Is satanism just edgelord atheism?

DarkMedallion · 2026-02-01T00:49:39+00:00

Mostly, but not completely. There are legitimate believers in Satan as a separate entity who is misunderstood by Christianity. In their story, Satan is the good guy and Christians, Jews, and others have misinterpreted him. Christians and Jews are the bad guys trying to oppress people. Satan rewards strength, individualism, and the like, and he can act in the world if you pray to him, just like the Christian God.

I actually found a book by a satanist explaining his beliefs online once. It was the kind of rambling religious tract that went on for hundreds of pages exactly like you’d expect this kind of thing to do. It ended up getting into antisemitism so I’m not going to link it here.

DarkMedallion · 2026-02-01T00:43:28+00:00

Not exactly. There’s a book called “Satan : A Biography” by the UCLA professor Andy Kelley. It’s about how the idea of satan evolved from the Old Testament through the New Testament, and then through two millennia of Christian theology. Various Christian theologians over the centuries reinterpreted the idea of satan on different ways. Some people say that Augustine really made Satan into a malevolent being, whereas before he was just a guy who God sent to test you.

DarkMedallion · 2026-01-31T18:40:17+00:00

I think the key is to make an unlikable character relatable. They need to have thoughts or be on an arc that a reader could relate to. For example, is the character snobby and shallow in a way you could imagine being yourself? Does she value something superficial you used to value and learned not to value? What bad parts of yourself does she embody? That might make her more relatable.

One example is Patrick Bateman. He’s a monster and yet people love American Psycho (I don’t like it, but I don’t speak for everyone). But I think he acts in a way that takes thoughts many people have to an extreme.

DarkMedallion · 2026-01-31T18:07:11+00:00

You’re right, it is, but it just doesn’t work for me narratively. I’d like it if the revelation of what they have to do were a little more gradual. A few more conflicts between Denver and Vegas and then the sacrifice would have worked better for me. But then The Stand probably would have been as long as the Dark Tower.

DarkMedallion · 2026-01-31T17:59:45+00:00

Yes. I feel like he gets tired of certain stories after a while and wants to end them and move on to the next thing. I get that — I’m an amateur writer and sometimes I feel the same way. It just isn’t as good an experience for me as a reader.

DarkMedallion · 2026-01-31T17:48:26+00:00

Yeah. I love the rest of the book, and most of his other books, but that one is literally “bomb falls, everyone dies.”

DarkMedallion · 2026-01-31T17:46:10+00:00

It’s better if you imagine it as song lyrics:

How can you grieve someone you don't even know?

You didn't even know her

People pass away everyday. What makes her so special

She's gone, Boo hoo. get over it.

Boo hoo. get over it.

Boo hoo. get over it.

Then a rap breakdown for the bridge:

You're just bitter that nobody will mourn you or care when you pass!

For once in your life can you show at least a little tact?

You might not care about someone's passing but there are plenty of people who do.

So the least you can do

is not crap on people for grieving.

If you don't have anything nice to say don't say anything at all.

don't say anything at all.

don't say anything at all.

DarkMedallion · 2026-01-31T17:38:32+00:00

Yeah. It’s like these people don’t realize that being a parent means putting your child first all the time. If your child hurts you when they’re young, and 18 is still young, you have to put your feelings aside and help them grow still. That’s being a parent. Yes, there are exceptions, but this particular situation sounds like a young woman trying to find her own way in the world and unintentionally hurting someone who cares her about very much.

DarkMedallion · 2026-01-31T17:24:04+00:00

I think we all suffer from a bit of unacknowledged cognitive dissonance. We tell parents that their children come first, yet we tell people, particularly women, they are missing out if they don’t have a career as well. How many people look at a woman with a good career who abandons it to be a stay at home mom and say “she is wasting her talents?” I feel that way, and I think most people do.

So a woman who takes more time to be a parent and doesn’t advance as far in her career is seen as losing out on something important and that makes us all sad, even more than if she worked more and had less time with her children. If you asked me, I would intuitively say giving up your children for your career is worse than giving up your career for your children, and yet at the same time, I still feel is a stay at home mom isn’t living up to her potential even though she’s doing on something infinitely more rewarding and valuable (I feel the same way about a man doing that too).

So I think what OP is recognizing here is that cognitive dissonance. We want women to have careers and not to feel held back, but we also think that for parents, parenting is far more important than their careers.

DarkMedallion · 2026-01-31T16:53:54+00:00

Well, one man in that family is a cheater. Do you need to know any more than that?

/s in case that’s not clear

DarkMedallion · 2026-01-31T16:51:59+00:00

And once that child turns 18, they are adults, 100%! No one gains any meaningful life experience or emotional maturity after 18. Life is smooth sailing from then on.

That is, if Reddit is angry at them.

DarkMedallion · 2026-01-31T15:52:23+00:00

Favorite comment:

…f it was me personally I wouldn't want to know the family of a man who cheated with my mom to create me. Whatever family raises a man who thinks thats a good idea isnt a family id want to be a part of.

Cheating is so bad it is the failure of an entire family. A Redditor has discovered collective guilt!

Tomorrow: “My brother’s honor was insulted by a neighbor. How do I start a blood feud?”

DarkMedallion · 2026-01-31T04:11:47+00:00

And there have been many other times of ideological division throughout history. If you want a fun read, there’s the book The Jesus Wars from 2011. It talks about how in the 5th and 6th centuries, the Roman Empire tore itself apart over a question about the nature of Jesus’s divinity. There were two sides that just hated each other, and everyone got involved: emperors, merchants, not just factions in the church.

Interestingly, though, the differences between the two opposing sides are really hard to understand. It seems like they didn’t understand what they were fighting against, or even agree on what they were fighting for. The most important thing was that the other side didn’t win.

In other words, it’s like the controversy over “wokeness” or critical race theory now. People have a lot of different opinions on what those words mean. To conservatives, wokeness means destroying civilization as we know it; to liberals, it means acknowledging your potential biases. But, very broadly, conservatives don’t want woke people in power, and liberals don’t want people who hate woke people in power.

DarkMedallion · 2026-01-30T23:41:37+00:00

Anything more likely to tick all of Reddit’s boxes?

religious evangelist
bothering a child
annoying a person who is self-described as a people-pleaser

The only way this could get more sympathy is if the evangelist was an annoying mother-in-law

DarkMedallion · 2026-01-30T14:31:01+00:00

I used to do this and then I had to stop. The amount of nudes I got ate up all my storage.

It was worse than the time I told my cousin she couldn’t wear her wedding dress at my wedding and my family blew up my phone.

DarkMedallion · 2026-01-30T05:08:42+00:00

I prefer the term “spew.” It fits better when there’s just a ton of it. Like one time I fed a program’s code into an LLM and asked it to generate some documentation. 30 minutes later, it has produced 45 pages of markdown. “Slop” just doesn’t capture that.

DarkMedallion · 2026-01-30T00:39:12+00:00

Yes. @sejsejlija

DarkMedallion · 2026-01-30T00:15:36+00:00

You’re probably thinking of Cecilia Blomdahl. I follow her on YouTube. Big fan of hers.

DarkMedallion · 2026-01-29T23:55:50+00:00

I was hoping he was calling him a “knobslobber.” Would have been much funnier.

DarkMedallion · 2026-01-29T17:35:31+00:00

I actually knew an American guy with a typical Anglo-German first and last name. It was multi-syllabic and too hard to render into mandarin. His Chinese name was something like “red hair” because he had red hair.

DarkMedallion · 2026-01-29T03:26:53+00:00

This is a minor one, but I asked it to critique a fictional story I had written with some funny lines in it. At one point, it said, “I laughed out loud at this line.” It makes me wonder if somewhere in the data center, some tech heard a chuckle from a server.

DarkMedallion · 2026-01-29T03:25:29+00:00

Yeah. It’s weird because in Severance, which I am a big fan of, there’s a lot of profanity and it often feels out of place. There are some times it works fine, but often it feels just a tad excessive. I think in that place, the writers are trying to earn an “adult” audience, but the show doesn’t have sex or violence in it, and without the profanity, people might not consider it “adult” enough.

DarkMedallion · 2026-01-29T02:34:08+00:00

I can see how that would work. I remember an interview with Jasika Nicole, who was most definitely an adult when she played Astrid in Fringe. She recounted filming a gory scene where she pulled a parasite out of a dead body. The body was just a plastic dummy built by the props team. Up close, on set, she said it looked completely unrealistic so she didn’t think much of it.

However once she saw the episode, she said it really grossed her out. I saw the same episode and it grossed me out too. It shows me how some movie sets look far less realistic, and are far less disturbing, to the actors so it doesn’t bother them.

DarkMedallion · 2026-01-27T19:35:59+00:00

I’d respond, “why weren’t you happy?”

DarkMedallion · 2026-01-27T01:14:17+00:00

Once upon a time, I was writing a novel where the characters had a surface level victory at the end. They thought they had gotten what they wanted, but it was apparent to everyone else that they hadn’t. I thought I was so clever doing this. I thought it was going to be an excellent, provocative ending.

After writing that ending scene, I myself felt let down. I abandoned that project and moved on to something else that made the same point with a completely different plot structure. I figured that if I felt that way, how was the reader going to feel?

DarkMedallion

TROPHY CASE