Salt City Sinner

Posted on 2/2/2020 by Charles R. Bernard Julieann Stipidis has quite an excellent piece up at Bloody Disgusting: “ The Devil to Make Her Do it: ‘The Blackcoat’s Daughter’ and Depictions of Satan and Women in Horror .” In it, she weaves together analyses of The Blackcoat’s Daughter and many other media, ranging from The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina (about which I have also Had Thoughts ) to Pyewacket to The Witch and many others. Stipidis suggests that horror films have historically taken an exploitative view of the relationship between women and Satan, depicting them as the Prince of Darkness’ victims, little more than objects. Now, however, in the post- Exorcist , post- Rosemary’s Baby era, women are more often portrayed as possessors of volition, agents who choose Satan. I find this to be a compelling argument, and well-supported by the reservoirs of evidence that Stipidis marshals to her point.

Posted on 9/21/2019 by the Salt City Sinner By the pricking of my thumbs… something wicked this way comes. Or, at any rate, it might if we’re lucky! The Satanic Temple – an organization of which I am a proud member and about which I have written in the past – is holding something of a contest, you see. We’re raising money for the Temple’s Reproductive Religious Rights campaign. The state that raises the most money by midnight on Halloween will get to host the 2020 Reproductive Religious Rights Rally. Given recent attempts by some Utahns to restrict women’s access to legal abortion, the time to support bodily autonomy is now. I cannot think of a better place than Salt Lake City (with the possible exception of Vatican City) to hold the Satanic Temple’s rally. If you’d like to help make that happen, you can donate to Salt Lake’s efforts here , or you can attend our Unholy Congregation this October: It will be a family-friendly event, held at Crone’s Hollow (the ow...

posted on 6/25/2019 by the Salt City Sinner Hemant Mehta at Friendly Atheist recently wrote about one particularly hateful character, Cheryl K. Chumley. Ms. Chumley boasts the hilarious title of “online opinion editor” at the Washington Times, where she wrote this :   Nothing shows cultural degradation like a nation that was forged by Christian faithfuls on a quest for religious freedom and built by Judeo-Christian principles being torn asunder and cast into judicial, legislative and cultural confusion by the likes of group that hails Satan during a prayer moment at a government get-together. … The First Amendment is being twisted and turned inward and used as a weapon of cultural and political destruction against America by cockroaches that, just a few short years ago, were constrained to dark corners. And they were constrained to dark corners because the moral majority wouldn’t tolerate it otherwise. Mehta does a great job of taking apart Chumley’s idiotic argu...

posted on 4/24/2019 by the Salt City Sinner Because of my unconventional religious beliefs, I expect to be misrepresented and unfairly pilloried. Anyone who stakes out a controversial position that pushes the envelope of free speech or the free exercise of religion can expect some pushback, whether their cause be just (as is the case with the Satanic Temple or ACLU), unjust (conservative Evangelicals writ large, trolls like Roger Stone), or legally-protected but unconscionable (the alt-right, the Westboro Baptist Church). When right wing figures squawk, whine, and weep about how persecuted they are when people quite predictably hate what they have to say, I don’t think it’s the least bit in good faith, because as a Satanist – and, thus, someone whose speech is also often unpopular – I expect to have to deal with the social consequences of my beliefs. Now, on the other hand, the correction of lies and misrepresentations – I think that’s both fair and a productive use of ...

posted on 3/5/2019 by the Salt City Sinner: this post originally appeared at Madness Heart Press If there has ever been a better real-life example of idle hands being the devil’s plaything than Archie Comics , I would be amused and delighted to hear about it. (No, really: at me .) From 1942 through 2014, Archie may have received the occasional update or fine-tuning, but he stayed the same basic Archie: redheaded, beloved of Betty and Veronica, safe as milk. Then, recently, Archie and the gang were delivered from the idle hands of his former curators and into the hot little mitts of Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa, where the devil got delightfully mixed up in things. Aguirre-Sacasa, you see, rebooted the entire franchise from the ground up, giving it an occult twist. This included a reboot of the character Sabrina Spellman, a teenage witch who first appeared in Archie in 1962 and originally had a tween-oriented TV show that premiered in 1996 and ran for an inexplicable seven seaso...

posted on 1/11/2019 by the Salt City Sinner “So…why Satan?” he asked me. It was a reasonable question – albeit a personal one. I am,after all, a Satanist . I’m not an evangelist, however, and people in the United States are socially conditioned to think of religion as an inherently expansionist, conquering influence. For example: even though Christians are instructed to “enter into thy closet, and when thou hast shut thy door, pray” (Matthew 6:6) those rascals are obsessed with the spotlight – grabbing it, keeping it, brightening it. It’s why Evangelical Christians erect giant stonemonuments to their god on public land, why they   want to make your mind up for you on any number of subjects, because look at them (please, won’t you?), how good they are, don’t they know best? Even when I was a Christian, I was a Catholic. While Catholicism is certainly a public-facing faith that has no problem whatsoever exerting political pressure on the saved and unsaved...

posted on x by the Salt City Sinner By now, most of you will have heard that I will not be finishing the remainder of this year as your Defense Against the Dark Arts instructor. Because a number of most hurtful and unseemly rumours have been heard circulating amongst my students, I have kindly been allowed to issue the following clarifications. You WILL still be expected to pass the extemporaneous written examination on “Contract Law In Norse Mythology And The Origins Of Complex Fraud And Trickster Gods” (I suggest you refer to your notes from class throughout May for the purposes of this exercise -- a three page essay should suffice here) . The same does not hold true for my one-day lecture on “Faustian Bargains In Goethe And Marlowe,” however, which has been redacted in its entirety. You are required to find and turn in your notes from this lecture. You will still be expected to perform two simple and one complex banishment(s) to pass your OWLS. Any lecture n...

a guest post on 11/14/13 by Joseph Farah, founder, editor, CEO and Grand Wizard of WND ( EDITOR'S NOTE : as should be obvious to most semi-sentient hominids, this is a work of satire. Since Joseph Farah, however, does not understand satire, and has a   history  of suing people -- for Freedom -- this disclaimer is sadly necessary. Mr. Farah was good enough to bring his own hot, scurrying intestinal cargo of ads, for which Salt City Sinner will receive nothing, because we are godless Communists. With no further exposition, we present the very first Salt City Sinner guest post, from the Reveren Doctor Joseph Farah, Newsman, Esq.) I don't know about you, but Freedom makes me frisky. Unless it's the wrong type of Freedom. I don't like that, and we didn't like that back when life was simpler, better. I'm not talking about the "freedom" peddled today, which is to say the kind the homos, weirdos, and Muslims want. Every single morning when the...

posted 1/25/2013 by the Salt City Sinner What is  it with Aaron Klein and the occult? I can easily explain my own fascination, but A.) I'm not a worshiper of YHWH, and B.) I'm not ensconced in a worldview where demonic entities are lurking around every corner, curdling milk and snacking on good Christian infants. In fact, summoning or communicating with "demonic" forces is like many facets of magick or occult practice-- tricky, difficult, and not for the lazy or inexperienced. Yesterday we were illuminated by Klein's theory that the Sandy Hook massacre was motivated by Satanism (a theory based on one statement by one sketchy source to a tabloid that Adam Lanza had a "web page with the word 'SATAN' on it" in Gothic font -- impeccable "journalism," Aaron!). Well kiss my grits and slap my hamhocks silly, because Investigator Klein is back with a bold new theorem, this time regarding the possible demonic possession and/or actua...

posted 1/23/2013 by the Salt City Sinner "Investigative Journalism," just like Aaron Klein does! Let's leave the indescribable recent news from Connecticut out of this as much as we can. What happened at Sandy Hook was beyond horrible, and to be quite honest, the events of that day - and the shooting deaths that have happened since - still are too angular and sharp for my mind to get a good grip on them. I suspect I have something to say about gun violence in America, but for now, I'm just quietly watching, trying to understand how things in this country have gone so terribly wrong. Not so for self-described "investigative journalist" Aaron Klein! Alex Jones' "Infowars" - tinfoil hat not included Klein is an ultra-right-wing talk radio host and author of several splendid books filled to the brim with piping hot paranoid conspiracy yarns. He also is a frequent contributor to store-brand Stormfront imitator WND, your one-stop shop f...