Satanic clubs, whose members do not worship the devil, usually formed in response to presence of religious groups in schools

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.

    • Zombiepirate@lemmy.worldEnglish
      161·
      11 months ago

      Take the garden of Eden story.

      Did God know that if he put the tree there then the people would eat from it?

      Did God have a choice to put that tree there?

      Could God have made a world where they did not eat that fruit?

      If he picked this possible world out of all possible worlds based on an outcome that he had in mind, then we’re just playing out the parts that he assigned for us.

    • greenskye@lemm.eeEnglish
      151·
      11 months ago

      God is supposedly all powerful and all knowing. God created the universe and everything in it. He did so with the full knowledge of everything that would happen in advance. He chose to do it anyway, despite knowing all the suffering it would cause. And then he chose to create a realm of eternal suffering (either by literal fire and brimstone, or by ‘absence of God’, it doesn’t really matter) for those fleetingly finite-lived humans that he created knowing they would screw up. Less than a hundred years of life in exchange for billions of years of torment. And he created them in a way that is fully capable of realizing how horrible a way to treat someone this is. It’s nothing but cruelty of an unimaginable scale. Part of the reason I don’t believe the Christian God exists is because I can’t accept something that evil. It’s too horrifying.

      • jandar_fett@lemmy.world
        5·
        11 months ago

        Most people that believe or even don’t believe don’t usually follow it to its logical conclusion like that, but I concur. The opening lines of Richard Dawkin’s God Delusion says something similarly.

    • Nelots@lemm.eeEnglish
      11·
      11 months ago

      True, if somebody comes from the future and knows what you’re going to eat tomorrow morning, that doesn’t make it suddenly not your choice. But to add to the other comment, an important point is that he made us all as well. Because if a god creates you according to his grand plan—knowing full well every single decision you will ever make—it is no longer a choice. Every one of your decisions were predetermined from the start.

      Something I like to think about is that it is impossible to go against the Christian god’s plan. If such a thing were possible, then this god would not be omnipotent nor omniscient. As such, everybody that has ever gone to hell did so because god designed them to.

    • dewritoninja@pawb.social
      4·
      11 months ago

      How is that a choice. If they know exactly what’s going to happen I don’t have the power to do anything except for what is going to happen. If you only have an apple at home, you can’t get any other kind of food and your gonna die if you don’t eat the apple, did you really choose to eat the apple?

    • TigrisMorte@kbin.social
      1·
      11 months ago

      My knowing what you shall do in no way invalidates your free will. That is invalidated by the futility of your choices. Totally man made and not to be confused with determinism.