In another bizarre Sign of the Times, the UK Guardian ran a superstitious story yesterday headlined, “Satanists to volunteer in Florida schools in protest at DeSantis religious bill.” A basket of new K-12 laws took effect in Florida yesterday, including a brand-new law allowing public schools to hire chaplains. So the Left deployed its perennial “anti-religious” shock troops, the Satanic Temple, and its Democrat crowd-favorite, the After School Satan clubs for kids.
As the Guardian aptly described, over the years, the Temple and its A.S.S. clubs have bullied many other states, and pushed around other Governors who tremulously backed away from restoring even the tiniest scraps of historic Christian norms to public schools.
But Governor DeSantis isn’t having it. He said, “bring it on:
The fly in the Temple’s ‘Dark Arts hemorrhoid cream’ is its too-clever-by-half attempt to have it both ways. On one hand, they claim they don’t worship the Dark Lord, not really, but rather just prop him up as a figurehead for “rebellion”
As you can see, the Satanic Temple is a basically harmless and widely misunderstood organization dedicated to instructing America’s youth in scientific principles like the phases of the Moon and the best times for conducting science experiments like sacrificing farm animals at midnight. But, and this is the point, they don’t really worship the devil.
But if they don’t really worship anything, how can it be a religion? Science, after all, is widely advertised as the opposite of religion, even though Christians invented the damned thing, a decision they probably wish they could take over again. I’ll grant you that many “scientists” act like they are acolytes of some mystery religion,* but still. (* See, e.g., climate change, covid shots, and pandemic panics.)
In April, 2019, one day after drinking far too much champagne at the annual accountants’ conference in Maui, the Internal Revenue Service took two Tylenol PM by accident.
Before slumping over on their desks, they approved the Satanic Temple as a non-theistic tax-exempt religious organization.
Mostly because the Satanists compared themselves to certain atheistic variants of Buddhism, but without all the meditating and sitting around. Who has time for that?
And so began the Satanic Common Era, where a smelly pack of overweight, blue-haired morons with face tattoos began swanking around and claiming that the “government approved their religion,” a ‘religion’ that mostly consists of playing video games, munching on designer recreational drugs, and angrily brooding about how Christians refuse to do it too.
But the truth is, only tax auditors have approved their Satanic non-religion as a “religion.” The Supreme Court has never had the chance to weigh in. Governor DeSantis —himself a lawyer— appears ready to bring that fight. “Go ahead, make my day,” he said, and the Nation may soon get the chance to reconsider the Satanic Temple’s tax-exempt status.