obviously this thread is for those of you who believe in satan.
heh i thought i was going to get kicked out of the house when i told my parents (southern baptist sunday school teachers) that i disagreed with the bible when it comes to satan.
you see i have come to believe that angels were made with no personal choice and made to serve obediently. in order for satan to be a "fallen" angel, by rising against and questioning god, god would have had a flaw in the creation of satan. well christians (and im sure most other religions) believe that god is perfect and flawless.
so i believe that satan was created "evil' on purpose by god. "why?" you ask. well, god is considered to ultimate good, so if there is a good there must be an ultimate bad.
in order for one to trully know god's love and mercy, they had to know satan hate and deciet. it goes along with how do you know what love is, if you have never experienced hate.

I don't "believe" in satan, and nor do I believe in Christian beliefs, but I grew up in a Catholic environment, and I do have opinions on how the stories might go...
Where there is good, yes the must be bad or we couldn't recognise anything as good. While I wouldn't say "God" created evil or Satan, I would say they are made from the same thing.

I don't believe in a 1 God person sitting somewhere with 1 Satan sitting somewhere else. I believe everything is made up of the same stuff and we will go back to that cesspool of "stuff"...hey let's call it energy. Energy isn't good or evil, it just is. Neither are people or "gods" good or evil, they just exist. Why? Because good and evil are totally subjective. You might think Hitler is evil, but he didn't think he was.

Satan isn't nor never was an Angel, Lucifer is.
According to the bible God went out of his way to inflate his ego, he made him the most beuatiful, the head aof all other angels and was declared his favorite. You;d have to be blind not to see the bible says it was an intentional fall.
Satan is the ArchDemon of Anger It is also a word that once meant "against god", it was used to describe Athiests and others.
I am a satan, because I don't believe in Jehovah.

If it means against god and you call yourself a satan then youre obviously not an athiest.

a) From what I know about Satanists, they don't believe in anything; no God, no actual Satan, nothing.

b) sorrow, I will bet your parents had a fit.

In other words theyre athiests. I know if I wanted to be associated with a specific beleif I wouldnt name myself after something that might otherwise make people think of me in terms of opposition to what I believe in.

I wouldnt call myself a heterosexual if i was gay for example.

Billy: I've read the Satanic Bible and from what it says Satan is used as a figurehead to represent man's animal nature. Unless I was missing something and LaVey was just saying that as some sort of misdirection (which, knowing him, could be possible) that's what they appear to believe.

Personally, I am not sure about whether or not the story makes sense about the fall. I also wonder sometimes if it's just meant to be metaphorical, like a lot of the rest of the Bible appears to be rather than something that was meant for people to believe literally.

And form what i have read the original satanists and satan worshippers actually hailed satan. Regardless naming yourself after someone you dont beleive in is ridiculous.

I don't know...see, I used to dabble in the occult a lot when I was in my teens and early twenties. I saw a distinction between full-out Church of Satan Satanists (like what I just mentioned in my prior post) and devil worshippers (which were mostly the animal slaughtering, baby-stealing, blood-drinking variety). Like I'd said, unless it's a cover-up, what I'd read said that they don't believe in anything and that is one of the reasons they feel they live their lives like there's no tomorrow, because there's this one go around and they want to live it to the fullest.

I agree with you in a way about labeling oneself something like that; at the same time, I don't think it's nonsensical because it's like the same way you could use the word "God" to just generally describe the universal life force energy. It's just putting a temporary name on something. In this case, they are using the name as what Satan represents to them, so in that sense it becomes real, but not as an actual entity in itself, I think. Something like that.

the satanic bible is only one view of satanism. there are, to narrow it down, 3 sects of satanists. Modern (levay), Tradional, and the name of the third alludes me at the moment.

Crypt: I stand corrected, or partially corrected. That is true. I brought up the LaVeyan Satanists because I felt that that sect was the one the general public is most familiar with.

This was sort of funny.
http://www.rotten.com/library/religion/satanism/

actually, the one that society is most common with is the one I can't remember the name of. The one that hits the news all the time of child abuse, rituals killing virgins and all that other fun stuff. I think i will have to go through my old posts in religion to find it before I get home.

I'd be interested to know because I'm not recalling it off the top of my head either.

i have a website book marked at home that describes in detail all three versions of satanism. for some reason the names that keep coming to mind are modern, traditional and gothic. though the last one could be wrong

I'm not recalling ever hearing it referred to as that...who knows? It would be easier if I could think of a particular group to say "this is part of the whatever sect"...there are so many offshoots that it gets complicated.

there are also luciferian satanists, theistic satanists and diablorists...

http://www.angelfire.com/ny5/dvera/

these guys are particularly interesting, even if they credit belial with more worship than satan, in a more, traditioanlly dramatic style of worship and offering.(personally i'm more fond of him too.)

http://www.geocities.com/jhanshermann/rituals.htm

satanism is going down the road of wicca...anyone with an itch to worship and a plan to sell to others, has his/her own religion.

I didn't invent the word, nor its uses., it apperently applies to athiests as well.
I personally believe in many gods, but don't worship any. I am not a worshippping type of person.

Isn't there a group called the Temple of Set, that branched off from the LaVey Satanists in the mid or late 70s?

Anton LaVey chose the term "Satanism" for his new religion because the word "satan" means "opposition" or "adversary" and he felt it fitting since the views he had expressed thus far in his midnight seminars with his little group of eccentrics were against God and all forms of conformity.


Shadow --There are many ..."organizations" that -claim- to be branches of the LaVey church, but those organizations strictly have nothing to do with the Church. (as claimed by the current High Magus)

Jordyn-- I'm not insulting your post (I hope), but there are literally hundreds of those sites. Especially the free ones, like geocities. a google search will give you alot of them. Mostly just kids.

Well, of course it would have nothing to do with the Church of Satan, that's why I said branched off (though I suppose "diverged" would have been a better term). I asked because I recall reading an interview with the leader of the Cult of Set back in the late 80s or early 90s, talking about how they formed after LaVey's death when he said (I'm paraphrasing here) that the church was essentially defunct and drifting away from its original intentions. From what I recall, he sounded like a fairly intelligent person, if a bit...eccentric.