The Demons of Satanism & the Religions of the Nontheistic

How Arguments Against the Legitimacy of Nontheistic Religions Fail

The war on Satanism, exemplified by the recent efforts of politicians who have proposed bills seeking to limit the civic capacities of Satanists, is nothing short of an assault on Freedom of Thought. Finding little to reasonably object to in our actual stated ethics and activities, theocrats — desperate to continue their advance from religious liberty to religious privilege, and beyond into absolute religious supremacy — have decided to attack our form, rather than our substance. Nontheistic religions, they loudly insist, are not to be considered religions at all. The idiotic practice of citing but one in a list of numbered dictionary definitions, focusing on that which isolates the veneration of an all-powerful deity, is common among those who make the case. Also common is their willful ignorance towards well-established non-theistic religions and sub-groups, such as Buddhism, Humanism, Jainism, Confucianism, and nontheistic Quakers, Hindus, etc. Organized Atheists have proven all too willing to abdicate their own religious liberty, often refusing to demand that non-belief continue to be recognized as a religious opinion, equally as protected as any organized religion under the law, all for the convenience of issuing blanket renunciations of all things religious. This, of course, only benefits the theocrats who now pretend as though they are and always were the sole intended beneficiaries of religion’s protected class status.

The law has been extremely hesitant to put hard definitions on “religion,” and for good reason: no universally agreed upon narrow definition that isolates supposedly necessary components of religion is anywhere to be found in religious studies. Similar to definitions of “art,” there is simply a strong sense that one knows it when one sees it, and academics often rely on checklists of characteristics that are often shared amongst religions. If this is thought to pose a problem, it is worth asking, a problem for whom, exactly? Claims of conscience should be available to anybody, and it is plainly illiberal and far from democratic to conceive of Religious Liberty as providing enhanced privileges for theistic viewpoints over the nontheistic. It may be sometimes reasonable for judges to consider the tribal pressures placed upon individuals whose perceived debt to a subcultural practice conflicts with legal obligations as claimants seek exemptions from legal obligations for religious purposes, but to assume that such claims lack meaning, or are inauthentic, when divorced from a theistic belief system, is counterproductive and absurd. Any rational person with a sense of the humane should agree that it would be just as much of a hate crime to assault the person or property of atheists simply because they are atheists as it is to commit crimes against any individual or people because of any other beliefs regarding religion (or any religious beliefs). Organized religion does not define religion itself, and viewpoints regarding religion are, and should be, as equally protected as organized religions under religious liberty laws.

Nontheistic religions confront universal existential questions and give their adherents a framework by which their beliefs, goals, and communities are understood. Preferencing theistic religion over nontheistic religion, as many politicians are now insistently demanding, is an open assault on freethinking and critical inquiry in preference of dogma and superstition.

The facile response to the judgment above is to insist that theistic religion is an entirely unique and independent domain from all others, focused upon the “spiritual,” and the ineffable. This claim is often invoked to justify the apparent backward, intellectually stunted adherence, by theistic tribalists, to beliefs long discredited by empirical facts, and to elevate this backward thinking to a preferred status. 

Consider demons.

Medieval and early modern European literature is full of examinations into the nature of unseen entities working at the behest of Satan to produce nefarious results in the physical world. The existence and impact of demons was not a question outside of the realm of scientific inquiry. Witch-hunters devised tests to determine the genuinely demonic from worldly causes, and slowly demons were replaced by a better understanding of why crops fail, cattle die, illnesses occur, and all varieties of “evil” that were previously attributed to beings willfully acting in malice. All but the most stunted and deranged would consider this something other than progress.

Today, we still see exorcists babbling in frightened paranoia about the existence of demonic entities infecting the minds of the mentally ill, but demons are no longer the causative force they used to be…not for the theistically religious in general, and certainly not for anybody else.

But science still confronts demons all of the time. Theoretical demons are invoked to explain unclassified phenomena and to speculate about possible, if often improbable, causative agents that could exist. Popular scientific demonology includes Laplace’s Demon, a speculative being that can discern the position and trajectory of every molecule in the universe, thus giving it the ability to calculate all that happened in the past and all that will occur in the future, and Maxwell’s Demon, a being that could theoretically undermine the Second Law of Thermodynamics by keeping fast-moving molecules segregated from slower ones (undermining the deterministic universe of Laplace’s demon).

Scientific demons have often been invoked to describe potential phenomena, but scientists have not been immune from inferring conscious agency behind unexplained and observable phenomena, as seen in Alfred Russel Wallace’s refusal to accept evolution as solely guided by natural selection and chance. Albert Einstein was speaking non-theistically, but not disingenuously when he declared that “God does not play dice…” 

The typical response to scientific demons is to insist that they are distinct and unrelated to the demons of theology. But they are not. I posit that they are one and the same, the only difference is in the approach utilized toward understanding them once they are recognized and named. They may wildly diverge in interpretation from their inceptions, but their initial function is the same: to explain reasonably complex causative phenomena for which agency might be inferred and other explanations are unavailable.

From here, we can contrast the defective approach of theistic religions against the nontheistic. While the nontheistic regard demons as placeholder “explanations” awaiting evidence or confirmation, or as simplified descriptions of complex occurrences, the theist may view them as the final answer and look no further. The theistic worldview begins to diverge from those outside their tribe into a complex web of superstition and empty practices by virtue of little more than the theists' failure to remain open to revising their placeholder assumptions in the face of evidence. A resistance to empirical evidence is often the virtue of “faith,” imposed upon the theistic community by authoritarian conditioning.

Theistic religions often only differ from nontheistic religions, at their core, only in degree of intellectual humility. We identify with our mythology, our values and ethics are contextualized by our understanding of Satanism, but we view all knowledge as provisional, as we religiously believe in the value of intellectual exploration and open inquiry. To favor a theistic viewpoint over nontheistic viewpoints, as government officials now propose to do in offering exceptional privileges to “religion” while trying to narrow religion’s definition to exclude nontheism, is an unconstitutional and anti-democratic effort to reduce the civic capacities of the freethinking in favor of the dogmatic and incurious. It is absolutely, fundamentally, and unforgivably authoritarian. It is an egregious overstep by politicians who would legislate our very way of answering existential questions of the most critical importance, diminishing the contributions of a way of thinking that has yielded advances in science, delivered us from medieval darkness, and has created the framework for a peaceful coexistence in a diverse and multicultural world. It provides special exceptions and unique privileges for those who show unquestioning submission to fiats derived from magical thinking, at the expense of the experimenters, the investigative, and the accepting pluralists. It is an open attack on enlightenment values, personal autonomy, and democracy. It seeks to codify the supremacy of blind conviction and ignorant zeal. It seeks to censor legitimate counterpoints to outdated assumptions, and to prevent diversity of thought. 

This is the theocratic coup, and we must resist it at all costs.