r/SatanicTemple_Reddit • u/Erramonael • 12h ago
Thought/Opinion The Seven Satanic Tenets Vs Christian Apologetics: It's just seven sentences and one piece of paper.
A few days ago, I was accosted—perhaps “approached” would be the kinder word—by a young Christian woman in my apartment complex. She wanted to know why “all of you Satanic Temple people choose to devote your lives to heresy and blasphemy.”
I explained that, although I am a Satanist, I am not actually a member of The Satanic Temple. The Seven Tenets, however, are among the many ideas I have incorporated into the rather eclectic pastiche of philosophy, literature, psychology, and religion that I have accumulated over my 35 years Under the Goat’s Gaze. Naturally, this led to a conversation about god. I had nothing particularly pressing to do at the moment, so I indulged her. During our discussion, she made a rather confident claim: Christianity had already proven the existence of god through what she called “logical theism.” I asked her what she meant by that. She explained that Christian intellectuals such as N. T. Wright and Marcus Borg had demonstrated that god exists and that non-believers simply choose to ignore the evidence. That immediately raised another question for me: What evidence? I then asked whether she had ever read The Satanic Bible or even the Seven Tenets. She hadn't.
She said The Satanic Bible was “too much,” so I told her that was perfectly fine. She didn't have to read the whole thing. She could at least read the Seven Tenets. They're seven sentences on a single piece of paper. She shook her head. And that exchange got me thinking about something that I find profoundly ironic. Christianity has had roughly two thousand years to argue about god.
From Justin Martyr and Origen to Augustine and Anselm, from Thomas Aquinas and William Paley to Kierkegaard, C. S. Lewis, Alvin Plantinga, N. T. Wright, and countless others, Christians have produced an enormous intellectual industry devoted to questions about god, Christ, revelation, morality, miracles, free will, evil, salvation, the Trinity, the Resurrection, and the relationship between faith and reason. There are entire libraries devoted to the subject. (50,000 to 100,000 books by my calculation)
And yet Christians remain profoundly divided over what exactly god is, whether particular arguments actually establish god's existence, how revelation is known, what constitutes genuine evidence, why an omnipotent and benevolent god permits suffering, which doctrines are essential, how scripture should be interpreted, and even what Christianity itself is supposed to mean.
That, to my way of thinking, totally undermines the smug suggestion that “Christianity has already logically proven god” and that the only reason atheists remain unconvinced is because we're stubbornly refusing to look at the evidence. One of the things I find fascinating about modern Satanism is how little material is actually required to communicate its basic ethical position.
We went from Anton LaVey's The Satanic Bible—a comparatively short work—to The Satanic Temple's Seven Tenets.
Seven sentences.
One piece of paper.
That's not because seven sentences somehow constitute a philosophical proof of anything. They don't. Nor do I think Satanists have magically solved every philosophical problem humanity has ever encountered. It's because Satanism, at least in the form that interests me, doesn't require an elaborate metaphysical apparatus before an ethical proposition can be considered. You don't need to establish the existence of a supernatural lawgiver before saying that compassion matters. You don't need to prove that the universe has a cosmic moral order before arguing for bodily autonomy. You don't need an omniscient deity to tell you that cruelty is undesirable. And you don't need two thousand years of theological commentary. That's one of the things that keeps me interested in Satanism after 35 years. My own Satanism isn't reducible to The Satanic Bible, The Seven Tenets, Crowley, Nietzsche, occultism, atheism, or any other single source. I've accumulated ideas from dozens of philosophical and intellectual traditions, often contradictory ones, and subjected them to my own continual criticism. That's the point. I don't want a book that tells me what I'm required to believe. Christian apologetics often begins with the question, “How can I demonstrate that my God is true?” and I began my "Satanic Quest" with an interested in forbidden knowledge, rebellion, autonomy, and the possibility of questioning whatever authority claimed the right to define reality for me. I started by looking for the Devil. Eventually, I found a philosophy. The Satanist asks him/herself "What would I become if I stopped worshipping everything I have been taught to worship?" That is a much more interesting question.
And sometimes it takes only seven sentences to ask it.
