how dumb some things were.

      Contextually, the Temple of Satan name is honestly probably more relevant to them than Christian is to U.S. Jesus worshippers.

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    • misophist@lemmy.world ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      What do you think Satanism is about? I model my behavior on a rational, scientific, and humanistic worldview and I fight against superstition. One of the predominant superstitious organisations in my country have a mythical being that espouses all of these same traits and they call it Satan. It’s convenient for us to refer to ourselves using their own language, so they instantly know we are against anti-humanism and superstitious oppression.

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      • 0x4E4F@sh.itjust.works ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

        My point was, maybe they should call it Paganism or something like that. Satanism doesn’t really bring much to the table (as a term) IMO.

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• LemmyKnowsBest@lemmy.world ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  [deleted]

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  • takeda@lemmy.world ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    The Church of Satan believes in the supernatural and would be the traditional satanists.

    The Satan’s Temple are essentially atheists that formed a religion to enjoy the same religious protections as people in other religions.

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  • 0x4E4F@sh.itjust.works ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Well, paganism should be a more acceptable name for it, just to distinguish between the two.

    I completely agree with the first part though, nothing wrong with that. In fact, we should all be leaning towards that if we wanna survive.

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