Imagine yourself for a moment in a painfully far-too-common scenario. A loved one, suffering from a growing sense of insecurity and deepening depression, begins seeking a destructive and delusive sense of purpose in wildly improbable conspiracy theories. Day by day, this person that you once felt a strong common rapport with drifts further and further […]
Lucien Greaves
Lucien Greaves is the most prominent contemporary Satanist in the world and front person for the band Satanic Planet. As spokesperson for The Satanic Temple, Greaves has gained international attention as an advocate for religious liberty and the voice of the Satanic Reformation. He has delivered lectures at universities nationwide and at conferences for American Atheists, American Humanist Association, Secular Student Alliance, and many others. Greaves has been featured in national media outlets including MSNBC, NPR, CNN, Newsweek, Fox News, Vice, Salon, Rolling Stone, and many more. Greaves famously made three appearances on Tucker Carlson’s Fox News program where the ensuing debates were overwhelmingly adjudged in Greaves’s favor.
Posted inFree Expression, Law, Religion
Pseudolaw, Satanism, and the theocratic coup
Satanism is a maligned and marginalized minority religious identity. Though this fact seems indisputable, many bristle at the characterization just the same. Beyond those who hold to a superstition-driven certainty that Satanism channels negative magical forces that “real” religions are designed to oppose, there are those who, for a variety of reasons, dismiss out-of-hand the […]
Posted inLaw, Nonreligious News, Op-Ed, Religious News, Video
Lucien Greaves: Boston’s pray-for-pay scheme is discrimination against religious minorities through codified corruption
Last Thursday, I witnessed a deposition conducted by a lawyer for The Satanic Temple in which sworn testimony from a representative for the City of Boston was taken. The Satanic Temple filed suit against Boston following unsuccessful attempts to gain an invitation to deliver a pre-city-council-meeting invocation, typically opened with a Christian prayer. The deposition […]
Posted inDeep Dive, Free Expression, Religion, The Secular
Salman Rushdie and America’s free speech ambivalence
The freedoms of others should be respected, including the freedom to offend. To willfully and unjustly encroach upon the freedoms of another is to forgo one’s own. Fourth Tenet of The Satanic Temple Less than a week after literary giant Salman Rushdie was attacked and repeatedly stabbed on stage in upstate New York, sales of […]
Posted inLaw, Religious News
The Satanic Temple: The Law is on our side. The courts are not
About five years ago, a lawyer for The Satanic Temple attended a Continuing Legal Education (CLE) seminar hosted by the “Alliance Defending Freedom” (ADF), only to unexpectedly find that the event’s primary topic of discussion happened to be The Satanic Temple. The ADF is a theocratic Christian Nationalist litigation group that fights to bring expressions […]
Posted inLaw, Religion, The Secular
Lies the Supreme Court tells about religious liberty
Since its adoption as the national motto in 1956, the inclusion of the phrase “In God We Trust” on the American national currency has faced legal challenges, leading to unlikely judicial claims about the phrase’s secular intent and meaning. In response to a lawsuit against the government in 1970, the Ninth Circuit ruled that “It […]
Posted inLaw, Politics, Religion
PA Senator argues against After School Satan Clubs
This past April 19th, the Northern Elementary School Board in York, Pennsylvania held a vote which threatened constitutionally guaranteed rights of free expression and religious liberty of the Satanist community. The school board voted to deny students the opportunity to join the After School Satan Club. The board did not frame their vote in Constitutional […]
Posted inLaw, Religious News
How a Pennsylvania school board turned a proposal for an ‘After School Satan Club’ into a witch hunt
The school board meeting that took place in York County, Pennsylvania this past Tuesday, April 19th, had the feel of a puritan village witch trial. National media coverage reported on the school board’s ultimate 8 to 1 vote against allowing the formation of one of The Satanic Temple’s “After School Satan Clubs” in their district, […]
Posted inPolitics
Stop the Christian nationalist coup: Make politicians pay for their Crusades
When state Senator Stanley “Jason” Rapert of Arkansas sponsored a Senate bill that called for the placement of a Ten Commandments monument on the Capitol grounds in Little Rock, he made it clear that no taxpayer funds would go toward the construction of the monument, for which he had established a crowd-funding campaign to meet […]