Year of Faith

I am working on the Introduction to Buddhism, but I am tired, and must rise early to meditate in the morning. Rest assured, there will be an overview of beliefs and practices posted by May 2 at the latest.

May 1 or May 2 (depending which calendar you reference) is a full moon, which in the Theraveda tradition would be a holy day. However, not only is it too early in the month for me to feel comfortable joining in temple ceremonies, I haven’t decided which variation of Buddhism I am following.

At the very least, I expect to follow the Five Precepts, summarized thusly:

1. No intentional destruction of life
2. No stealing
3. No sexual misconduct
4. No lying
5. No intoxication

For further reading while I am getting my act together, I suggest UrbanDharma.org.

I have a confession to make: I utterly failed at Satanism.

In addition to not posting at all this month, I managed get through April without even reading the Satanic Bible. I blame Satanism for being such an uninvolved faith—with no rituals or practices to hold to, it’s very easy to go days without even thinking about religion. I may not have succeeded in daily meditation or prayer, but the guilt over missing days at least made me think about religious matters.

(I am, of course, merely inferring the lack of ritual, since I haven’t read the book.  I’m sure Michael or Andrew would have told me.)
My token efforts  this month involved eating too much junk food and being lazy because hey, that’s what I felt like doing.  Other than rationalizing away that can of Coke as a religious duty, I let faith out of my life entirely.

I’m disappointed in myself, but also intrigued how I can’t seem to get past my prejudice toward certain “faiths”.  Michael makes a good case for Satanism as a religion, but going in I didn’t take it seriously and as a result didn’t put any effort into it.  My distaste for the name, the narcissistic theme, and the juvenile melodrama of the Satanic Bible never wavered.  This does not bode well for Scientology.

You may note that the header image went straight from Baha’i to Buddhism, as the lack of enthusiasm extended to this blog.  Sorry about that.  Buddhism looks fit to inspire a lot more activity.

One of the best things about Satanism is the real lack of religious day-to-day ritual, prayer, meditation and what not. Every day I can wake up and go about my life and not have to worry about fasting, any daily prayers, or making time for half an hour of meditation. I don’t have to attend a church, listen to a sermon, or go door-to-door saving people’s souls.

Sure, I have the option of doing rituals. If I get annoyed or frustrated I can perform a destruction ritual to let go of those excessive and unwanted feelings. In a way, it is almost therapeutic, but it is never required. It is never pushed on me as something I must do every week, or every day. I can participate in religious ritual if I so choose, and if I think it is going to help me.

However, this open-endedness of Satanism has made me rather…lazy. I can appreciate why many religions require their adherents to pray or meditate once a day- this keeps the religion alive in people’s minds. Going through the motions of a prayer allows your mind to focus on your religion, to reflect on it and its significance in your life. With Satanism, it is up to me to reflect and meditate on the religion, and admittedly I am not the best at self-motivation.

Although it will be a nice break from the other religions this year, I think it is an overall drawback for Satanism not to have this component. Without these requirements, we are left with people who will know little about their religion. I do not think people would be able to fully understand the whole idea of Satanism if they are left, like I am, to my own devices. Only if they are really passionate about the religion would people fully participate in it, unlike the other religions we have practiced which require a certain amount of daily action. If people don’t feel like they need to set aside time to consider their religion, they may end up blindly following the voices of religious authority, or the actions of their congregation, or accepting principles and rules that conflict with genuine common sense. I think that it is probably a mistake to put that much faith in people.

But to be fair, I think it would be good to remember that in all of the religions I have practiced so far this year, the point has not been to follow the rules precisely, to make sure you do all the proper prayers and rituals. The real point is to have the right attitude, to be a good person no matter what the reasoning behind it.

Many people seem to think that Satanism is not a true religion. People have objected similarly to my choice of Discordianism, and Scientology in the year of faith- always claiming that they are more philosophies, or systems of belief, or blood-sucking cults, rather than real religions. In this post I want to defend the Church of Satan as a true religion, claiming that it has all the necessary components of a religion, and even shedding a few that aren’t so necessary anymore.

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Satan stands in opposition to all those fake social norms, like being productive and writing posts.

Once again, I am successful in being massively behind the times. April begins our month spent studying and practicing Satanism.
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While reading A Short Introduction to the Baha’i Faith, I came across a passage that seemed to perfectly summarize the philosophy of Satanism:

Thus human beings can either be turned towards the material world and have their hearts set on the appeasement of their animal nature–the state of being in sin as it is called in Christian terminology–or they can turn their hearts towards God and try to develop their spiritual nature. According to the Bahá’í scriptures, Satan or the Devil is a symbol for the animal side of human nature. It is this animal side that constantly tempts us and keeps us from fulfilling our spiritual potential.

Satanism rejects this dichotomy between the spiritual and the material. All we are, and all that exists, are our desires and animal nature. We have no spiritual potential, only potential has human beings, and we block off part of that potential by wasting time on backwards spiritual hogwash and lost prophets.

Satan is a symbol for the animal side of human nature, because that is what hundreds of years of religion has labeled our natural desires and impulses. We are told that our spiritual well being is more important than that of our carnal impulses, and that we should hedge this part of our beings for a better fulfillment of the self. For as long as there has been religion, man has been denying these needs and the fulfillment of his or her ego.

This is similar to the Discordian approach to life- that somehow, somewhere, we got it into our heads that it was more important to be orderly and predictable than unconstrained. In this religion though, it was not a stuck up Grey Face that got us in this mess, but prudish geezers who promised salvation or enlightenment if we just followed their rules. Any desire or impulse that may take you away from their control, or from emptying your pockets into their coffers, were denied and vilified. Therefore Satan was, and is, the adversary of religious doctrine and dogma, that which you are taught to ignore and surpass for the good of your soul.

Satanism stands as a rejection of “spiritual pipe-dreams” and old biases, a denial of external controls and authority. The Satanist is a man or woman that stands alone, with no need for anyone to tell them who they are or what they need to do. This is a religion that is not afraid to tell you to go out and explore your sexuality, to find all those things that tempt you and partake in them fully. This is the Church that says, “Do not spend your time in preparation for the hereafter, or to dutifully serve a deity that may as well be a reflection of yourself for all of it’s fallibility and human characteristics.”

We are but shadows and dust, no matter what the man on the pulpit tells you. This does not mean that therefore anything goes, but perhaps something more frightening- that you are the author of your own life. You are the force and the will that shape your life and your ultimate fate, and you are the one that should be served in order to make you feel complete and happy.

Thus, Satanists are Gods. We are all our own pieces of ritual and our own focus of worship. We deny any other God, Heaven, Hell, and all the rest- the complete blasphemer’s set. By embracing all that which is denied to other religions, we earn their title of contempt.

And that is why we are Satanists.

Weight: 270 lbs.

Overall my month of Baha’i went pretty well. I managed to learn a lot about the religion, and even managed to interact with the community in more ways than one (there have been eighty comments made on my post to the ljbahai website so far).

The fasting was difficult. There were a few points where I almost didn’t make it, and even a few times when I just forgot that it was happening (small transgressions, honestly). It didn’t have the religious or spiritual connotations that were meant to accompany such an event, but it did help me gain a kind of empathy. I lacked that seemingly essential connection to God to make it a Divine, rather than a human experience. Regardless, I think it will change me for the better.

The Baha’i faith itself was very interesting, and in my opinion was one of the more progressive of the faiths that we shall be experiencing. What struck me most was the evolutionary, progressive stance it had on religion and revelation, as well as the strong connections it had to some of my favorite philosophical models.

At many points I read of God being equated to the sun, that although it may appear on different days and at different times, it is always the sun that we are observing. The resemblance here to Plato and his allegory of the cave is striking. Plato thought that the ideas of common human beings were like shadows on a cave wall- far detached from true existence outside of the cave. The ultimate truth, that of the idealistic, immaterial realm of the Forms, was represented by the sun. Here are the fully realized ideas and characteristics we see in every day life, the paradigms of justice and all the virtues.

Specifically the sun was the Form of the Good- that which is connected to all the other Forms and therefore all the other ideas. This is how we can come to define the virtues as any action that produces a good outcome, Plato’s solution to his predecessor Socrates and his endless questions. An action or idea is virtuous in so far that it matches our conceptions of what is good, that it reflects the says of the sun.

I concluded early on in my reflections that I could not conceive of God as anything physical or in any way anthropomorphic. Certainly not as some kind of divine creator or personal being that loves me. I have however come to conceive of God as indeed something to be worked towards, something worth studying and acknowledging. Please understand that my conception of God is wholly philosophical, it was the only way I could work toward the idea, and the word really doesn’t have a lot of the baggage that I would expect when hearing someone else say it. But after this, perhaps that may change.

God, simply put, is the fulfillment of the best of our ideas. In a way, God is the Truth. God is not something that has been fully realized yet, nor perhaps will it ever be. We have these concepts of what is good, of justice and fairness, of virtues and freedom, and of liberty and equal rights. We set ourselves these immense tasks of trying to fulfill these ideas that we have laid out in front of us, and we keep falling short. We know what it is like to be loving and just and fair, but we can’t point to any idea or method that fully encapsulates what we mean. We never see these ideals fully realized, but we get it right sometimes.

In philosophy a lot of stress is put on the difference between our ideas and the real world, and if we can ever know if the two truly match up. Some philosophers start to even suggest that our concepts of truth are all nonsense, that we can never have that genuine representation of the real world in our ideas, and so the only thing we can mean by truth is how useful the idea is. But some philosophers, like Putnam, argue that although some of our truths are largely contingent or subjective, every once in a while we get it right. Every now and again the ideas we hypothesize and argue for actually match up with how the objective world works, with the real and natural order of things.

This realm of what is natural and objective is what I would consider the realm of God. It is that source that we are trying to get right, towards which all thought and philosophy and discovery is bent on. God then, as I said, is the Truth.

But as I said earlier, we aren’t anywhere close to this yet. We cannot say dogmatically that we have found the right answers. As Baha’u'llah taught us, the truth does not come from one source, but from many, through all times and cultures. God, then, is a dynamic thing, not something which shall remain the same through out time. Just as we think we have everything figured out, someone comes along and points out where we went wrong. As the times change, so do our routes to God. So we can say that we are getting closer to fulfilling our ideas, but we should never put our foot down and say that that is the end of discovery, that at this point and no further will our knowledge take us.

God is also the Good. It is that best way to be, the ethics and morality that will allow us all to realize our own lives and best know the Truth. It is the same thing across cultures and ideologies, amongst all philosophies and religions. God is that final realization, that full and complete state where we can all agree on what the heck is going on. God is that state when we finally get it right. Eden, in a way.

These thoughts will become more elaborate as time goes on, but the Baha’i faith was a major instrumental part in my understanding. It was an interesting month, and will offer a stark contrast to Satanism.

Allah’u'Abha.

I haven’t had the time to update with my final thoughts on the Baha’i Faith, school is once again rearing its delightful head. I assure you it will be long and thoughtful. I hope to conclude with my thoughts on God as well as important bits of philosophy that I took away from the experience, and comment a little on the persecution of the Baha’i Faith.

But for now I have a few links to get things going. The first is an old internet radio show called the Sean Kennedy Show that used to air on RantRadio every Monday night. In one of the first episodes Sean interviews a member of the Church of Satan, the result is I think illuminating and entertaining…but it has been a while since I listened to it.

The Sean Kennedy Show, Episode 9- March 11, 2002 Warning: Totally not work safe.
And this link will point you to the Church of Satan’s official website. Get informed!

Hail Satan!