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In case you missed it: "The Harvard Extension Cultural Studies Club has teamed up with the Satanic Temple to re-enact a 'Black Mass' on May 12 at 8:30pm at the Queen's Head Pub, in Memorial Hall, with “commentary and historical context” provided by some of the Temple's atheistic Satanists." Link.

Jeffrey Burton Russell, the leading historian on all things devilish and no Catholic, explained the absolute absurdity of devil worship. I used his logic in an earlier column called "Silly Satanists" that I wrote for Catholic Exchange, which you can find here. Excerpt:

The Church of Satan justifies its odd beliefs on the basis that conventional thinking about the Devil is wrong. It's a fundamental tenet of their belief. It is also absurd or, to quote Jeffrey Burton Russell, author of a four-volume history on the Devil,“inherently meaningless”:

[Their claim] asserts that everything humans know about the concept of Satan is in opposition to the absolute, objective reality of Satan. It ignores the fact that we have no way of knowing the absolute reality of Satan, whatever it might be. The only thing that we can know about Satan is the human concept of Satan. The idea that the Devil is good, not evil, has further dimensions of irrationality, because the human concept of Satan was developed . . . precisely for the purpose of personifying radical evil. Satan is by definition evil. The claim that the evidence in favor of the good Devil has been destroyed, leaving only the evidence of his “detractors,” is equally silly”¦ [E]ven the possibility of such “evidence” does not exist, because it would contradict the very definition of the subject.

From the same column:

I can't say I've read [The Satanic Bible], but I have a copy of LaVey's follow-up, The Satanic Witch, a book that helps woman put into practice the principles of the Satanic Bible. I bought it while in college. I was never drawn to any dark worship, but I remember thinking that the book probably contained something of merit, either interesting facts, wild speculations that would humor me, maybe even dark insight or other angles I'd never considered.

Man, I was disappointed. The book, not to put too fine a point on it, is stupid. It's embarrassingly immature, employing no more intellectual rigor than one might expect from an eighth grader. It basically tells women to do whatever is effective to get what they want, especially touting the use of sex to dominate others (in the Introduction, LaVey's witch daughter Zeena tells us she dominated so effectively that she got pregnant when she was 13).

In her famous study about Adolf Eichmann, Hannah Arendt said Eichmann did not embody radical evil, but rather exemplified the “banality of evil.”

The Church of Satan confirms such banality. They profess meaningless beliefs and adopt an ethical system of “do as thou wilt,” which is, of course, the ethical system of the average toddler in the midst of the “terrible twos.”

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