There was a time that I used to work in the one of the Southern states, known by Americans as an active part of the 'Bible Belt'. In the organization that I worked, I met quite a few individuals of many different backgrounds. However most of the American citizens there were either of actively religious background or they were active at one time in their life.
One of these people that I met, let's call him Ken, was one of the latter type. Once Ken and I had a religious discussion and here is what transpired:
Ken: What do you think of Satan worshippers?
Anonym: I always thought that name was attributed to insane individuals.
Ken: No, not so. That has now become an accepted idea by a large number of people.
Anonym: How so? What's so good about liking Satan?
Ken: Well, it's not really that some people like Satan for what he is, but more that they think that God is 'evil'! So the enemy of God, Satan, must be good!
Anonym: I see. So what do base your idea on?
Ken: If you know, God orders Abraham to cut off his son's head as a token of sacrifice to God. How evil can that be?
Anonym: So I take it that you accept what is indicated in the Bible?
Ken: Well, yeah. How could God ask Abraham to do such a monsterous thing to prove his loyalty to God?
Anonym: You do know that according to Bible before Abraham do the sacrifice, God asked him to stop? (Some believe that the blade of the knife dulled by the will of God so that Abraham was left without any means to do the sacrifice)
Ken: Yes but imagine what went through Abraham's mind, the suffering he had!
Anonym: Do you believe in Christ and that the Bible is divine?
Ken: Yeah.
Anonym: Since you accept the story of Abraham, do you also accept the concept of Afterlife?
Ken: (Shrugged his shoulder as sign of doubt)
Anonym: Why do accept what is written about Abraham and not what is written about Afterlife?
Ken: (Shrugged again)
Anonym: According to the Bible (Qur'an too), God will test all people for devotion. The greater those people are, in case of Prophet Abraham, the greater and most severe is the test. There were two possibilities, one, Abraham would say, "no, I love my son and I will not kill him", hence fail the test and become a regular person again. Or go ahead to perform the sacrifice and be stopped by God, as it happened. So therefore Abraham proved that he accepted everything that God had revealed to him as the truth and to prove it he would sacrifice the most valued thing in his life, his own son. Because of that, God rewarded him the prophethood and the eternal glory that he would receive in the life to come and allowed him to keep his son too. Is that evil?
At this point Ken really had not much else to say and the break was over so we both went back to work.
The life of this world is like a curtain in front of our eyes and most human beings accept only what their senses, or the machines they invented, detect. There are true believers who believe in God out of sensibility and faith and yet there are also a few people (non-prophets) who know things that most people do not. But that is the subject of another blog.
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Satanism
by Zulfiqar110 on Thu Sep 10, 2009 02:24 AM PDTThe estranged daughter of a prominent California Satanist, namely the daughter of Anton LeVay, the founder of the Church of Satan and author of the Satanic Bible, has written a book both analyzing and ripping apart the contemporary Satanist underground and sub-culture. She is currently, with her husband, an initiate of an authentic Kashmiri Tantric lineage, and her intellectual calling is to basically show how the Western occult Satanic sub-culture is a corrupted misappropriation of the Left-Hand Path esotericism (or Tantra/Vama-Marga) of India - which in Iran and much of the Islamic world has its corrolary as Malami or qalandari Sufism.
Now most contemporary Satanists fall into two basics groups: 1) pop culture satanists, which includes predominantly the high-school youth counter-culture, who is generally trying to revolt against their parent's religion; and 2) occult Satanists who are genuinely interested in the left-hand path as a spiritual calling. One prominent occult Satanist is the performer Marilyn Manson.
Occult Satanism is a long and tortuous discussion, but basically the long and short of it is that in the West it is part of the pagan revival movement (beginning with the Golden Dawn and Aleister Crowley's Thelema) attempting to masquerade itself under the mask of the archnemeses figure in the later Abrahamic tradition (note there is no devil in Judaism until after the Babylonian captivity). Zeena Schreck, the aforementioned estranged daughter of Anton LeVay, basically details the intellectual and sub-cultural problems with the overal occult Satanist approach to the bigger questions. Most of these people, other than a few, have not really thought through the philosophical ramifications of their beliefs. When they do, like Zeena and similar, they go find the authentic Traditions to which the Left-Hand Path is part of a rigorous, gruelling and ultimately transformative initiatic life.
The subject of the Devil has been around on Iranian.Com quite a bit lately. My position on the satan-narrative is identical to that of the Sufis Hallaj and Ahmad Ghazzali, not to mention the Kabbalists, who all recognized that in the final scheme of things the Devil is no more than a facet of the Godhead Itself, i.e. that God and the Devil are the Same. I'll close with a famous statement made by the Sufi master Ahmad Ghazzali to one of his disciples about the Devil,
"Whomsoever does not learn Unitarianism (tawhid) at the feet of Satan, is an infidel!"