Aspiring to Understand and Getting It Wrong Anyhow

Some Thoughts on Tenets V and VI

Galileo Galilei (1564-1642). Oil painting by an Italian painter (Wikimedia Commons)

Recently, the European contingent of TST hosted one of their bi-weekly WRAITH (Worldwide Religious And Informal TST Hangout) discussions around the topic of supernatural belief and science. (This later became the Hellmouth Religious Service “A Demon-Haunted World”. I wrote this article before the service aired.) While I was unable to attend the discussion itself, the introduction to the topic got me thinking about a number of things. Some of which we will go over together. We’ll start by looking at the description of the WRAITH that inspired me.

Our liberal ideals promote free speech, individual rights, and the acceptance of opinions and behaviors different than one's own. Active harm aside - doing, saying and believing whatever the fuck I want? Seems like paradise! So why not let everyone cherrypick their beliefs from the world’s garden of religions, esoterics, nationalist ideologies, conspiracy myths? Some people even leave TST because they feel having Tenets at all is too dogmatic. Our 7 mostly describe how to act, only the 5th prescribes what to believe. Tenet 5 seems to infringe on a personal freedom, and submission to science seems to contradict our otherwise liberal ideals. So why bother with beliefs at all?

While the introduction is ripe with fruit, today I am most interested with the “5th prescribes what to believe” statement. The rest will have to wait for both time on my part and interest on yours. (If you are interested in me fully delving into everything in that introduction do let me know. November would be a great time to do so.) In particular, I am interested in whether or not the Fifth Tenet is indeed a prescription. Then, once we look at that, I would like to reflect upon Tenet V and its relationship to other Tenets, in particular Tenet VI.

I do want to be clear that as we go through this essay, I am responding to the rhetorical framing of this discussion, not the specific beliefs of the WRAITH host and moderator nor Ministra Melankali, who is a dear colleague and friend. While I do not know the exact beliefs of the person(s) who wrote this introduction I am assuming that they do not hold fast to any of the positions in it. The introductions to service deliberations serve as a framing for the conversation that will be had. In this case, the rhetorical framing of the introduction appears to be a composite of odd, eclectic beliefs that some people bring with them into our spaces with the intent of the discussion being to deconstruct those beliefs and come to a better understanding of what it means to be a Temple Satanist.

What I am doing here is accepting their rhetorical framework and addressing it, sometimes in direct, emotionally powerful language. My intent is to engage you, the reader, not bash the WRAITH crew or my fellow Hellmouth Ministers. The framing presented has inspired nearly 1800 words in response and could likely inspire another two or three times that as I deconstruct the rest of it. Whoever wrote this introduction did an excellent job, succeeding at being both provocative and mysterious to the point that I have enthusiastically taken the bait, dragging you along for the ride on what I hope is an entertaining and fun journey. So in good faith, let’s go!

Tenet V: Beliefs should conform to one's best scientific understanding of the world. One should take care never to distort scientific facts to fit one's beliefs.

So is Tenet V a prescription? If it is, it’s an incredibly weak one. Should is a mealy-mouth word, often uttered by those without conviction or to impose opinion through guilt. So to read the Fifth Tenet as prescriptive you need to believe that The Satanic Temple lacks courage of conviction to say definitively what we want. While a number of detractors may argue that point, their arguments tend to boil down to the ignorance of personal grievance and the cowardice of entryism. The actual  evidence says otherwise. The Satanic Temple has teeth. We bare them in our campaigns, our charitable activities and our legal battles. There is more to us than bark and snarl. We wouldn’t have opened a new Satanic Abortion Clinic named after the president if all there was, was sound and fury. If The Satanic Temple were to command something we would not use tepid language because we are not tepid people. If Tenet V were a demand the language would be bold, blunt and vehement like in Tenet III. We speak directly. We do not couch our values in manipulative, polite suggestions.

If Tenet V is not a timid prescription, what's a better reading of it? The answer to that comes from looking at the rest of the Tenets for context. The Fifth is surrounded by six others that ask adherents to strive, struggle, prevail, respect, resolve, and be inspired. These words all come with great emotional power, a spirit one might say. None of the Tenets command anything. What they do is exhort us towards betterment. So when placing “should” into this constellation we come to understand that it has the same spirit as all the rest. That means Tenet V isn’t a commandment to blind obedience or dogmatic pursuit, but a want and hope for us to honestly engage with reality. One should, not because you are told to, but because you aspire to. Should, in this case, echoes the greatest of all Satanic virtues; the belief that we can better ourselves through thoughtful, intentional acts.

We Satanists are our own gods, so to speak. This self-deification requires an honest understanding of what is and isn’t real. Material reality is our truth and it is through the honest understanding of it we can authentically actualize, unencumbered by our minds and emotions. We accurately see what we need. We accurately see what we want. We accurately see what needs to be done to achieve our needs and wants. Accurately seeing reality must be at heart of self-veneration and self-worship. This is the deeper, religious Satanism that Tenet V compels us to achieve by inspiring us to embrace our best scientific understanding of the world. By doing so we can abandon reactionarianism and embrace the religious Satanism of The Satanic Temple, as demonstrated in The Revolt of the Angels.

Embracing the aspirational nature of the Tenet V also frees us from the corrupt ideal of perfect knowledge. By reading Tenet V as non-prescriptive we gain the emancipative power of the other Tenets when pursuing knowledge. If we don’t, we end up cutting ourselves off from the sublime beauty of the Seven Fundamental Tenets holistic nature. No Tenet is meant to be paragonal; demanding you answer whether or not you acted appropriately in accordance to its dictates. That’s just sin. We’re supposed to be uprooting Ialdabaoth not replacing him with a new demiurge of our own making. Hence another reason to reject the prescriptive reading of Tenet V, or any other.

By reading Tenet V as an aspiration, rather than doctrinal, it becomes part of the comforting thought of good Satanic living. This aspirational nature, the nature of all the Tenets, allows Temple Satanists to embrace knowledge and humanity without fear or shame. We can succeed or fail knowing that our worth never changes. We are encouraged to strive to be our best but when we fail we do so knowing that failure comes without spiritual contamination. Just the communal expectation and support if one does fail they will see, acknowledge, repair and adjust based on what went wrong.

People are fallible. If one makes a mistake, one should do one's best to rectify it and resolve any harm that might have been caused.

One of my favourite pairings of Tenets is the Fifth and Sixth. They flow seamlessly between each other. The Fifth tempered by the Sixth. The Sixth Tempered by the Fifth. They uplift each other in a scientific and philosophical beauty that is unique within our religion. Both demand pride and humility. Neither can exist healthily without the other.

Scientific understanding is an incredible undertaking. It is an ocean that is both infinitely wide and infinitely deep. To become an expert in one thing requires you to ignore much of the surface to plumb the depths of expertise. To have a wide breadth of knowledge means mostly skimming just below the surface of the water, maybe diving a few feet deeper on a handful of things but never plunging too deep lest abandon a breadth of understanding and get weighed down by specialization. No matter what path gets chosen, generalist or specialist, one never knows the truth. All anyone ever has is their best scientific understanding of what they chose to know.
This is why the pairing of Tenet V with Tenet VI makes so much sense to me. We will get it wrong. Even if we flawlessly practice “one's best scientific understanding” and always “take care never to distort scientific facts to fit one's beliefs” mistakes will be made. No finite being can grasp infinity. There will be things that won’t and can't be known. Potentially worse, there will be things that are only partially known because one lacks the needed depth or breadth of understanding to truly contextualize information. And there will be things that were once known that are no longer true because science always advances. This is a hard truth. A truth that Tenet VI softens, lowering the burden of Tenet V by allowing its aspirational nature to entwine with our various limits.

Of course, we aren’t perfectly rational beings, either. Science tells us the exact opposite, in fact. We are irrational, feeling first beings who justify our emotions post-hoc. In other words we feel what we want and then concoct logical reasons why we want it after the fact. Biases, heuristics, and instinct are what drive our decisions. Unfortunately, they are meant to keep us safe on the Serengeti, not the concrete jungle. We’ve made a world we are simply too biologically limited to truly understand. And here’s where Tenet V tempers Tenet VI by letting us know the needed truth about who we are so we carry ourselves with the proper humility to see our mistakes and correct them.

For many Tenet VI can be very hard to navigate. When we are wrong, we immediately jump into a defensive posture. Adrenaline floods the body, pupils narrow, and muscles tense. Mistakes are seen as a threat so our mind and body prepare to fight or flee. These are natural responses, born out of tens of thousands of years of human evolution. They’re automatic. They’re also quite unhelpful a lot of the time. That’s why it is so important to embrace the aspirational nature of Temple Satanism and practice living our Tenets, especially the Fifth and Sixth, through peaceful, mindful deliberation. This is how one trains their mind, turning a conscious act into a reflexive one. 

When one incorporates rational, scientific thinking into their daily practice they can also embrace error and failure as teachers, rather than harsh accusers. This strips mistakes of their stigma. No longer does one sin, morally fail. Instead one learns and grows. Yes, failure can sometimes be a harsh teacher but that doesn’t change the value of the lesson. Science and mistakes, when viewed through the lenses of the Fifth and Sixth Tenets, turn life into a classroom and us into students and teachers.

Practicing deliberation, philosophy, and critical, scientific thinking is the epistemic training all Satanists need to engage in. This is how you uproot Ialdabaoth. Painting Christianity black and flipping the cross isn’t enough. That’s why I write here. It’s, I hope, why you read what I write and what others write. We support each other through likes, comments, shares, and questioning. We practice meaningful agreement and disagreement together, supporting our shared beliefs and our shared growth. None of us want to be bound without consent. Unbinding ourselves starts by seeing the world the way it really is (Tenet V) and by working to reconcile the mistakes we made (Tenet VI) that led us to this moment.

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Satanic Fragment is a Toronto based Epicurean Satanist and Minister of The Satanic Temple. If you like what you read please subscribe to get further updates. If you really liked what you read you can buy him a Ko-Fi by clicking on the button below.