When we experience a thing or event the first time, our mind conjures ideas to make sense of it. This has allowed us to turn women who were different than others into witches who, in one moment, can create a love potion to capture the heart of the one that has stolen yours or mumble a few words over a pot filled with liquid and turn someone into a toad. These thoughts will live unchallenged until something comes along and challenges it. Science is one of the things that has shed vast amounts of light into the unknown universe we often left open to the paranormal.
As a non-theistic Satanist, I am constantly having to explain to people that I do not believe in a physical being that is called Satan. I do not believe there is a heaven or a hell waiting for us and as such, do red beast with a long tail is waiting to torture me for eternity. Likewise there is no magic sky daddy waiting to wisk us away into the fabled never never. I allow science to dictate my beliefs. There has, to this very day, been no evidence of a place called Hell below us and the heavens above have only begun to show us just how vast the Universe is and how small we are. It is through science that we must understand the world, not outdated modalities that there are beings we can petition for our well being and prosperity.
Hey y’all, its your friendly neighborhood bisexual Satanist here to talk about Tenet Five from The Satanic Temple and how it relates to navigating the world and our beliefs. Let’s not waste time and jump into Challenging the Supernatural: A Scientific Approach to Belief.
Spirits unite
It’s the dawn of humanity. We have moved from our animalistic natures to create the beginnings of households. Slowly, humanity is moving from its nomadic hunter/gatherer phase to settling in one place to become farmers. The world is still an unknown place with frightening events that seem to spring up out of nowhere. We struggle to make sense of floods, the movements of things in the sky, and why there is death. Slowly, we start to attribute these things to powers beyond our imaginations. It is the beginning of spirituality and our minds grab onto it as a means of making sense of what is around us. We need something that has responsibility so we can try to understand why things seem to happen to people and suddenly the idea of luck is born. Spirits are created, gods are formed, and suddenly the world around us takes on an anthropomorphic tone that makes sense to us and allows us to offer prayers of safety and bounty.
It is at this point that humanity’s mind takes a change. We now can pass responsibility onto others for our actions or why things happen.
It would be millions of years before humanity starts to develop a new way of explaining the world. It will be met with challenges from what become institutions, churches and priests will speak of the will of God and call any deviation from belief a sin. Religion is weaponized against free thought and intellect. This is still a challenge to this day.
Belief vs. science
”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.”
This tenet, while easy to understand, may actually be one of the hardest for new Satanists, or any one of faith, to accept. It is fair to say that most of us grew up in households that had some kind of spiritual belief. Most of those would be some variation of Christianity. Those faiths/beliefs teach us to view the world in a way that all the universe and everything it was created by one being. This being we should pay homage to. Anytime there seems to be an unknown reason for something happening, we often chalk it up to faith and that being moving in mysterious ways. It is far easier to write off events to the unknown and release control than to try to actually take the responsibility to understand them.
To this day, there has been no quantifiable evidence that there is any God, afterlife, or magic. Simply put, there is no scientific evidence of all this Woo Woo stuff people often discuss.
On the other hand, science has explained a great many things in the world that cannot be disproven as a truth. We know there is more to our Universe than what we can see on Earth because we have telescopes that are allowing us to see into the darkest recesses of space. We have mapped the human genome and even started to see how we can detect and remove damaged genes so they do not affect a newborn.
Science has allowed us to cure diseases and make improvement to the world but it has never proven the existence of anything spiritual.
Science and reason
As humanity has evolved, over our time on Earth, we have developed some amazing things and science is one of them. Christians, pagans, and whatever other spiritual group you would like to add, say that there is this binding force that keeps the world together and reality where it is, funny thing is they are not wrong. Science sees these forces and seeks to explain them. The real magic of the universe is that it exists at all. There was no person out there with a simple chemistry set that gave rise to the universe, all the creations, and everything, our science shows us that.
Spirituality and Religion can be divisive. History shows how religion has caused upheavals, death, and extermination of civilizations. The reason for this is because there have been people who have not believed the faith that was most popular. No religion has been exempt from this. Science is immutable. If you follow the same experiment multiple times, the same results are produced.
Religion cannot say that. In every religion, its followers pray and go through ceremonies to show devotion or to petition for specific outcomes. One religion will tell you that another is worshiping the wrong entity and so they are wrong. If a pagan prays to their god(s), are their words heard any less than a Catholic offering prayers at mass on some Wednesday night? The methods are the same, the basic formation is similar, and each is done in some kind of performative way to make it feel all the special, but yet the results are never the same.
In the absence of proof
I grew up in a southern household, in an area that is keen on things like spirits, magic, and old time mountain beliefs. My parents were church goers who talked about a god as if they were on a first name basis. I had a grandmother who would tell you they talked to spirits and even worked with them. As a young kid who moved away from Christianity, witchcraft was my first stop. I went into it thinking this would be the right path. I did my ceremonies, cast spells, prayed to ancient archaic gods looking for answers and to fix me but nothing happened. I was left thinking I must be doing something wrong, so I studied more and continued my practice.
In highschool, I met a science teacher who would change my world view. It was an honors biology class and this teacher was a dyed in the wool man of science. We would read literature that woudl elude to the magics and mysteries of the world and then he would drop the science on us. In a flash, the world started to make a better version of sense. I had always thought plants were a live and carried a spirit, of some kind. Science showed me that indeed plants are alive and will act in their own best interests but there is no deep magical force — other than life itself.
Through microscopes, we were able to see entire worlds that were out of our vision but no less real. Satellites in space allowed us to see distant systems that things like the Bible or Magical texts didn’t even understand. It all started making sense.
Challenge the norm
I honestly thought this would be a short post. Explain the tenet and leave it for y’all to digest. The truth is this is a hard tenet for many people. It is up to us to not just blindly believe what others tell us are fact. We need to seek out science and reason for things in our lives. I have a friend that is going through cirrhosis and if their only course of action was to sit and pray it away, they could be dead now. Instead, they opted to reasearch the disease and how it acts in the body. They keep their medical team involved with what is going on and follow the advice they are given. They are in an amazing state of health due to this. This has allowed them to create this wonderful place to share ideas and educate others. That is how we need to interact with the world around us.
How do you feel about this tenet? Can you only believe in things that science explains? Is it easy to give up the mysteries that are parts of spiritual belief systems in exchange for really understanding why things work the way they do? Let me know in the comments below. Keep questioning and challenging the status quo. Use immutable facts for your decisions, not unfounded speculations. Thank you for being a part of this journey and I will see you in the next one.
Gay in the CLE 