Satanism

Satanism: religion involving either the worship of Satan or the Prince of Darkness under other name(s), or the directing of one's life based on inspirations gained from study of Satan or the Prince of Darkness.

There appear to be four general classifications of Satanists in modern society:

• Rebellious Christians, who view Satanism as the opposite of Christianity, who find themselves missing something within Christianity, and who seek that something in what they think is Satanism.
• Rebellious Adolescents, who rebel against modern society for a variety of reasons, who also adopt the Christian ideas concerning Satanism, and who cloak their social rebellion in the mystique of Satanism.
• Philosophical Satanists, who do not believe in the existence of any Satan or demon or devil, but instead who find inspiration in the study of various "dark" gods and spirits and myths.
• Religious Satanists, who do believe in some Prince of Darkness (a more generic name than Satan), and who worship or otherwise work to fashion their lives based on their ideas concerning the Prince of Darkness.

Most who study Satanism in modern society disregard the first two groups above as relatively unimportant, and focus their study on the latter two.

The largest or most visible organized group of Philosophical Satanists appears to be the [Church of Satan]?, founded by [Anton Szandor LaVey]?. Following LaVey's death, the group has gone through some turmoil and reorganization. Note that while members of the Curch of Satan would consider themselves philosophical, and many of them are atheists, many outsiders (i.e. religion researchers) classify them as religious satanists (even though many of them are aware that members of the Church don't believe in a literal Satan or any other deity. The practice of magick classifies them as religious, at least according to some definitions of religion.

The largest or most visible organized group of Religious Satanists appears to be the Temple of Set, organized by [Michael Aquino]? from members of the Church of Satan who left that Church in 1975. The Temple of Set claims to believe in the existence of Set, the ancient Egyptian god, as the primal Prince of Darkness.

In various Gnostic sects, Satan was praised as the giver of knowledge, sometimes with references to his name of Lucifer or "the light-bringer". Some claimed that the being imagined as God by Christians and Jews was in fact Satan, as a world as imperfect as ours could not have been created by a perfect God.

See also Process Church, Yezidis for groups that have been called Satanism but are questionably so.

/Talk