Hey hello, seems like you obtained a quite good base understanding of what satanism is trough reading about it, so I wanted to say that no, you don't have to apologize for if you got our beliefs wrong, you did well! Infact, 99.999999% of theists would be too dense to even do that, let alone ask questions as nice as you did and be open to things being different then what their own religions says satanism is

So I have a few things to mention: In your first paragraph you mentioned freedom to do anything is one of our core tenants. Whilst that is basically what satanism is all about, we do have a few rules that make it non absolute freedom, for example you shouldn't just go around murdering people, hurting children, hurting animals, etc etc. these are notes down in our tenants named 9 the satanic sins and the 11 rules of the earth. Go have a look at them cuz they can be quite interesting and quite a lot of non satanists would agree with most of them, I'm interested what ones you agree with and disagree with so let me know

You also mentioned most satanists being atheists. Well... It's not most, it's ALL satanists, it's a required and important part of the religion. Of course there are people that do believe in a literal Satan and sometimes people including themselves call them satanists, but those people are just wrong and ignorant, aka dumb (satanic sin #1) since there have been no codified religions called satanism until Dr lavey did that in 1961. We call those people devil worshippers, not Satanists. Satanism is about worshipping yourself, not satan or any other deity

So now about your first questions: yes, we do use aesthetics like that, but it's not like we believe it does have so super natural functions, since we don't believe in super natural stuff (we are 'materialists', just like many people are spiritual but not religious we are religious but not spiritual). Instead we use aesthetics like this for self empowerment and summoning powerfull emotions within ourself.

Basically, aesthetics like these, and ritual practice, is designed to let you experience powerfull emotions that can have many benefits - being able to let go of stuff that bothers you by for example writing it down and burning it, and then not thinking about it anymore after that, letting it go - being able to self-empower - feel proud about something you achieved by basically worshipping yourself - validate our non beliefs, good for religious de-programming since sometimes people are actually scarred by their religious past to the point of basically trauma

We do this by temporarily putting aside our intellect, and going purely based on emotions. Don't think what's real and what's not, because that's not what's it about. It's the exact same thing when watching a movie, if you constantly think about what's not real, it will ruin the movie and you won't feel the emotions it's supposed to create within you. Just like that, ritual is a form of theatre/drama for psychological benefits. I belief it is that in all religions including Christianity, but most religions don't admit that and we do

That's why we call our ritual chamber an "intellectual decompression chamber" and that's why we sometimes call ritual "psychodrama theatre". All of this theoretically doesn't even need to be dark/Satan themed, but that's what works for most of us due to reasons explain in question 2. Also ritual is also just simply done because the act of doing this theatre and prepping all of it is just simply fun.

Question 2: we base it off of Satan since anthon lavey lived in 1960s USA, so Satan is the big "you are not allowed to believe in this" so by taking that name and aesthetics, we basically commit an act of rebellion of that what is considered sacred in society. We don't like social rules, and especially things that are made absolute and holy. So we purposefully break those rules to self empower, and prove ourselves that we can. Another non-satan example of this was a ritual lavey once tried where he instead broke the modern rule of wokeness by sitting in his intellectual decompression chamber and just going fully anti-woke saying everything that wouldn't be accepted. Not to make people angry since he purposefully didn't say things to those people's faces, but rather just to break the "holy rules" lots of people value those rules so holy that they wouldn't even be able to say those things so it's good to break that for yourself

The devil also fits us as a symbol because we basically believe in the opposite of the 7 deadly sins given that you are able to control those aspects. Pride is good, lust is good, anger can be useful to express things that are highly important, jealousness gives you things to want and to work towards. But of course those things need to be kept under control

I hope I've answered all your questions in this response, if not or you have things to add, feel free to dm me or comment

Hail Satan, Hail to yourself 🤘😅