What Satanism Is and What It Isn't
By Ilya Shambat
There are plenty of people around the world who have been claimed to be Satanic or Satanists at one or another time. Having examined the matter I have come up with three groups of people who have been claimed this. I refer to them as:
Quasi-Satanists
Pseudo-Satanists
Real Satanists.
The quasi-Satanists are for the most part teenagers and young men raised in Christian backgrounds who are rebelling against Christianity. Most of them do not actually worship Satan; but they may do some rituals or get some tattoos. As they get older, most of them stop calling themselves Satanists and either go back to Christianity or explore other paths. For the most part, the quasi-Satanists are kids who are going through a phase and will go into a different direction as they grow out of that phase.
A larger group is the pseudo-Satanists. These are people who are not Satanists, but get falsely branded as such. One group of non-Satanists who constantly get branded as Satanists are the Wiccans and pagans who do not believe that there is such a thing as Satan, much less worship the same. Buddhists, Hinduists, Taoists, also get falsely portrayed as being Satanists - once again, these religions do not believe in Satan; and while some in these religions believe that there are demons and hells, they treat them as undesirables or as things to avoid. Atheists and agnostics get branded as Satanist though they believe neither in Satan nor in God. Gnostics and metaphysians get accused of being Satanists when they likewise don't worship Satan: most of them believe in God but have chosen to practice the path of knowledge rather than faith. And then of course there is constant accusation and counter-accusation among Christians, Muslims, Mormons and different denominations within Christianity, each portraying the other as Satanist.
In all cases these claims are ridiculous.
Why are these claims ridiculous? Because there is such a thing as real Satanists. And once one has known real Satanists, one is no more likely to call the next person a Satanist than a man who's known real Communists is likely to call his liberal wife a Communist, or a woman who's known real Nazis is likely to call her conservative husband a Nazi.
And to accuse all these other people of being Satanic is an insult not only to them, but to anyone who's had to deal with people who actually practice real Satanism.
There was, for example, a kid in a Southern Baptist community who believed that he was a Satanist because he believed in revenge. A therapist familiar with different religions asked him some educated questions; after which the poor boy was in total shock. Here was someone who practiced the Christian worldview, but had one disagreement with Christian orthodoxy, who because of this one disagreement was led to believe that he was a Satanist. A dogma this authoritarian, assimilative and intolerant cannot be good and is unsuitable for freedom. In fact, the boy was significantly more sincere than were his neighbors; for of course Southern Baptists practice revenge even though they claim not to believe in it.
Satanism has been described as shadow Christianity; and for most quasi-Satanists it is. For real Satanists it is a religion in its own right. They believe that Satan genetically engineered humanity and that God then stole the credit. I can say with full certainty that the vast majority of people who get accused of being Satanic do not believe in any such thing. Not Hindus, not Taoists, not Buddhists, not pagans, not metaphysicians, not atheists, not skeptics, not liberals, not materialists, not scientists, not feminists, not transsexuals, not agnostics, not kids who believe in revenge, have any such convictions.
So before one mouths off to claim that such-and-such is Satanic, may one be alerted of what Satanism actually is. And may one's claims then be put into perspective. Knowing what something is makes it possible to know what it is not. And knowing what Satanism is makes it possible to know all the many things that it isn't.
Ilya Shambat
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