Do you think Satanism is just reverse Christianity? Do you think Satanism is just reverse Christianity? - Page 14
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Thread: Do you think Satanism is just reverse Christianity?

  1. #131
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    If you told me that was the kind of Satanism you are into I would beware of you. I'm pretty sure it can mean that, though, if you want it to.

    I think Satanists tend to be concerned with demonized virtues, rather than anti-virtues.

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    I'm not "into Satanism" by any means; I just thought it would be a point of interest regarding "reverse Christianity" - Nietzche being such an influential philosopher et al...

  3. #133
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    Tor Johnson-Lugosi said: "Have you read NIETZCHE'S THE ANTICHRIST and if so how do you think it applies herein?"
    That's a HUGE question, in so few words, Tor.

    When I and my friends read the first accounts of supposed Satanic Ritual Abuse victimization, way back in the 1980s, we knew right away that the "victims" stories must be false. We knew that, because the beliefs & practices of the "satanic cult" described by the alleged victims, was an exact match for the mythical "satanism" that we labelled "reverse-christianity". (We were studying Comparative Religions & Mythology).
    Everyone ought to understand exactly what these alleged SRA victims claimed those beliefs & practices to be, so I will quote a summary from satanic panic promoter and psychiatrist Dr Colin Ross (DISCLAIMER - what follows is NOT MY OPINION of any persons who self-describe as "satanist"), from "Satanic ritual abuse: principles of treatment" (pg.32):
    "“The Satanic rituals...are the mirror opposite of repressive Christianity; the Christian devours the spiritual body of Christ, the Satanist eats his victim's heart, the Christian has an upright cross, the Satanist has an inverted one; the Christian is washed in the Blood of the Lamb, the satanist in the Blood of the Goat; the Christian Priest is celibate, the Satanist is a pedophile; the Christian reads the Bile, the Satanist defecates on it. The Satanist does literally what the Christian does, in a disguised form: the Christian drinks wine that represents the Blood of Christ, the Satanist drinks actual blood; the Christian god was nailed on the cross, the Satanist ties his victim to the altar, and so on".

    As you can see from the above, this concept of "satanism" has very little to do with opposing or working against Christian doctrines as they are acted out in our society by Christian communities, Christian leaders/clerics or Christian churches. This concept of "satanism" is all about acting out blasphemous parodies, or reversals, of what a pious Christian is supposed to do. This "reversed-christianity" is the concept that most people in our society had of satanism before The Church of Satan came along, it is the concept most people had of satanism while Anton LeVay was living, and despite a lot of hard work by many people - it remains the dominant concept of satanism in our culture today.

    Despite extensive investigations over 10 or so years, this Reverse-Christianity Satanic Cult described by alleged SRA victims, could not be found. Even the FBI couldn't find valid evidence that it existed. No one could find it, because it is only a mythical concept. It has only ever manifested in the form of solitary deranged individuals, or short-lived, small, criminal groups. There are very good reasons for this - as demonstrated in my previous posting, persons who attempt to live out a literal reversal of Christian (or any other major religion) beliefs & practices, would be so rabidly anti-social that they could not work together co-operatively for more than brief periods. They certainly could not run an organization so efficient, and so efficiently secretive, that not even the FBI could find any trace of them. They would be a menace to everyone, including each other, and would be purged from their society either legally or by vigilantism within a short time of "forming up".

    There is also the problem of the utter pointlessness of spending all your time acting out reversals of Christian practices. It accomplishes nothing, so why would anyone dedicate their lives to doing it? Satanic Panic promoters tried to explain this by referring to the ancient Judeo-Christian myth about people who "hate God". The mythical god-haters supposedly hate Christ-Jehovah so intensely that they are motivated to spend all their time acting out blasphemous mockery of Christian or Jewish morals, values and practices - supposedly believing that such mockery actually injures that Diety. Another explanation was, because they hate Christ-Jehovah so intensely and Christ-Jehovah is the essence of "good", they "identify with evil" and act that out by reverse-christianity satan worship.
    Supposed SRA victims claimed that the members of this satanic cult actually professed to perceive themselves as "evil people doing evil things in service to an evil diety".

    There are several problems with these ideas. To begin with, although there have been and continue to be many people who hate individual Christians, or entire sects of Christians, or specific Christian doctrines and the way those doctrines are acted out in their society, most of those people couldn't be bothered wasting their time hating Christ-Jehovah personally. Most anti-Christians don't believe Christ-Jehovah exists at all - why bother hating a mythical or fictional character?

    In "The Anti-Christ", NIETZCHE typifies the real attitudes of many Christianity haters. He doesn't hate Christ-Jehovah, he doesn't believe such an entity exists. He doesn't despise "God", he despises the "religion of pity", the worship of weakness, that he perceives Christianity to be. Although he does advocate values & practices that are the antithesis of what he perceives to be Christian values & practices, he isn't advocating reversal as parody or mockery enacted out of hatred - he advocates positive, constructive enactment capable of bringing about real change in the real world. The same is true of two other famous anti-Christians; Aleister Crowley and Madame Blavatsky.

  4. #134
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    @Tor - I'm not into practicing satanism , but I'm interested in studying the history of ideas about satanism & how and why people self-describe as Satanists.

    The concept of multigenerational religious communities/organizations composed of Satanists who perceive themselves to be "evil people doing evil things in service to an evil deity" is VERY problematic. It is utter nonsense, frankly.
    To begin with, believing oneself to be "an evil person" is contradictory to fundamental aspects of the human psyche. Schizophrenics, psychotics or suicidal depressives might genuinely perceive themselves to be an evil being, while in their delusional state. Psychologically healthy persons whose ideas, attitudes or behaviour violates social norms and might be labelled "evil" by conformists in their religious community or culture, invariably develop rationalizations through which they define those conformists and their standards as "evil", "mistaken", "stupid", "barbaric", "ignorant", "old-fashioned", "brainwashed" etc., and define themselves as; more advanced or intelligent, better educated, having superior insight, a heroic innovator, a free-thinker etc., and ultimately as the genuinely "righteous" person.

    This tendency is greatly amplified by membership in a community of persons with similarly transgressive ideas, attitudes or behaviour. Religious communities whose beliefs or practices are considered heretical, immoral, or "evil" by neighboring or surrounding communities develop theologies, mythologies or philosophies through which they perceive themselves as righteous and their detractors as "the evil ones". No community of Satanists, not even one that practiced "reverse christianity", would believe themselves to be evil people doing evil things.

    David Finkelhor is a child abuse expert who allowed himself to be exploited by Satanic Panic promoters. He participated in a "study" of alleged daycare sex crime cases which was intended to demonstrate that there really was "satanic ritual abuse" in at least some of the cases. In his conclusion, he stated the opinion that at least 13% of the cases he studied were "genuine":
    "After studying the ritualistic allegations we decided that they needed to be subdivided into three categories: 1) true cult-based ritualism, where the abuse was in service to a larger spiritual or social objective, 2) psuedo-ritualism, where the goal was primarily sexual gratification, with ritual being used only to intimidate children against disclosing, and 3) psychological ritualism, where the activities were primarily the expression of an individual's obsessional or delusional system".

    Unfortunately for Finkelhor and other Satanic Panic promoters, his #1 - "true cult-based ritualism, where the abuse was in service to a larger spiritual or social objective", is entirely mythical. There are theories of sexual magic, with sexual acts performed in the context of a ritual, but the participants absolutely have to be willing or there could not be any "magical" results. I won't go into detail here, but the anti-occult crowd have never understood sex magic and they never will. Their fantasies of rape in a ritual setting producing some kind of "antinomian" or transgressive "energies" are exactly that - pornographic fantasies that only make sense to outsiders with superficial knowledge and ulterior motivations for wanting the public to believe in such a thing.

    It is true that transgressive behaviour - violating social norms - can produce a cheap high, by triggering the stress-response system to release a flood of Catecholamine hormones & neurotransmitters; adrenalin, dopamine, epinephrine & norepinephrine. But, like any other means of triggering the catecholamines, (such as smoking tobacco, crack or methamphetamine), acclimatization is inevitable. Each time a specific event triggers the stress-response system, the response will be a little more muted, eventually losing the capacity to produce any high whatsoever.

    This fantasy about satanic cult abuse - that exposing small children to the most horrific, traumatizing experiences, like witnessing or participating in rape, murder and cannibalism in a ritual setting would produce fanatically loyal cult zealots driven to reproduce those experiences over & over - is one of the stupidest fantasies I've ever encountered. The most likely result would be to produce totally non-functional schizophrenics & psychotics, incapable of benefiting the cult in any way. Certainly, a child exposed to such experiences even on an occaisional basis would quickly acclimatize - becoming emotionally numbed to such experiences, and would be unlikely to derive any "thrills" from them as an adult.

  5. #135
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    @Fatalist - I don't believe that I said anything about "absolute evil" or "objectively evil". If you inferred that I was talking about those concept, then you mistook my meaning.

    It is certainly possible for a psychologically healthy person to believe that they have made mistakes, or that they have done something "wrong", or "bad", from their own perspective. It would be very unusual, however, if they were to conclude from this that they were an evil person and adopt that idea as the core of their self-perception.

    As for insufficient or parasitic identity...
    Perhaps you mean something like this; person A defines himself as "not a Christian" and that negative is the sole basis of his identity. If there were no Christians, he would he no identity at all. Any positive, (not positive as in "good", positive contrasted to the negative "not a -" ), concepts of himself are derived from the negative, i.e., it has to be something that being "not a Christian" means to him. He could only see himself as a loving person if he perceived Christians to be unloving persons. Is that the idea?

    This would be a manifestation of Borderline Personality Disorder, wherein a person fails to develop a complete, stable sense of Self. Such a person is then reliant on something external for their self-identity. Usually, that external would be another persons's expectations of them, i.e. "Mother expects me to get good grades, that must mean I am a good student" - producing a self-identity of "I am a good student".

    Such a person would not be "psychologically healthy", and I did state psychologically healthy as a precondition to my conclusions, in the preceding rants.

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    are there really people like that Ifind it hard to believe they would be blinded by such idea's i mean to do something just because its the opposite is nuts now if it goes against ones belief or ideals thats another story. have you ever met people like that?

    i think satanism started out as shock value and defience, but grew into something more i am assuming here out of its still in existance.

    great posts guys i look foward to reading more of them.
    Man is invited to question, discover, explore,
    and manipulate the world around him and use it for his benefit.

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    Quote Originally Posted by zero View Post
    are there really people like that Ifind it hard to believe they would be blinded by such idea's i mean to do something just because its the opposite is nuts now if it goes against ones belief or ideals thats another story. have you ever met people like that?
    If you are referring to genuine, literal reverse-christianity satanists, no I haven't. My point was, such persons are a mythical concept. They couldn't exist for anyone to meet them, because their behaviour would sabotage their own capacity for survival. It is important to understand, however, that many millions of conservative Christians around the globe (and some non-christians as well) believe that literal reverse-christianity satanists - who would "do something just because it is the opposite" - have existed in the past, might exist today and are likely to exist in the future.

    It's easy for them to believe this, because they never examine the concept and its ramifications in any depth. They have a vague idea that people confessed to being exactly that in the past, under torture by inquisitors or freely of their own volition. It never occurs to them that inquisitors only had to solicit very superficial (and scripted) accounts of how these people supposedly lived and what they did, that they never had to ask the hard questions, such as - "If you've been killing people just because The Lord forbade you to, saying Thou Shalt Not Commit Murder, then why haven't you and the other members of your coven murdered each other? What difference would it make who you killed?"

    Literal reverse-christianity satanists also make sense to many conservative Christians and Jews, because of the judeo-christian myth about God-haters. In this myth, the God-hater is a previously pious Christian or Jew who experiences terrible tragedy, such as the death of their spouse and children from disease or accident. The previously pious person blames Jehovah or Christ for their loss and suffering, grows to hate their diety and ends up devoting the rest of their life to worshipping Satan and acting out a reversal of everything the diety commands believers to do or not to do, simply out of spite.

    This leads me to the last aspect of literal reverse-christianity satanism that I haven't yet discussed: to be one, you'd really have to be a Christian or a Jew.
    I don't mean, you'd have to have once been a Christian or a Jew - I mean you'd have to still be a believing Christian or Jew. There just wouldn't be any point to living your life in that manner, if you didn't believe that Jehovah or Christ-Jehovah was God, and therefore you are supposed to obey their commandments and live your life in accordance with their teachings. What would be the point to violating their commandments & teachings, if you didn't believe that they really do apply to you.

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    I agree there can not be anyone/anything completely anything thats left to essences. balance is necessary just like in nature else it shall consume and in this even something good can be a bad thing.
    Man is invited to question, discover, explore,
    and manipulate the world around him and use it for his benefit.

  9. #139
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    @Fatalist - I had no intention of accusing you personally of being delusional. I know nothing about you and couldn't possibly make such a judgement. If you felt that was my intent, then I apologize for the confusion.

    In this thread, at this time, I am simply saying that it would be unusual for a psychologically healthy person to believe that they are "an evil person", and that I don't believe it is possible for any religious or spiritual community to believe that they are "evil people doing evil things" by their own standards.

    I think that, when it comes to self-concept, many people's perceptions about themselves are likely to be more complex that simple polarity: "either A or B"
    For many people, the possibilities are likely to seem more like: "A or 'not A', B or 'not B', both A & B, or neither A nor B".

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    @fatalist - I'm agreeable to discussing these subjects with you, with some caveats that probably don't need to be voiced (but I will articulate them anyway, out of politeness).

    It might be a good idea to create a new topic thread for our discussion. You are probably familiar with the internet forum protocol about 'staying on topic'. I think we may already be stretching the boundaries of this thread. If you wished to refer back to discussions in this thread, from a new one, that would be acceptable to me & to protocol I would think.

    I might not be the right person for you to have these discussions with. I have an impression that exploring/ discussing Hermeticism et al, in an occult context, is a relatively new experience for you? Am I wrong?
    It is a very old experience for me. The prime of my exploration and discussion of philosophical/ religious-spiritual/ metaphysical/ occult-magickal/ whatever topics was in my youth, many decades ago. In a sense, I "got over" my fascination with the words, the word-games, the mind-games, many decades ago. You may find me disappointingly uninterested in intellectual sparring, or even in defending any 'position' I might appear to postulate. I'm quite familiar with all the concepts you've raised, but I feel no allegiance to them, I don't worship them, I'm not enslaved to them.

    You said: "Just as you argue that a genuinely evil person is a mythical concept..."
    It wasn't my intent, to express an opinion on whether "genuinely evil persons" are mythical or not. From my perspective, Adolph Hitler, Jerry Falwell and Strom Thurmond were all genuinely evil persons - but I accept the subjectivity of this opinion and I absolutely do not think that any of those 3 persons believed themselves to be "an evil person". I have argued that a specific concept - that of: literal reverse-christianity satanists who believe themselves to be "evil persons doing evil things" - is a myth.

    "...it can be also argued that a “psychologically healthy” person is a mythical concept as well". Sure. I don't disagree with that. If I were to offer a definition of "psychologically healthy", I might say something like: "a person whose functionality is unimpeded by psychological/psychiatric disorders that appear in the DSM" - but we could debate the meaning & reality of each term within that also; "functional", "unimpeded", "disorder", or even "person".

    I agree with what I perceive you to be saying about the universality of stress-events.
    I might choose the term "traumatic". I think that life is inherently traumatizing, especially for infants, toddlers and young children. I know some people who insist that abuse is basis of all childhood trauma, but I disagree. I think the process of individuation itself is inherently traumatizing for children, regards of how benevolently they may be treated by their caregivers.

    As for polarity, choice, etc. From an abstract perspective, there is of course validity to such concepts, which permeate hermetic/ kabbalistic/ magickal philosophies - postulate The All, contract it to a monad - being everything, it cannot have identity & perhaps not even self-awareness. Split into a duad, each half comprehends itself by what it is not - yet this is illusory, since opposites contain each other - and so on.

    What I can tell you is, that I experience free agency. I experience it every day, and every moment of every day. I am aware of logical constructs which "prove" that freedom is impossible, merely illusory - nevertheless my experience validates my perception that my Will is free, day after day after day...

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