Last week I contacted Doug Mesner in hopes that The Satanic Temple will come up with a plan to distribute their lovely coloring books here in Oklahoma, for the sake of trolling the Attorney General and all the school districts partial to the idea of distributing religious literature to public schoolchildren.
To my great surprise (and mild chagrin) a totally different Satanic church stepped up first. This is personally embarrassing for me, because I know Adam Daniels and should have thought to ask if they had literature to distribute.
In the reporting and commentary about these sort of events, people often tend to get the different players confused with each other and with the infamous Church of Satan founded by Anton Lavey. It’s sort of a mess, really, so I decided to put together a very brief guide which I can point to in the future.
The Church of Satan is sort of like a regular church in that they have a holy book, a venerated founder, and a tendency to promote themselves as the one true expression of Satanism; however, they are fundamentally atheistic and believe primarily in the virtue of selfishness. Basically it is “Ayn Rand with trappings” and way more black leather. I interviewed a card-carrying Laveyan Satanist from my local military base, way back in the day before our podcast acquired a taste for decent microphones: [audio].
The Satanic Temple does not have a holy book, but they do have an awesome coloring book. Like the Church of Satan they are nontheistic, but unlike the CoS, the TST holds to broadly humanistic principles and actively campaigns to make the world a better place. Typically they do this by leveraging Satanic literary symbols and demanding equal access whenever Christians strive for special treatment, as they are wont to do so often here in Oklahoma. We interviewed one of their activists in the most recent episode of the Oklahoma Atheists Godcast. We haven’t done an interview with Doug Mesner yet, but I swear by the horns of Baphomet that we are working on it. Meanwhile, there are plenty of other interviews to go around.
The Dakhma of Angra Mainyu is rather unlike the other two in that it more closely resembles pagan theistic religions, with magically effective rituals and supernatural beings and all that. This mysterious community of faith is based right here in the Oklahoma City, and they are the ones responsible for the recent Black Mass which my friends Caleb and Brian attended. I had the chance to speak with their founder awhile back, and it was a strange trip. (It’s not everyday you set up your recording equipment on a dark altar, taking care not to bump the ritual blade or knock over the frightful figurines.)
As a strict separationist, I will gladly take help wherever we can get it. If all three of these groups want to send a message to our wayward Attorney General, that would be just fine with me. Hell, if the Mormons and Taoists want in on the action, that would be great, too. The more the merrier. We will do whatever it takes to get us back to the point where no one religious system is privileged over any other by the government, just as the Oklahoma Constitution demands.
