Community members in a Tennessee school district want to banish Satan from their children’s halls after the formation of a new club was announced.

The After School Satan Club (ASSC) wants to establish a branch in Chimneyrock elementary school in the Memphis-Shelby county schools (MSCS) district.

The ASSC is a federally recognized nonprofit organization and national after-school program with local chapters across the US. The club is associated with the Satanic Temple, though it claims it is secular and “promotes self-directed education by supporting the intellectual and creative interests of students”.

The Satanic Temple makes it clear its members do not actually worship the devil or believe in the existence of Satan or the supernatural. Instead Satan is used as a symbol of free will, humanism and anti-authoritarianism.

  • nicetriangle@kbin.social
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    7 months ago

    The outrage these assholes are feeling is what the rest of us feel every time we see them trying to force their dogma into every facet of society.

      • Welt@lazysoci.al
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        7 months ago

        Way to miss the point and misunderstand it in terms of polarized politics. There is no “ours” and “theirs”.

        • grue@lemmy.world
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          7 months ago

          Not everything is a debate with multiple valid points of view. The notion that your right to a belief somehow encompasses a right to inflict that belief on everybody else isn’t an ideological position; it’s a declaration of violence.

          Fuck dishonest moral relativism. 2+2=4 and one person’s religious freedom ends where another person’s begins. Those are facts, not opinions, and if you disagree you’re just wrong.

    • Ultraviolet@lemmy.world
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      7 months ago

      It’s a bit frustrating that it doesn’t make any of them actually reflect on their hypocrisy though. They just double down on the hypocrisy with no questions asked.

      • Facebones@reddthat.com
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        7 months ago

        I’ve been saying it for years, through even the most liberal of us attacking me for it -

        It’s because this is and always has been the point and the end goal.

    • Mango@lemmy.world
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      7 months ago

      You can’t use your technicalities to push your way around and do what you want! That’s our whole thing, man!

        • uranibaba@lemmy.world
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          7 months ago

          From the full article (had to click the link):

          Jenny Kincaid, a grandparent of a student at Chimneyrock, told the local Memphis news station Action News 5: “I’m about to come unglued right now. I cannot believe … this is a kindergarten-through-fifth-grade school and they’re letting a satanic club come in here?”

          The MSCS interim superintendent, Toni Williams, reportedly said there were no plans to prevent the club from operating in the district.

          “I do not support the beliefs of this organization at the center of recent headlines,” Williams said. “I do, however, support the law.”

  • OldWoodFrame@lemm.ee
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    7 months ago

    The uproar is the point.

    The Satanic Temple makes it clear its members do not actually worship the devil or believe in the existence of Satan or the supernatural.

    But somehow conservative Christians believe that there are huge swaths of people who agree that their religion is 100% correct but worship the weak bad guy character.

    (Which is not to mention that there are actually multiple bad guys who got combined, Satan and Lucifer and The Snake were originally different people)

    • flipht@kbin.social
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      7 months ago

      This is a long standing joke - what do you call someone who believes in Satan?

      A Christian.

    • TigrisMorte@kbin.social
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      7 months ago

      God is omniscient and thus knew exactly what Lucifer would do. Angels don’t have free will. Lucifer did exactly what God intended. God wanted Man to have free will. Free will requires the choice between good and evil. Man is the “bad guy” as well as the “good guy”.

      • dewritoninja@pawb.social
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        7 months ago

        If god is omniscient they would know exactly what everyone is going to choose, nullifying free will entirely

        • Cosmic Cleric@lemmy.world
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          7 months ago

          If god is omniscient they would know exactly what everyone is going to choose, nullifying free will entirely

          Yeah but if God knows every choice that’ll be made ahead of time, it doesn’t mean he’s taking the choice away from the person actually making the choice, they still go through the motion of making the actual choice, and hence, they have free will to make the choice. God just predicted it ahead of time.

          • BorgDrone@lemmy.one
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            7 months ago

            Yeah but if God knows every choice that’ll be made ahead of time, it doesn’t mean he’s taking the choice away from the person actually making the choice

            That argument would only make sense if god wasn’t the supposed creator of the universe and everything in it. If god created everything, is omnipotent and omniscient then at the moment of creation she would have known every single event and circumstance in that person’s life leading up to making a certain choice and she would have been able to create the universe differently so that a different choice would have been made.

            If you set up all the dominoes, you cannot claim the 100,00th domino falling over wasn’t your doing because you only tipped over the first one.

            • Cosmic Cleric@lemmy.world
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              7 months ago

              That argument would only make sense if god wasn’t the supposed creator of the universe and everything in it. If god created everything, is omnipotent and omniscient then at the moment of creation she would have known every single event and circumstance in that person’s life leading up to making a certain choice and she would have been able to create the universe differently so that a different choice would have been made.

              This actually makes my point though.

              God knowing everything doesn’t mean that God made you make that choice, God let you make that choice, but knew what that choice would be ahead of time.

              You still had free will, you still were the one that had the neurons fire off in your brain, and you made the choice. God was able to predict that choice ahead of time with 100% accuracy.

              On a side note, I love that you use ‘she’ for God.

              • BorgDrone@lemmy.one
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                7 months ago

                God knowing everything doesn’t mean that God made you make that choice, God let you make that choice, but knew what that choice would be ahead of time.

                If she intentionally chose those circumstances to happen so that the choice would be made that way, which she would have to have done being omniscient and omnipotent then that choice being made is 100% her responsibility.

                If I put a child alone in a room with a powered on electric band saw, is it the child’s fault for getting their arm sawed off ? They had free will and could have chosen to not go near the saw. Or is it my fault for putting a child in that situation?

                • Cosmic Cleric@lemmy.world
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                  7 months ago

                  If she intentionally chose those circumstances

                  Why are you assuming she chose them, versus just letting them happen via free will, mapping them out ahead of time, precog style?

                  If I put a child alone in a room with a powered on electric band saw, is it the child’s fault for getting their arm sawed off ? They had free will and could have chosen to not go near the saw. Or is it my fault for putting a child in that situation?

                  The childs.

        • lolcatnip@reddthat.com
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          7 months ago

          This is a great example of why I don’t believe free will is a coherent concept outside of religion. It’s basically a perk that negates God’s omniscience as it applies to you, but if you don’t believe in God, it’s meaningless.

        • TigrisMorte@kbin.social
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          7 months ago

          Ah, but that is the point, until Man chose it hadn’t happened, it is the precognition paradox. Until the event occurs, what is known is all the possibilities.

          • Girru00@lemmy.world
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            7 months ago

            That’s… just like your opinion man.

            Then god isnt omnipotent, cause you know, it lacks the power of whats actually to come and is only good at knowing all the hypotheticals. Or may be lacks omnicience, but one could argue that knowing all the possibilities counts.

            All that matters is that its lacking something, when it shouldnt

        • Pips@lemmy.sdf.org
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          7 months ago

          If there exists a being that experiences time the same way we experience space, do we have any less free will just because the being can continue knowing about it before it happened? The person is making the choice, not the being that knows about the choice.

        • jandar_fett@lemmy.world
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          7 months ago

          The funny thing about the free will argument is that theoretically if you could build a galaxy powered “super” computer, you could potentially track every single movement of every single particle in the entirety of the universe, so that level or scientific inquiry nullifies free will.

          • Mango@lemmy.world
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            7 months ago

            That’s where it gets interesting though! A set of all numbers cannot contain itself! It’s out of control! Call the alphabots!

    • jandar_fett@lemmy.world
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      7 months ago

      Got sources for this? Not that I don’t believe you I’m just interested in reading up on exactly what you’re referring to.

      • frezik@midwest.social
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        7 months ago

        Short of it is that the concept of Satan didn’t exist at the time Genesis was written.

        https://www.biblicalarchaeology.org/daily/biblical-topics/bible-interpretation/how-the-serpent-in-the-garden-became-satan/

        From a more literary perspective, there’s nothing that directly connects the serpent in the Garden of Eden, the interlocutor in Job, and the later mentions of Satan in the Hebrew and Greek scriptures (and there’s not a lot of direct mentions in the Hebrew scriptures). You can kinda make it work if you read between the lines, but fundamentalists will be the first to say you’re not supposed to read between the lines of the bible. To them, you take the word as it is written and nothing else.

        Naturally, this rigid reading of the bible doesn’t work out so well for their beliefs.

        To take the Answers in Genesis article on the subject (just because they’re a prominent fundamentalist organization), their reasoning is that the bible shows that Satan can enter into a physical being and control them. Notice that they leave out any reasoning showing that Satan did so in that particular case. He could have, and therefore, he did.

        • mrcleanup@lemmy.world
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          7 months ago

          So if Satan wanted to, for example, make it so everyone would fail to meet the entry requirements for heaven laid out in the old testament, and end up on hell… could he, theoretically of course, pretend to be the son of God and “change the rules” so that sin is totally ok as long as you say sorry before you die?

          Asking for a friend.

  • kromem@lemmy.world
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    7 months ago

    The number of adults in the US that think Satan is a literal being is way too fucking high.

    It started as an editor using ‘adversary’ in the place of what was probably the goddess Anat appealing the head of the pantheon to kill the son of the protagonist like in the earlier Canaanite A Tale of Aqhat as an intro into what was an adaptation of the also earlier Babylonian Theodicy in Job.

    But we couldn’t have a polytheistic holdover, so suddenly there was a supernatural ‘adversary’ (‘Satan’) in a story.

    Which in turn spawned fanfiction during the prophet ages where they referred to the supernatural adversary of Job.

    Then Hellenistic ideas around Hades (both the place and figure) get added into the mix, and we get the Enochian literature about fallen angels, where the guided katabasis influenced Virgil which later informs Dante’s Inferno.

    Then King James messes up translating Isaiah and the Latin for the morning star (Lucifer) gets mistaken for a proper name, further tying the supernatural adversary to being one of the Enochian fallen angels. And we get Milton’s Paradise Lost.

    It’s all just mistranslations and fanfiction.

    And yet millions of people believe it’s actually a thing so much so that they freak out at the idea of any references to it as literally being dangerous.

    In 2022.

    An age filled with things beyond the wildest imagination of those in antiquity dreaming up miracles and wonders.

    We’re so beyond fucked as a species.

  • Pratai@lemmy.ca
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    7 months ago

    It would be sad how badly these idiots fail to see the irony when it’s spelled out for them if it wasn’t so funny.

  • El_guapazo@lemmy.world
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    7 months ago

    Conservatives always want to have a free “marketplace of ideas” until it’s something they fear.

  • rayyy@lemmy.world
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    7 months ago

    Of course Tennessee Christians are outraged. The after School Satan Club is most likely way more Christian than they are so there’s stiff competition.

  • Gazumi@lemmy.world
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    7 months ago

    Actively missing the point… “In a meeting with more than 40 pastors and other religious leaders, the district board chair, Althea E Greene, said: “Satan has no room in this district.””