In friendship, a critique

A Kandrona Rays repost

You should be suspicious when a confirmed satanist discourses against forgiveness.

The satanist worldview is remarkably easy to conceptualise, which is why the satanist must habitually mystify it into an allegory of ‘personal liberation’. It is simply and plainly an inversion of Christianity.

“Virtually every religious tradition, as well as every new religious movement, affirms the necessity of forgiveness. Turning the other cheek and forgiving the transgressor are at the heart of Christianity. This principle is less pronounced but still deep seated in Judaism. Forgiveness resonates, albeit with different rationales, in Vedic traditions. To forgive is at the center of modern spiritual philosophies like the Twelve Steps and A Course in Miracles.”

Although he actually locates his agon with forgiveness in ‘virtually every religious tradition’, realise that, while it is true that forgiveness is not exclusively Christian, his agon with forgiveness derives from his agon with Christianity, expanding outwards to accommodate all that is analogous to Christianity within other religious traditions.

Irony is anathema to satanists. In its place, they have surprise. The above piece of narrative architecture is designed to build forgiveness into an ‘oppressive hegemony’ by pointing towards its ‘centrality’ in world religion and in new age beliefs. The ‘hegemony of forgiveness’ (which he refers to as ‘the necessity of forgiveness’ to evoke the oppressive and austere character of ‘necessity’ with its connotations of religious discipline) is supposed to impress us before it oppresses us, however. This is the set up for the ‘surprise’ reversal of paragraph 3-

“I have worked intently with forgiveness for seven years. I have prayed, pondered, assayed, and studied. I reject the moral imperative of forgiveness.”

– in which the collective authority of the ‘powers and principalities’ of forgiveness listed in the first para is rhymed with the seven years of intent prayer, ponder, assay, and study. Both represent the weight and force of the rejected ‘moral imperative’ and implicitly heroise the rejecter as one who has known but refused. Beneath this heroising, and glorified by it, is the resentment of one who feels he’s put the work in and has little to show for it.

Ah, lucky for him he realised it was a ‘moral imperative’, as these are vaguely oppressive in much the same way a ‘necessity’ is. He qualifies himself: ‘That does not mean forgiveness is unwarranted in given situations’- how the mighty have fallen! What was once the very ‘heart of Christianity’, ‘deep seated in Judaism’, ‘resonating in the Vedas’, ‘centre of modern spiritual philosophies’ now reduced to merely not always being ‘unwarranted’!

The satanist isn’t comfortable with a spiritual idea until he’s ‘put it in its place’. “Oh, we’ll keep you around, just in case you display to us some utility”. ‘Warranted’ really means ‘useful’, and ‘useful’ means ‘useful to my self-interest’. For the satanist, no spiritual idea can stand until it’s been dragged into a battle of dominance and submission, where it must play the part of an authoritarian daddy and be ritualistically trounced, all for the sake of satisfying some parochial insecurity that one may at some point be forced to ‘submit’ to it.

Satanism is merely the relentless projecting of this narrative into every conceivable area of existence. Or as he puts it: “I believe that the moral suasion to forgive often places the individual in an unnatural position and produces inner division that gets diverted into other, often hostile or self-negating behaviors.”

Nothing, of course, is worse than to be ‘unnatural to oneself’, experiencing ‘inner division’ or undertaking ‘self-negating behaviors’: these are the chief prohibitions within the religion of satanism- one is burdened with maintaining the fiction of a ‘natural, undivided, unnegated self’ as a bulwark against an Oppression which is pragmatically constituted as Everything-Not-Me. Not for him the multitudes of Whitman, however much he may enjoy quoting Emerson.[1]

As an aside, notice the sheer legalism of this writing! ‘Moral suasion … places the individual in an unnatural position’- this is the dry, colourless tone of a software licence agreement. It is language stripped of subjectivity, reduced to the bare bones of a Urizenic consesnsus. This is in fact a familiar characteristic of satanist spiritual rhetoric, beyond the narcissism of small differences with which ‘theistic’ satanists distinguish themselves from ‘LaVeyan’ satanists.

It’s a rhetoric distinguished by 1. self-pity, resentment, and 2. a predilection for legal arguments. The canonical example of the latter is the wounded appeal towards religious freedom, but is most ideologically visible in general debate-school sophistry along the lines of ‘you claim to love x and be against y but my particular interpretation of y is also x, so therefore how can you be against y?’ Example:

“In essence, we are all after the same thing: power. We hate to admit it, we immediately argue with the suggestion, slander the messenger, and insist that our search is about truth, self-knowledge, and service. Yeah, sure. I still have shiv marks in my back from pietists who speak the loudest of service.”

Here, the particular y is ‘power’ and the particular x is ‘truth, self-knowledge, and service’. The latter are collapsed into the former- the certainty of this is guaranteed by the hypocrisy of those who say otherwise. Hypocrisy is perhaps the satanist’s answer to Christian forgiveness, in that it is utterly at the heart of satanism- without the guaranteed hypocrisy of those who profess love of truth, self-knowledge or service over Self, the satanist is merely a person pursuing his own selfish interests, which is all most of us are. It is the ‘shiv marks’ from ‘pietists’ which transform this banality into romance.

Satanists are congenitally and neurotically obsessed with power- who has it and how they are using it. If the Christian receives sanction from the priest, the satanist receives justification from the same priest’s hypocrisy. He quotes in this piece Blake’s wonderful aphorism ‘Opposition is True Friendship’ but Blake’s name for Satan was ‘The Accuser’- the voice of the satanist ‘exposing’ hypocrisy is identical with the voice of the inquisitor ‘exposing’ sin. Both take the presence of sin for granted and are secretly haunted by the possibility of its absence which is made possible by the forgiveness of Christ.

They speak in crypto-resentful legalese because it is a language of power, and the language with which one appeals to authority. The authority appealed to is not the mythological Jehovan tyrant, but rather a sort of spiritual referee, a stuffy beauracrat whose favour is to be courted in the hope that he will grant the satanist legitimacy and thus embarrass himself. The exoteric mythology of the satanist is heroic Luciferian revolt. The reality is endless rules-lawyering- the game is to prove the hypocrisy of a given moral ideal by showing that it is compatible in some way with ‘power’, thereby 1. exposing its bankruptcy and 2. justifying what the satanist was going to do anyway.

In this sense, the satanist needs morality, and preferably cruel, punitive morality at that, the morality of the classic grievance-hunter. This is why the rhetorical attempt to frame forgiveness as a ‘blanket rule, spiritual imperative, or ethical necessity’ is unconvincing- it’s backwards. He doesn’t wish to dismiss forgiveness because of its oppressive morality. Rather it’s precisely because forgiveness transcends and subverts the robotic ‘praise-and-punishment’ of morality traditionally-conceived, by reconciling one away from the revenge impulse- which is why he says things like ‘”understanding” is no excuse for paralysis’ or ‘metaphysics must never serve as an excuse for ethical paralysis’.

The language of no excuses is the zero tolerance language of the inquisitor-tyrant-judge. Satanism is the institution of Christianity conspiring against itself, the letter conspiring against the spirit- it is the pact between Id and Superego.

“With emancipation came suffering. And so the individual became a creative actor rather than an object. Should Adam and Eve forgive Yahweh for the inconceivable cruelty of condemning humanity to forever being born in sin for a single ancestral transgression? Does the parabolic “sacrifice” of his son redeem or compound that sentence?”

Again, it’s backwards- the Tree of Knowledge gives Knowledge of Good and Evil i.e. it makes available to men and women the tyrannical morality of Yahweh, the egoistic drive to enforce discipline via punishment and vengeance-seeking. Christ’s sacrifice (no quotation marks from me) is precisely an intercession into this dynamic of endless sadism- it neither redeems nor compounds but renders the sentence obsolete: you only continue it if you want to. Satanists want to. Simple.

Oops. “From time to time the comments section of my articles abound with religionists telling me how I’ve completely misunderstood this or that; quoting Scripture; telling me how they are going to pray for me; how love will overcome all. Try this experiment. Next time someone presents you with one of those arguments, watch how they behave when they are told “no.” That response is their philosophy. Philosophy is conduct. I am not a Christian. But in conduct I am a better Christian than most of my detractors.”

Here the variation is ‘you claim to be for Love and against Aggression but my particular interpretation of (your) Love is also Aggression, so therefore how can you be for Love?’

When he writes of his apparent harassment at the hands of ‘religionists’, he dares you to become the archon or oppressor of a moral imperative by disagreeing. The ‘no’ is a test- you either fight for the ideal of love and in fighting betray it, or give it up, proving that it was never important in the first place. Refuse to ‘give up’ and you are added to his aggressors list, since you implicitly lay down a standard against which his conduct can be judged, and suggest he is not complete unto himself. It is this belief, in the total completeness of the self, which must be protected against the reality of any value which is not reducible to ‘power’ aka force or fraud. Satanism, in its theistic or atheistic variations, offers the same consolation- to become the petty tyrant Jehova of one’s boundaried self.

‘I am a better Christian than most of my detractors’. He means it- because his idea of a Christian is secretly the hypocritical Christian whose faith is a set of rationalisations for power. He means that having taken shivs in the back, he’s willing to shiv in turn. None of this is particularly occulted. The ninth of the Nine Satanic Statements of LaVeyan Satanism: ‘Satan has been the best friend the Church has ever had, as he has kept it in business all these years’. When the Prince of Lies appears as ironic, it is prudent to take him literally. The easiest way to offend a satanist is to take him at face value- that he is ideologically committed to evil. Doing so cuts thru the ‘rules of conduct’ with which he insinuates, and forces a direct confrontation of values: “Oh no no, that isn’t want I meant! How could you accuse me of such a thing?!”

Therefore, I respond to his ‘no’ with a counter-no: Whether or not y is x is not a factual statement but a revelation of one’s values. I say that Love is real, and Power without Love is Tyranny.

Most writing about forgiveness that pretences ‘depth’ revolves around the folk standpoint epistemology of ‘who has the right to do what’ in a given situation- ‘do we have the right to ask forgiveness’, ‘do we have the right to expect it’, questions which are not totally meaningless but which at no time make contact with reality. Such questions mystify forgiveness- its difficulty is really its simplicity- and are premised on the questioner asking into an imagined community of moral technicians. This community, though accessible in various comment sections and twitter threads, is irrelevant before reality, and one should not make one’s choice to forgive or no based on their imaginary approval.

There is a clue in his first paragraph: ‘Turning the other cheek and forgiving the transgressor are at the heart of Christianity.’ He dissents from forgiveness, not because forgiving others is difficult or inadequate or unjust. It is that fancying, or fearing himself, a transgressor, he is hostile to being forgiven. He believes himself already damned. He doesn’t want to change.

[1] Emerson’s ‘Ne te quaesiveris extra‘: ‘Do not look outside yourself’ can be read as satanist or Christian, depending on whether the self is understood to be a synecdoche for Creation, in which case it is esoterically the latter.