When I stumbled upon this t-shirt online, I had to have it. It commemorates my favorite scene from The Witch - in my opinion, one of the greatest horror movies of this millennium (not to overhype it, lol). In this scene, the last survivor of a Puritan family living on the outskirts of colonial America, after being rewarded for their divine fervor with the unrelenting torment of an indifferent universe, is given a tantalizing offer by the devil, who asks, "wouldst thou like to live deliciously?" It's not that he's asking her to sell her soul (although it could be interpreted that way), but more that he's giving her permission to enjoy the good things in life (like frolicking naked in the woods, and relishing the pleasure of sexual ecstasy), something her Puritan ideology forbade, and for what? Unending suffering. So why not try the alternative? God wants you to suffer. The devil just wants you to have a good time.
Now let's get real. Blind faith is not a virtue. It is a handicap. Just because I question the authority of men who claim to speak for God, does not make me evil. If I do not believe in a God, it does not mean that I do not believe in goodness. And if I relish antagonism against the church, it's because I rail against the bureaucracy of spirituality, which is a perversion of the divine. God does not dwell in houses made by human hands. Lucifer is the protagonist of the Bible, a courageous rebel standing up to an authoritarian (and genocidal) ruler. Satanism is virtuous in the sense of its original etymology - not as a form of worshiping darkness (a Hollywood fantasy), but standing in the role of God's accuser, demanding justice for wrongdoings. If God is evil, then Satan is our salvation. Consider that the devil is stereotypically depicted using imagery of pagan gods - a literal case of demonizing foreign cultures, committed wholesale by Christian imperialists. The truth is more complex than those who would whitewash history for their own benefit want you to believe.
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