Navy gives blessing to sailor Satanist

Guardian Unlimited | The Guardian | The devil and the deep blue sea::
I'm surprised that none of my regular blogly haunts have produced any comment on this: it's been sitting on my Firefox tab for a few days now. I have been wondering what to say, but feeling that it should be noticed. A few years ago I seem to recall social workers and others denying that there was such a thing as Satanism. Now I remain agnostic about the alleged abuse cases at that time, but it is the fact that people denied the existence of Satanism that I'm remembering here.

As with anything that one tries to ruin their life by it needs more than negations in its philosophy; you can't really develop an apophatic philosophy [?] there have to be some things that you take to be 'good' that guide your desires and actions and that help you to decide what is 'good' and what is 'bad'. Unsurprisingly, Satanism turns out to be a kind of Nietzschean philosophy with ritual magic thrown in.

It's also interesting to note that it is impossible to simply take a mirror image of what -usually- Christianity says is good and call it bad. There are certain 'goods' in this world that have to be taken as foundational. Pleasure is generally 'better' than pain, to eat is good, to live is good the society of others is generally good. These kinds of things cannot be denied, only framed. To eat is good but not if it makes you unhealthy or deprives others [if you're a Christian] or eating might be to a Satanist something that is judged by whether it gives pleasure and how it affects ones short and long-term chances of survival. A Satanist doesn't really have the option of saying that eating is regarded as good by Chjristianity so it must be regarded as bad by Satanists -not unless s/he thinks that their own survival is not important.

The upshot of this is to recognise that actually 'goodness' is the foundation of existence. we cannot get away from a basic goodness of what is. It is not true that evil is an equal and opposite power to goodness. Evil is a perversion and a subversion of what is given and good. Evil is parasitic on good. Good is ultimate and not evil. All 'evil ' can do is to try to make things serve selfish or less-than ultimate ends.

As the guy from the Reachout Trust said inthe article:
"'Following such tenets and working them out practically in your life seems to produce a selfish person - not a member of a team. At they same time, they appear to have little regard for others and certainly would not want to see people forgiven for things they have done wrong.' "

My linking tothe Reachout Trust site does not imply that I support in every particular their approach or theology.