The Satanic Temple

I'd been following TST since it first popped up in the news, and eventually just decided to join. I love the community and am glad to see some of that porting over here. Hail yourself :)

Oddly enough, the Hail Satan! documentary on Hulu.

My story starts with becoming an atheist about 15 years ago, hearing about TST fighting to put a Baphomet statue on the state capitol grounds in Oklahoma, and then not thinking about them much for the next 9 years except when they'd pop up in the news and I'd laugh my ass off at whatever antics they were engaged in. I legitimately didn't realize it wasn't an elaborate troll for a long, long time.

That all changed last year when the draft Dobbs decision to overturn Roe v Wade was leaked. I saw that as a call to action. I went to protests and looked for any organizations I could find that are fighting for reproductive rights. Naturally, atheists on reddit at the time reminded me about the Temple, so I gave it a hard look for the first time ever and realized it was a serious religion. And, not just that, one whose core tenets I agreed with wholeheartedly. I was officially a Satanist by that month's end and haven't looked back!

Religulous.

I grew up in a conservative christian household but when I was 18 I met a trans woman (neither she nor I knew it at the time) that asked me, when I was doing as conservatives do, "But what if you're wrong?" That was the first time in my life someone even suggested I question my beliefs and it was asked so kindly and earnestly it sent me down a rabbit hole of Christopher Hitchen's, Richard Dawkins, and too many others to count. Eventually I caught Religulous on Netflix and that was the first time I heard about TST.

TST and other freethinkers saved my life, I believe, because when I was full of hate I didn't hate anything as much as I hated myself. The Satanic Temple among other groups and individuals helped me to be accepting of others which helped me to stop hating myself.

This is a bit of a tangent at this point, so I'll just add hail Satan.

Honestly, and I don't mean this to sound rude at all, but I went through a kind of edgy phase in highschool that lead to TST. Which, as it turns out, is very different than the theatrics it puts on in name and symbol lol.

To be clear, I don't consider it to be an "edgy" group, I understand the point of referencing Satan, and all that, just that my discovery of it was the result of other dabblings that one might consider edgy.

I live in Denver and in 2020 there was a proposed bill to limit abortion access. I had a vague idea of what TST did so my desperate googling landed me on their membership page. Now I keep my religious abortion ritual card in my pocket, just in case.

Tst as an org around the time they started trying to erect Baphomet statues, satanism as a young fella working out existential questions and being interested in philosophy, literature and the occult. I dont't practise or follow any tenents aside from those that arise from my own morality, but I do appreciate the counter-movement against christo-fascism.

Geocities.