Community members in a Tennessee school district want to banish Satan from their children’s halls after the formation of a new club was announced.
The After School Satan Club (ASSC) wants to establish a branch in Chimneyrock elementary school in the Memphis-Shelby county schools (MSCS) district.
The ASSC is a federally recognized nonprofit organization and national after-school program with local chapters across the US. The club is associated with the Satanic Temple, though it claims it is secular and “promotes self-directed education by supporting the intellectual and creative interests of students”.
The Satanic Temple makes it clear its members do not actually worship the devil or believe in the existence of Satan or the supernatural. Instead Satan is used as a symbol of free will, humanism and anti-authoritarianism.
The outrage these assholes are feeling is what the rest of us feel every time we see them trying to force their dogma into every facet of society.
Except ours is actually justified.
Way to miss the point and misunderstand it in terms of polarized politics. There is no “ours” and “theirs”.
Not everything is a debate with multiple valid points of view. The notion that your right to a belief somehow encompasses a right to inflict that belief on everybody else isn’t an ideological position; it’s a declaration of violence.
Fuck dishonest moral relativism. 2+2=4 and one person’s religious freedom ends where another person’s begins. Those are facts, not opinions, and if you disagree you’re just wrong.
Neither is justified, theirs is just hypocritical
Excuse me, but being outraged at having your rights attacked – your actual rights, in contrast to the religious nutjobs’ imagined “right” to inflict their beliefs on others – is entirely fucking justified!
Sorry you’re right, I misread the post. I thought the poster was saying that we feel outrage by their clubs. On reread it’s clear I interpreted it wrong (my own fault) and agree.
If it makes you feel any better I was interpreting it the same way and appreciate your sacrifice.
I’m amazingly good at forgetting my own mistakes. It’s how I maintain such a high opinion of myself despite being so deeply flawed.
I’m pretty sure this is how normal people maintain their self-esteem.
Unfortunately I do not have that trait myself.
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Need more groups.
Every city that allows religion in a public school needs a ASS club
Me and my wife are both members of TST and we LOVE the work they do. The Tenets they promote are loving, self-respecting, and do justice towards an ideal world of Individualism, anti-authoritarianism, and critical thinking - i.e. everything that Christianity and modern conservatism in general are eager to suppress. We regularly donate to them, and we constantly purchase stuff through their store to help support them.
Same, also a member of TST and a practicing romantic Satanist. It’s brought a lot of strength, clarity, and confidence to my life.
That sounds interesting, I know I can try googling but I would love to hear from the source. What is a romantic Satanist?
lights candles, opens box of wine
Well, you see…
box of wineA connoisseur I see 🧐
It just comes in a box, they’re not going to drink it from the box! I’m sure they’ll pour it into a mug first.
You don’t know me
No, we get a box each and drink it like a Capri-Sun.
Hey now. Some boxed wines have AMAZING taste. Especially in their super-cool naming.
Oh, yeah, I love wines. Red, white, fizzy white, rosey… all the wines.
That sounds like the start of ritual to me!
Check out the book “Compassionate Satanism” by Lilith Starr. You can buy it on TST’s website, I am not sure about availability on other platforms.
Romantic Satanism holds up the depiction of Satan from Romantic period literature as an ideal. The book has a nice analysis of Satan’s use at that point as a rebel against authoritarianism who fought for Enlightenment. Romantic Satanists are non theistic and do not believe in the supernatural. TST is an organization of Romantic Satanists but you don’t have to be a TST member to be one; the seven tenets of TST are a major guiding force as well.
Totally suggest reading the book - it’s fascinating and well written.
Thank you, I will check it out!
Edit: it’s available on Bookshop.org and on Amazon, too.
Out of curiosity, how does one join the Satanic Temple? I never hear anything about them except when they show up in the news, and the more I hear about them the more I love them.
Check out their website. You can join there.
Thank you! Joined!
Another member here, are donations tax deductible?
Open question to anyone: how much shit do you get being TST members? Do you just keep it on the downlow? I can very much imagine consequences if it got around at work, etc. Any repercussions may be illegal, but a lot of people are “ask questions later, sort it out in court if it gets there” types.
My work associates are all extremely liberal so they were actually pretty stoked. A couple others had no idea what it was, but LOVED the concept after it was explained to them.
A good friend of mine who’s a Christian Pastor was the only one that was like…shocked. lol. After he chilled out and I got to explain it to him, he was all in favor of it. He’s not a big fan of the mainstream evangalism shit that’s going on, so TST being a way to fight the encroachment of the alt-right/Supply-side Jesus on our government was a big win for him.
I want the Samuel Alito’s Mom’s Abortion Clinic lunchbox, and I want it now! That merch is AMAZING!
The uproar is the point.
The Satanic Temple makes it clear its members do not actually worship the devil or believe in the existence of Satan or the supernatural.
But somehow conservative Christians believe that there are huge swaths of people who agree that their religion is 100% correct but worship the weak bad guy character.
(Which is not to mention that there are actually multiple bad guys who got combined, Satan and Lucifer and The Snake were originally different people)
This is a long standing joke - what do you call someone who believes in Satan?
A Christian.
God is omniscient and thus knew exactly what Lucifer would do. Angels don’t have free will. Lucifer did exactly what God intended. God wanted Man to have free will. Free will requires the choice between good and evil. Man is the “bad guy” as well as the “good guy”.
If god is omniscient they would know exactly what everyone is going to choose, nullifying free will entirely
Ok Calvin
For those downvoting the above, @[email protected] is making a reference to John Calvin, who is considered to be an OG determinist.
(Determinism: The view that God determines every event that occurs in the history of the world.)
If god is omniscient they would know exactly what everyone is going to choose, nullifying free will entirely
Yeah but if God knows every choice that’ll be made ahead of time, it doesn’t mean he’s taking the choice away from the person actually making the choice, they still go through the motion of making the actual choice, and hence, they have free will to make the choice. God just predicted it ahead of time.
We need better RNG, clearly. My D&D character should have died by now!
We need better RNG
This is what happened when you don’t seed your RNG.
Yeah but if God knows every choice that’ll be made ahead of time, it doesn’t mean he’s taking the choice away from the person actually making the choice
That argument would only make sense if god wasn’t the supposed creator of the universe and everything in it. If god created everything, is omnipotent and omniscient then at the moment of creation she would have known every single event and circumstance in that person’s life leading up to making a certain choice and she would have been able to create the universe differently so that a different choice would have been made.
If you set up all the dominoes, you cannot claim the 100,00th domino falling over wasn’t your doing because you only tipped over the first one.
That argument would only make sense if god wasn’t the supposed creator of the universe and everything in it. If god created everything, is omnipotent and omniscient then at the moment of creation she would have known every single event and circumstance in that person’s life leading up to making a certain choice and she would have been able to create the universe differently so that a different choice would have been made.
This actually makes my point though.
God knowing everything doesn’t mean that God made you make that choice, God let you make that choice, but knew what that choice would be ahead of time.
You still had free will, you still were the one that had the neurons fire off in your brain, and you made the choice. God was able to predict that choice ahead of time with 100% accuracy.
On a side note, I love that you use ‘she’ for God.
God knowing everything doesn’t mean that God made you make that choice, God let you make that choice, but knew what that choice would be ahead of time.
If she intentionally chose those circumstances to happen so that the choice would be made that way, which she would have to have done being omniscient and omnipotent then that choice being made is 100% her responsibility.
If I put a child alone in a room with a powered on electric band saw, is it the child’s fault for getting their arm sawed off ? They had free will and could have chosen to not go near the saw. Or is it my fault for putting a child in that situation?
If she intentionally chose those circumstances
Why are you assuming she chose them, versus just letting them happen via free will, mapping them out ahead of time, precog style?
If I put a child alone in a room with a powered on electric band saw, is it the child’s fault for getting their arm sawed off ? They had free will and could have chosen to not go near the saw. Or is it my fault for putting a child in that situation?
The childs.
This is a great example of why I don’t believe free will is a coherent concept outside of religion. It’s basically a perk that negates God’s omniscience as it applies to you, but if you don’t believe in God, it’s meaningless.
Free will is the ability to be belligerent until death.
Ah, but that is the point, until Man chose it hadn’t happened, it is the precognition paradox. Until the event occurs, what is known is all the possibilities.
That’s… just like your opinion man.
Then god isnt omnipotent, cause you know, it lacks the power of whats actually to come and is only good at knowing all the hypotheticals. Or may be lacks omnicience, but one could argue that knowing all the possibilities counts.
All that matters is that its lacking something, when it shouldnt
Spirituality is all opinion man.
But no, it not lacking anything.
Except all morality and empathy
How would an explanation of a religious concept have morality or empathy? Words don’t generally have Human emotions in my experience.
Is that true. Could he know what we will do but what we do is still our choice without influencw
Take the garden of Eden story.
Did God know that if he put the tree there then the people would eat from it?
Did God have a choice to put that tree there?
Could God have made a world where they did not eat that fruit?
If he picked this possible world out of all possible worlds based on an outcome that he had in mind, then we’re just playing out the parts that he assigned for us.
God is supposedly all powerful and all knowing. God created the universe and everything in it. He did so with the full knowledge of everything that would happen in advance. He chose to do it anyway, despite knowing all the suffering it would cause. And then he chose to create a realm of eternal suffering (either by literal fire and brimstone, or by ‘absence of God’, it doesn’t really matter) for those fleetingly finite-lived humans that he created knowing they would screw up. Less than a hundred years of life in exchange for billions of years of torment. And he created them in a way that is fully capable of realizing how horrible a way to treat someone this is. It’s nothing but cruelty of an unimaginable scale. Part of the reason I don’t believe the Christian God exists is because I can’t accept something that evil. It’s too horrifying.
Most people that believe or even don’t believe don’t usually follow it to its logical conclusion like that, but I concur. The opening lines of Richard Dawkin’s God Delusion says something similarly.
If god existed, my driving force would be to kill them
Like the Klingons. Lol
True, if somebody comes from the future and knows what you’re going to eat tomorrow morning, that doesn’t make it suddenly not your choice. But to add to the other comment, an important point is that he made us all as well. Because if a god creates you according to his grand plan—knowing full well every single decision you will ever make—it is no longer a choice. Every one of your decisions were predetermined from the start.
Something I like to think about is that it is impossible to go against the Christian god’s plan. If such a thing were possible, then this god would not be omnipotent nor omniscient. As such, everybody that has ever gone to hell did so because god designed them to.
How is that a choice. If they know exactly what’s going to happen I don’t have the power to do anything except for what is going to happen. If you only have an apple at home, you can’t get any other kind of food and your gonna die if you don’t eat the apple, did you really choose to eat the apple?
My knowing what you shall do in no way invalidates your free will. That is invalidated by the futility of your choices. Totally man made and not to be confused with determinism.
I think its still possible that I could freely choose my actions and you knowing what they would be would not invalidate that it was an action I choose based on my own free will.
yup
If there exists a being that experiences time the same way we experience space, do we have any less free will just because the being can continue knowing about it before it happened? The person is making the choice, not the being that knows about the choice.
The funny thing about the free will argument is that theoretically if you could build a galaxy powered “super” computer, you could potentially track every single movement of every single particle in the entirety of the universe, so that level or scientific inquiry nullifies free will.
That’s where it gets interesting though! A set of all numbers cannot contain itself! It’s out of control! Call the alphabots!
That last part is intriguing. Do you have any more info that I could read about how/when their unholy trinity was combined into one evil deity?
The wiki article does a decent job. Basically the mentions of him in the texts describe different beings because they were written by different authors for different audiences with much different views. The serpent story has echos of other bronze age ones in that area and the text says as much that El put him there. The story in Job looks like a Cannite legend that got reimagined in Judaism. At some point the people of the region believed in desert spirits that would inhabit people causing them to go crazy and kill other people.
Due to the first exile Judaism started inventing an explanation for why they weren’t allowed to freely practice by imagining a being that was opposed to El. Because the pattern had broken. The pattern of the past was: everything fine, Jews sin, god punishs, jess repent, everything fine. However, this time they were trying to repent and weren’t able to. Which meant that something was blocking it. Hence Satan. The accuser.
By the time Paul came around the Book of Enoch was popular and to him Satan was a leader of a celestial army of angels. Which is why Paul said that had they known they were killing the son of God they still would have. That were not just following El. Off his writings we see things like Revelations and John where Greco-Roman celestial powers were merged with Satan and Lucifer together.
There was never an idea that someone had 2900 years ago and Christianity is following it. Like all myths it is a combination of different fables, attempts by people to explain their world, and thinkers continuing on a tradition.
I really wish Lilith stayed in the story, I always liked that version of the garden better.
Just curious, do you think she was part of one of the originals and not just a combo of some “heretical” Jewish texts and ideas of the Middle Ages? Legit asking.
I just think it’s a better version of the story. If your going to be writing some religious fantasy, might as well make it as interesting as possible.
Which wiki are you talking about exactly? Did I miss something?
Just the regular wikipedia article about Satan subcategory Historical Development
I can’t comment on Lucifer and Satan but serpent reverence showed up in a lot of ancient matriarchal religions before they were displaced by modern patriarchal ones.
This doesn’t apply to only Abrahamic religions but shows up in Greek mythology too. Apollo slaying Gaia’s serpent messengers at the temple of Delphi for example.
Gnostic teachings, which are a form of Christianity, see the serpent as divine wisdom (Sophia) and the old testament God as the demiurge (Devil). Jesus as the good God. And Lucifer as the light of reason and not a villain.
But Gnosticism is basically a dead form of alternative Christian belief. So I have no idea what the modern church’s take is on these three entities.
It’s now thought the number of truly matriarchal beliefs in antiquity have been grossly overstated. Your comment belies a strong Judaeo-Christian ethos and historiography, which is all fine of course, but the feminists reinterpreting history isn’t divinely wise at all, but political.
I know that many of the modern misconceptions (according to Biblical canon anyway) about Hell came from Dante’s Inferno. So perhaps it’s also something like that?
Oh, it starts way before Dante. Hell is actually a sort of mismatch of different beliefs. Babylonian, Norse, Buddhist and Greco-Roman belief systems all had an underground afterlife with variable ideas of punishment for the wicked. The Bible just mentions “Gehenna” which was actually a real place on earth where trash was burned. Basically think of someone talking about the local dump. Thing about trash though is it doesn’t really burn eternally, it just burns away and it was likely being used as a metaphor. The usage of it also doesn’t really mention an eternity, links it with the devil or any of that. People really like rhe idea of someone getting their jist desserts after death so a idea of “bad people just stop existing” was probably kind of doomed to not be super popular. Basically that just leaves a door open for folk belief to stuff somebody else in the Hades/Hel/Ereshkigal role and carry on having a hell just like they did before.
All told Christianity and it’s family of belief systems is actually a fairly late adopter of the belief in something like a hell. It’s closest thematic relative is probably Buddhist Naraka which was first written about around the 400 BC but there’s not a lot of scriptural evidence that anything like that was intended for Christians. At best Judaism has an idea of an afterlife where one is consumed by shame but it sounds more like what happens when a kid is told their parent is disappointed in them and to go to their room.
Got sources for this? Not that I don’t believe you I’m just interested in reading up on exactly what you’re referring to.
Short of it is that the concept of Satan didn’t exist at the time Genesis was written.
From a more literary perspective, there’s nothing that directly connects the serpent in the Garden of Eden, the interlocutor in Job, and the later mentions of Satan in the Hebrew and Greek scriptures (and there’s not a lot of direct mentions in the Hebrew scriptures). You can kinda make it work if you read between the lines, but fundamentalists will be the first to say you’re not supposed to read between the lines of the bible. To them, you take the word as it is written and nothing else.
Naturally, this rigid reading of the bible doesn’t work out so well for their beliefs.
To take the Answers in Genesis article on the subject (just because they’re a prominent fundamentalist organization), their reasoning is that the bible shows that Satan can enter into a physical being and control them. Notice that they leave out any reasoning showing that Satan did so in that particular case. He could have, and therefore, he did.
So if Satan wanted to, for example, make it so everyone would fail to meet the entry requirements for heaven laid out in the old testament, and end up on hell… could he, theoretically of course, pretend to be the son of God and “change the rules” so that sin is totally ok as long as you say sorry before you die?
Asking for a friend.
“Well, they are Satanists. They are just lying.”
Reading the outrage comments always tickles me lol. Welcome to the point, bitches!
It’s a bit frustrating that it doesn’t make any of them actually reflect on their hypocrisy though. They just double down on the hypocrisy with no questions asked.
I’ve been saying it for years, through even the most liberal of us attacking me for it -
It’s because this is and always has been the point and the end goal.
You’ll almost never reach the truly devoted. But, you can get them to say insane things in front of an audience.
You can’t use your technicalities to push your way around and do what you want! That’s our whole thing, man!
Were are they? I want popcorn! Edit nvm, The article was longer than i The post.
I can’t find them :/
From the full article (had to click the link):
Jenny Kincaid, a grandparent of a student at Chimneyrock, told the local Memphis news station Action News 5: “I’m about to come unglued right now. I cannot believe … this is a kindergarten-through-fifth-grade school and they’re letting a satanic club come in here?”
The MSCS interim superintendent, Toni Williams, reportedly said there were no plans to prevent the club from operating in the district.
“I do not support the beliefs of this organization at the center of recent headlines,” Williams said. “I do, however, support the law.”
The Satanic Temple does a little trolling.
As a treat.
It’s not trolling though. They teach kids good things.
The Satanic branding is basically the trolling and meant to be provocative, at least that’s what they say on their About Us page. That’s one reason other (more insane) Satanists hate the ST, because they basically openly admit to appropriating Satanic and pagan imagery in jest which is sacrilegious to “real” Satanists and some pagans who actually believe the symbols have power. It works in the sense the ST is a political advocacy group though because it freaks some Christians out.
Satan accepts everyone
Not his fault that God is picky
Satan doesn’t whisper “Believe in me”.
He shouts “Believe in yourself”.
Satan is rad as hell.
God is the dickhead that puts a dangerous tree in the garden despite knowing exactly what’s going to happen. God is the asshole that wipes out everyone (even the animals) except one drunkard and his family because God apparently fucked up again. God is the one who creates a place of infinite punishment for finite crimes.
God is the real villain of the Bible.
And Satan is the hero that fought an omnipotent being knowing he would lose because he wanted freedom more than he wanted victory.
something about better to die on your feet than live on your knees?
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that part from Good Omens S2 was amazing
Preach
Fuck TikTok though
If you have access to BBC content (the broadcaster not the big people) then I would surely recommend viewing the whole series there!
Satan’s the one who tempted Eve to eat the apple, though. Without him, that tree would have been left alone.
Wrong. It’s not satan but the serpent. BUT even so the serpent is the one that tells the truth in the story.
God lies, saying Adam will die if he eats from the tree. The serpent says he’ll gain knowledge of right and wrong. Again, God is always the asshole in the stories.
Nevermind the fact that he punishes his children for eating a fruit from the fucking tree he put in the middle of the garden and said DON’T TOUCH!
The whole story is just so stupid.
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God cursed him to crawl on the ground or something. That’s why snakes slither and don’t got no feet.
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So then I guess God was just being a dick pointing out flaws.
So why did the serpent do that?
Genesis never says that the serpent is Satan, just that it’s a serpent.
Also, god created that serpent knowing full well it would tempt Eve and succeed.
Genesis only makes sense from a Gnostic point of view imo. Snek was good guy all along.
I’m cool with banning satan shit if we ban all other religious shit in politics and law. Fuck your imaginary friends.
The Satanic Temple is an atheistic organization that uses Satan metaphorically, mostly to troll Christians.
DO YOU WORSHIP SATAN?
No, nor do we believe in the existence of Satan or the supernatural. The Satanic Temple believes that religion can, and should, be divorced from superstition. As such, we do not promote a belief in a personal Satan. To embrace the name Satan is to embrace rational inquiry removed from supernaturalism and archaic tradition-based superstitions. Satanists should actively work to hone critical thinking and exercise reasonable agnosticism in all things. Our beliefs must be malleable to the best current scientific understandings of the material world — never the reverse.
https://thesatanictemple.com/pages/faq
As you can see from this uproar, it works quite well too.
Yeah, I know. Good.
That is the exact goal of The Satanic Temple. They would be incredibly happy to have their own symbols removed, as it would mean all religious symbols would be removed from government institutions. They are trying to scare Christians into voting against their own legislation, basically.
The first amendment in the constitution makes it so the government has to give equal rights to all religions, so the Christians can’t remove the Satanic symbols without also voting to remove their own.
The Satanic Temple isn’t religious.
I know, but they’re using religious pretense in the service of freeing us all from religious oppression.
Thats a complicated thing to say because the ST functions as a real religion in the US which is the basis for why they’re able to challenge things in court. If they didn’t qualify as a sincere religion their mission wouldn’t work, and that “sincerely held” qualification is actually challenged in some cases. Recently this qualification became an even bigger deal when people claimed they had religious beliefs against vaccination. In the past its been applied to people challenging the draft on behalf of sincerely held religious beliefs.
I don’t think they’re a religion like Christianity though, maybe a pseudoreligion or civil religion.
As someone planning to move to this area soon I want my kiddo involved!
Be careful you don’t encourage it, or else they won’t want to. :P
People are cats.
The number of adults in the US that think Satan is a literal being is way too fucking high.
It started as an editor using ‘adversary’ in the place of what was probably the goddess Anat appealing the head of the pantheon to kill the son of the protagonist like in the earlier Canaanite A Tale of Aqhat as an intro into what was an adaptation of the also earlier Babylonian Theodicy in Job.
But we couldn’t have a polytheistic holdover, so suddenly there was a supernatural ‘adversary’ (‘Satan’) in a story.
Which in turn spawned fanfiction during the prophet ages where they referred to the supernatural adversary of Job.
Then Hellenistic ideas around Hades (both the place and figure) get added into the mix, and we get the Enochian literature about fallen angels, where the guided katabasis influenced Virgil which later informs Dante’s Inferno.
Then King James messes up translating Isaiah and the Latin for the morning star (Lucifer) gets mistaken for a proper name, further tying the supernatural adversary to being one of the Enochian fallen angels. And we get Milton’s Paradise Lost.
It’s all just mistranslations and fanfiction.
And yet millions of people believe it’s actually a thing so much so that they freak out at the idea of any references to it as literally being dangerous.
In 2022.
An age filled with things beyond the wildest imagination of those in antiquity dreaming up miracles and wonders.
We’re so beyond fucked as a species.
To those people, if there’s no Devil then it means all the bad stuff in their heads and hearts is just them. All the temptations are them. All the hatred, including self-hatred is them. There’s no Devil that made them do it or think it, no external tempter or defiler to resist. They can’t take that.
It is 2023
STOP MAKING IT WORSE.
It’ll be 2024 in like a couple of weeks
💀
It’ll be 2024 in a couple of weeks…
Well you can’t believe Satan is real without believing God is real, and that number is too high too.
Observe:
I just did it.
All I did was was choose to believe a different version of the fairy tale.
For what’s it worth, it was a take on the “The Throne Is Empty” mythos, fucking Metatron, always lyin’
I understood some of these words.
But that was fun to read
Could say similar things about the monotheistic Christian God who seems to have originated in Cannanite polytheism. At some level everything is “made up” though and that doesn’t prevent it from having power. Just look at race for instance.
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Thx. Phone autocorrect is a pita.
There is no way you expect the average person to know this.
I expect the average person to know that there isn’t a supernatural evil being controlling the bad things that happen in the world.
It would be sad how badly these idiots fail to see the irony when it’s spelled out for them if it wasn’t so funny.
They can’t spell, and even if they can they can’t read and don’t listen.
Oh the irony.
After School Satan Club would be such a great name for a band.
Check out the Mountain Goats song Best Ever Death Metal Band in Denton
Hail Satan!
Hail yourself.
ASS Club.
Nice.
Sad that something like this is even needed but the US is full of bigoted hypocrites that want to turn the country into a religious state.
Sad that something like this is even needed but the
USworld is full of bigoted hypocrites that want to turn thecountryworld into a religiousstatewasteland.The majority of western countries are nowhere near as religious as the US. Maybe something like Poland.
Italy, especially south Italy, is ridiculously religious. We’re also one of the few modern countries that actually have laws on blasphemy.
We keep telling people we’re not a religious state but then everyone brings out the knives when someone says maybe having a cross in every class isn’t exactly peak neutrality.
Hahahah good luck to them if they try to pull any of this shit in Western Europe 🍿
Conservatives always want to have a free “marketplace of ideas” until it’s something they fear.
…until it’s something they fear.
Which, unfortunately, is everything they don’t understand, and absolutely for lack of trying.
Yes I love freedom, but not like that.
Of course Tennessee Christians are outraged. The after School Satan Club is most likely way more Christian than they are so there’s stiff competition.
