Reply to meowmixeater on my theological views

In the general feedback thread, meowmixeater asked me one of the usual questions that Christians commonly ask theistic Satanists: “Do you believe that satan is actually more powerful than God? If so why?”

My answers to that question can be found here:

• Post-Copernican natural theology
• The here-and-now principle in theology
• Theology of the Church of Azazel

If you have further questions, feel free to post them as a comment here.

Some very good news

I’ve been away for a long time — very busy with a new job, among other things.

Some good news: As of this past month, I’ve found a very passionate co-administrator for the budding NYC proto-congregation of the Church of Azazel, and also for New Yorkers Against Religion-Based Bigotry. Hopefully both can now, finally, begin to get off the ground. I cannot launch them all by myself.

The necessary roles of both innovation and conservativism – Robert Boyd and Peter J. Richerson

On a blog called “Todd’s Hammer” here on WordPress.com, Todd wrote:

There are a couple professors at UC Davis who have done a series of mathematical studies and have shown that human cultures have a balance of conservative and innovative thinkers within them. If the culture is too conservative, its members will fail to adapt to a changing environment; if a culture is too innovative, its members will adopt possibly maladaptive meanings in the wrong times and places. Cognitive scientists are finding that individuals tend to lean to one side or the other, and that both sides are necessary for survival.

Makes perfect sense, and the idea that both conservativism and innovation play essential roles in a society’s survival is relevant to the Church of Azazel paradigm, so I asked for more info and sources. Todd’s reply:

Actually, now that I look at it, one is at UC Davis, the other at UCLA. They are basically doing statistical analyses of the evolution of culture/cognition; that is, the role of culture/cognition in survivability/adaptation.

Robert Boyd and Peter J. Richerson, _The Origin and Evolution of Cultures_ (Oxford University Press, 2005).

The statistical analysis I was referencing is described in the first chapter of that book; but I recommend the whole thing.

Todd is a gay ex-Mormon, now apparently an atheist. I discovered his blog by clicking on one of the tags (either “gay rights” or “same-sex marriage,” I forget which) at the bottom of one of my own recent posts.

Welcome, Theistic Satanists (and others)

Hi everyone! I’d like to experiment with the idea of using WordPress categories/tags to create a de facto unmoderated forum, as a possible replacement for my Theistic Satanism forums on Yahoo, in the event that I decide to phase out the latter.

For every tag, WordPress.com has a page of all the recent posts on WordPress.com with that tag. So, if a bunch of us regularly use a sufficiently rare tag, that page becomes a defacto forum for all relevant posts by us here on WordPress.com.

Publishing this post with the tag “theistic Satanism” will enable me to find the page for the tag “theistic Satanism.” I’ll then add a comment with a link to that page.

To put a tag on a post the first time, type the tag in the text field under the heading “Categories,” next to the “Add” button, at the top of the side panel of the page where you write a new post, and then click the “Add” button before you publish the post. To add the same tag again to a subsequent post, check the checkbox for that category/tag.

As we can do with the tag “Theistic Satanism,” so some of us can also do with the tags “Black Goat Cabal” and “Church of Azazel.”

To try out another neat feature, let’s experiment with trackback pings. In your post, put a link to this post. (Note: That’s a link to this individual post, NOT to the page for the tag, or to my home page.) Soon afterward, a link back to your post will automatically appear as a comment on my post.