Why You Should Pay Attention to SatanCon 2023
SatanCon 2023 kicked off this week. It's a gathering of freaks and weirdos, and it features what everyone would assume: Satan. But it also features something else people might not expect...
SatanCon 2023 kicked off this week. It's a gathering of freaks and weirdos, and it features what everyone would assume: Satan. But it also features something else people might not expect: all the Democratic talking points.
I'm not saying there are Satanists around every corner, or that the Satanists are hiding under your bed. But it's certainly concerning when the philosophy of the Satanists has diffused throughout American culture.
Now, it is worth noting that the number of Satanists worldwide is increasing. That's indicative of something, at the very least. The Satanic Temple - the group behind SatanCon - apparently has about 700,000 registered members at this point. According to statistics published by the Pew Research Center, Satanists have reached a new membership milestone, ranking the Satanic Temple ahead of worldwide numbers of Rastafari, and just under Unitarian Universalism.
The Satanic Temple says that they don't actually believe in a spiritual Satan, the supernatural being in traditional Christian theology. But as you'll soon note, the crossover between the fundamental tenets of the Satanic Temple and the fundamental tenets of left wing liberalism, at this point, are almost indistinguishable.
Here are the names of some of the events at SatanCon 2023:
Deconstructing Your Religious Upbringing with Judas Marduk;
Atheistic Strategies for Self-Determining and Empowerment;
Reimagining Lilith as an Archetype for Reproductive Justice;
Sins of the Flesh: Satanism and Self-Pleasure from Dr. Erik Sprinkle;
and Reclaiming the Trans Body.
So let's just check off those boxes. Essentially, these sessions translate to: Why Religion Is Terrible; The Joy of Transgenderism; Hedonism and Masturbation; Abortion, The Happiest Sacrament; and The Fulfillment of Racial Intersectionality.
This actually makes a lot of sense. So much of today's politics and value system are built around opposition to traditional morality. In this sense, Satanism is no different from radical secularism writ large.
Further evidence of this lies in the seven fundamental tenets of the Satanic Temple.
First, they say we should strive to act with compassion and empathy toward all creatures in accordance with reason. Sounds great! But what they mean by this is that reason is going to replace religion; there is no objective morality. You are the master of ethics, guided merely by feelings of compassion.
This is the hallmark of post-Enlightenment thinking, and it is incredibly dangerous. When your only guideposts are compassion and reason, people tend to have compassion for themselves and their friends, and they tend to utilize their reason to justify their own cruel and bad behavior.
Another of the seven fundamental tenets is the struggle for justice, which Satanists call “an ongoing and necessary pursuit that should prevail over laws and institutions.” This is saying that all the traditions should be destroyed because we have undefined higher ideals of justice.
Another tenet: “One's body is inviolable, subject to one's own will alone.” This springs from the notion that we are all mere bodies and our subjective senses of pleasure.
Satanism, in this iteration, looks like secular humanism with some rather colorful and bizarre adherents.
This actually makes sense. Theologically speaking, most Westerners think of Satan as the opponent of God; modern secularism plays the same role. This is why SatanCon looks like the Democratic National Convention, with strange tattoos and cosplaying Lucifers. When you realize that secularism defines itself in opposition to traditional religious values, the commonality begins to make sense.
Secularism originally saw itself as the hard-headed, rationalistic, scientific opposite of supernatural based religion. This was always a lie, because traditional religion – which rests on the idea that there is a God who is the Creator of the universe, who designed natural systems in which we all live – actually allows for scientific progress because it means an understandable universe. Traditional religion teaches that the human mind is capable of grasping a predictable universe in which rules actually apply and that there is an imperative for you to know God and, therefore, to know the universe. Rejecting religion means these key tenets of civilizational development come unmoored.
The human brain requires religious belief. This means that secularism doesn't devolve into mere atheism; it often devolves into paganism, which is what we see at SatanCon. Modern secularism is now its own religion, complete with saints and devils, complete with religious iconography, complete with bizarre spectacle and supernatural interventions. Secularism has become its own religion. At least the Satanic Temple is saying what it is out loud.
Ben Shapiro
Editor Emeritus,
The Daily Wire