Thanks for the compliments, those who left them. I frankly know very little about Satanism. I can never get past the home page of their
official website. From what I gather, they DO believe in Satan, or a "Dark Force," and they like purple and pictures of themselves wearing robes and animal-head masks from some goofy British fertility ritual out of a bad 70s horror film (or of course from a
good seventies horror film). These are the guys, by the way, who keep
stores like this open.
They seem a load or pretentious poseurs who never got that punk was about rebellion, not conformity, or who took Goth too far and made a full-blown religion out of it.
That's official, anyway. Jordan is right that there are all sorts of libertarian groups out there that call themselves Satanists, and who distinguish themselves in many cases from Laveyans. While Laveyans seem to make no bones about opposing Christianity,
some folks focus on "being in touch with nature." I have a garden that I keep pretty nice, and I like to walk my dog through the University Endowment Lands, so I may just give those fellows a call.
Jordan's claim that Satanists don't actually believe that Satan exists, or is any sort of deity, is backed up by
common opinion, also seen
here. The official site seems to say otherwise, but again it's hard for me to get past the Hell's Angels imagery and
the hillarious picture of head-shaven Lavey holding what looks to be a knock-off of Bilbo's knife from the Hobbit !!! Incidentally, I'm really looking forward to Peter Jackson's
The Hobbit, if it ever happens.
I do like the pictures of large-breasted women wearing (if anything) cheap Goth-inspired PVC and smearing their cleavage with fake blood. I like the endorsement of things they like, redefined as Satanist, like The official church's reviews of George Carlin books. But even all that can't help me past the idea that these are folks who took role-playing games too far. I mean God bless 'em: they found a way to get laid; they gave me an excuse to try out hyperlinks in my posts; and they don't draw nearly as much water as the other religions do (noone has yet declared a holy war in the name of Satan, so they have that).
"I had a lot of different ideas. At one point, Luke, Leia and Ben were all going to be little people, and we did screen tests to see if we could do that." -George Lucas, in STAR WARS: the Annotated Screenplays (p197).