No Satan and No God

An essential tenet of Buddhism is that everything is interconnected, so I was interested to come across the story that the Detroit chapter of the Satanic Temple had held a public unveiling of a 9-foot, 1-ton bronze sculpture of Baphomet, a winged deity with a goat’s head.

The group had previously tried to install it near a 10 Commandments monument in Oklahoma as a protest against Bible-themed displays on government land. However, the Oklahoma Supreme Court recently ruled the 10 Commandments monument violates a section of the state constitution that bans the use of state property for the benefit of a religion. A similar monument was authorized in Arkansas earlier this year, so the group now plans to transport the statue there.

Interestingly the Satanic Temple writes on its website that it practices “non-theistic Satanism,” which means it does not believe in supernatural beings. “We understand the Satanic figure as a symbol of man’s inherent nature, representative of the eternal rebel, enlightened inquiry and personal freedom rather than a supernatural deity or being.”

The interconnectivity comes from the fact that I had just been reading Geoffrey Berg’s “The Six Ways of Atheism” New Logical Disproofs of the Existence of God just before coming across this story.

No one up there or down there.