Hey y’all, it’s ya favorite bisexual satanist back and dropping some wisdom on ya. I often get asked about being a satanist and what it is like to live without guiding principles that are often forced upon you by insert your brand of faith here. People often think that being a satanist is equal to being a contrarian and givin’ a whopping F the F off if you are going to tell me what to do and how to live. The reality is quite different, but the biggest difference is we choose what to live by without oppression from a faith or someone telling us what is their version of right and wrong. We have eaten from the tree of knowledge, hopefully, and decide to make informed decision about our lives and how to live them.
Being a satanist and living with humans and animals doesn’t mean we go about our day shirking our duties and not following some example of how to be a better person. Each flavor of Satanism has a code in which to live by and they all share the very similar tenants. Personally, as a non-theistic Satanist, The Satanic Temple has seven tenets that seem to sum up living our best life in a great way. I want to break these tenets up over the next few weeks and go into detail about them. Join me, today, as we talk about the first tenant in what I like to call Compassion and Empathy: A Southern Bisexual Satanists Perception.
Why have tenets
Life needs a set of values to live by, a code, morals, or whatever you want to call it. It is essential for being able to distinguish what is good for you and what is not. It is a system of measure to evaluate its worth based on how it may make you feel. Every aspect of life has this and most of us just kind of consider it the normal operating system and not give it thought. Oh, curious as to what I mean here? Let’s poke at it.
If you are buying shoes, you have lots of options. Athletic, dress, casual, special occasion, flip flops, tennis shoes, boots, slippers, and more. Each one of them are designed for specific situations and meant only for them. Sure, you will see people out in fuzzy bedroom slippers all the time, that’s just plain lazy and a topic for a different article.
What is important is that when you are looking for shoes, you have a need that has to be filled. You wouldnt buy flip flops if you needed a good pair of trail running shoes. Then, once you decide the style, you further evaluate them based on how they feel, look, and build. These are guiding principles in buying those shoes — tenets, if you will. Structure is important to all things, it allows us to have a path to navigate on and do so in the right way. Even bad people have guiding principles they operate under, even those agents of chaos who profess to never following rules are following at least one. The one to not follow rules. It is almost inescapable, so why not set up those tenets to align with your beliefs?
The tenets
Every belief system needs a core foundation of how to act and behave, these are guiding principles for interacting with others and how to view the world, based on your set of beliefs. Christians have the Ten Commandments and The Satanic Temple has its Seven Fundamental Tenets. There are similarities between them, for sure, but there are also core differences. Many of them are small and may be overlooked, especially since they are not spelled out in the actual tenets.
For me, personally, the Ten Commandments sounded just that… commandments. Personally, I am not fond of being commanded to do something that the leaders of the faith are often not followers. With the Tenets, it is more like a blueprint for how humans should interact with each other in accordance with respect for yourself, them, life, and all that is around us. It is about using your mind and intellect to navigate the world around you. Here are the Seven Tenets:
- One should strive to act with compassion and empathy toward all creatures in accordance with reason.
- The struggle for justice is an ongoing and necessary pursuit that should prevail over laws and institutions.
- One’s body is inviolable, subject to one’s own will alone.
- The freedoms of others should be respected, including the freedom to offend. To willfully and unjustly encroach upon the freedoms of another is to forgo one’s own.
- 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.
- 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.
- Every tenet is a guiding principle designed to inspire nobility in action and thought. The spirit of compassion, wisdom, and justice should always prevail over the written or spoken word.
They all seem pretty straightforward and not diabolical in any way, right? Well, let’s break it down a bit further and look at Tenet One, today.
First Tenet
One should strive to act with compassion and empathy toward all creatures in accordance with reason.
Remember, that the tenets are written in an ascending order and builds on what is before it. Tenet seven is the culmination of those tenets and practices. It tells you how to interpret them, ranking them in importance. But, I am putting the cart before the horse here. Let’s look at the first and important Tenet. This is similar to Do Unto Others As You Would Have Done Unto You, but with an added coverage for all things living.
The easiest way to look at this in relation to people is to think before you speak or act. If the words or actions you are about to do will cause undue harm to the person, then dont do it. Essentially, dont try to hurt others with your words or actions. Here is how I try to implement this in my day to day life. If I am having an argument with someone, I try to pause before I say anything and see if it will be beneficial to the sItuation or only make it worse. I also try to see the situation from their point of view. Often, what this means is I will need to take a moment from the situation to go journal about it. In that journal, I will state the situation and my point of view. Then, I take the other person’s point of view and write about it. That usually allows me to see something I had not before. Ain’t no one wanting to feel worse about an argument, fight, or disagreement.
Looking at the components of the tenent, we see words like empathy and compassion. Empathy is pretty straight forward, it means being able to understand someone else’s point of view and then share it with them. If someone is hurting, we are built to understand that emotion and sympathize with it. We know what it feels like to hurt and as such feel for those that are in that situation. That, oddly enough, is also part of compassion. Compassion is the ability to show concern for others feelings/situations. This is because we have probably gone through something very similar.
This tenet can shape so many things in your life. For example, i have a friend that became a vegetarian because they saw how eating meat was actually a very intrusive and abusive existence for the animals we eat. If you want to see a good example of how bad that can be just google how chickens are raised for eggs and meat production. That alone will turn your stomach and mind.
But it also goes a bit further. When we see a spider in our house, the initial instinct for many of us is “Ewwww, kill it! Kill it with fire!!!” We see the spider as an intruder and causing us harm. In reality, it is only causing us a mild discomfort because of some preconceived idea that spiders are creepy crawlers. Realize that that spider has been in your house longer than you realized, or at least close by. It is helping you, without its knowledge, by keeping other bugs and pests away from your living area. The average spider only lives about three years, that is a short comparison to how long you will probably live in a house. It is easier to relocate them, by however means you choose, instead of killing them out of some antiquated fear.
Why it matters
When we are hurt, mad, sad, depressed, or whatever else, we often tell people we dont want to be bothered. Many times this comes from our point of view being that they cannot understand the feelings we have, for that situation. While it is true that no one person will feel exactly the same about a given situation, there are commonalities enough for us to understand it. When we have our feelings, we want someone to understand how we feel so that they can relate and make it go away, whether we know this or not. No living creature likes to feel pain hurt, we simply aren’t built that way.
So, it is our duty as good Satanists, and humans, to act in accordance with that principle and not cause anyone to feel anything undue. If we do, then it is our need to make it right. Understand we did wrong and made them feel a certain way and try to fix the damage caused. Every being, great or small, deserves it’s chance to live and thrive. We dont have to love each of them but we should give them the respect to live as we want to live.
Just remember that the tenets also ends with the statement of “within reason.” This is important as it refers to doing everything you can to follow this tenet as long as it is not sacrificing the safety and life of you or hurting someone else, in the process.
Compassion and empathy
Remember that these tenets are not mandates, they are examples to live by. What would be thought of as a good way to live and interact with others. We all could use a bit more compassion and empathy, especially towards ourselves. This allows us to see the world in a more open minded fashion and a realization that our mindset only shapes our perception of the world, not the actual world. Altering how we interact with it and its inhabitants allows us to better work together and see ourselves in a better light.
How do each of you feel about this tenet? Does it feel like a good example to live by? How do you interpret it and add it into your daily life? Let me know in the comments below and I will see you in the next one where we talking about the struggle for justice.
Gay in the CLE 