A TIME Magazine article written by Lily Rothman is titled “The Evolution of Modern Satanism in the United States,” July 27, 2015 AD.
A few recent events have reawakened attention and interest in Satanism. One is the erection of a status of Baphomet which includes two admiring children, see: Satanic Temple raises funds for abortion. Others are considered within the following articles:
Miranda Barbour: is she a satanist and are her murders satanic crimes?
And, see the follow up: Satanic crime – Miranda Barbour claims 22 victims
Eric Minerault burns and urinates on a Bible: satanic crime or art?
Satanist compliments Judeo-Christianity: destroys Ten Commandments
Satanic Temple spokesperson Jex Blackmore stated that the Baphomet statue, the goat headed hermaphrodite, is meant to signify “a reconciliation of opposites” yet, in 2nd Corinthians 6:14 the rhetorical question is asked, “what communion has light with darkness?”
Lily Rothman notes:
In the early 1970s, interest in the occult in American culture was so high that TIME devoted a cover story to the topic, and a large portion of it was focused on Satanism.
Within that 1972 AD story, TIME all but encouraged Satan worship by appealing to desperate and rebellious youth, noting:
Some of the confessions [in the Inquisition age] must have been sheer defiance: faced with a ruling establishment that was sanctified by the church, a resentful peasantry followed the only image of rebellion they knew—Satan…
The satanic messiah became especially appealing in times of despair, such as the era of the plague known as the Black Death. Real or imagined, the pact with the Devil may have been the last bad hope for safety in a world fallen out of joint.
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Just below Lily Rothman’s article on Satanism, TIME magazine had a slide show titled as follow with the primary example being Hilary Clinton:
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An example of that which TIME terms “the existence of Satanists as an organized, public group” is their mention of Anton Szandor La Vey who founded the church of Satan and wrote The Satanic Bible. It is mistakenly often asserted that LaVey viewed Satan as merely metaphorical. Michael Aquino left the church of Satan in order to establish the temple of Set which is viewed as a group that held that Satan was a personal being.
As TIME explained in 1972, La Vey’s organization was not the scary Satanism of religious imagination:
La Vey’s church and its branches might well be called the “unitarian” wing of the occult. The members invest themselves with some of the most flamboyant trappings of occultism, but magic for them is mostly psychodrama—or plain old carnival hokum.
Apparently, there is some truth to this as Satanism is about mocking YHVH, the Bible, and Christianity.
They invoke Satan not as a supernatural being, but as a symbol of man’s self-gratifying ego, which is what they really worship. They look down on those who actually believe in the supernatural, evil or otherwise.
There is more to the story than this since, as I noted in Miranda Barbour: is she a satanist and are her murders satanic crimes?, when Anton LaVey’s girlfriend Jayne Mansfield’s son was mauled by a lion (at Jungleland, a private zoo), LaVey and fellow Satanists actually invoked the healing help of their “Brother Satan” as a personal being with the ability intercede for them.
TIME went on to report:
Though the 1960s and ’70s saw the introduction of several other concepts called Satanism—from actual religious belief, to a credo used to justify criminality—the Church of Satan did not fade away. In 1978, the U.S. Army even included the group in the manual of “Religious Requirements and Practices” delivered to its hundreds of chaplains.
In fact, the aforementioned (Ret) US Intelligence officer Col Michael Aquino was the first Satanist to become an official US Army chaplain.
He stated the following during the legal battle between US Army Maj Grady McMurtry and Kenneth Grant regarding the legitimate chartered of the US Grand Lodge of the Ordo Templi Orientis (OTO):
While sitting in the courtroom watching Judge Legge preside sternly over the slug-out, I couldn’t help wondering if he had any idea he was ruling on which group had legal claim to anal sex as the supreme religious sacrament in the United States.—Scroll of Set, Vol. XII no. 5, Oct. 1986 AD
Learn more about this sorted subject in the article Satanic sodomy and the Typhonian tradition: sex magick.
Next, TIME comes to the modern day:
The brand of Satanism on display in Detroit was of a different sort: political Satanism, a more recent innovation. Those activists are associated with the Satanic Temple, a New York-based group that has spent the last few years publicly offering alternatives to more mainstream displays of religiosity. The Satanic Temple sees Satan as a Paradise Lost-inflected metaphor who represents skepticism and the ability to challenge authority.
This pertains to the group that erected a statue of Baphomet, raised funds for abortion, etc.
Interestingly, A Satanic Temple spokesperson noted to TIME that erecting the Baphomet statue is mean “to ensure that its view of the world is included.” Yet, if Satanism is about worshipping man’s self-gratifying ego then our culture is already primarily Satanic and they are merely putting an image to the concept.
Another very interesting point is as follows:
…a point made by John M. Kincaid, the Church of Satan’s minister of information in the mid-1970s: though it may take a variety of forms, interest in mystery and rebellion is timeless.
“The need to believe,” he wrote to TIME in 1974, “is as dominant a factor in this so-called enlightened age of ours as it has ever been”—which means those who are skeptical are present and accounted for too.
Well, as GK Chesterton had his fictional character Father Brown state:
The first effect of not believing in God is to believe in anything.
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