Diabolical Authority: Anton LaVey, The Satanic Bible and the Satanist "Tradition"

The status of The Satanic Bible as an authoritative scripture-or, perhaps more accurately, as a kind of quasi-scripture-within the Satanic subculture was initially brought to my attention during my first face-to-face encounter with Satanists in the Spring of 2000. Via the internet, I had found a small Satanist group in Portage, Wisconsin, which was about an hour south of where I resided at the time. This group, the Temple of Lylyth, distinguishes itself from Anton LaVey's brand of Satanism chiefly by its emphasis on feminine nature of the Dark Power. I arranged to meet with them in Portage on a Friday evening in connection with a research project on which I was working at the time. Over the course of our conversation, the founder and then leader of the group mentioned that on Friday evenings he was usually downtown where a small group of fervent Christians regularly set up what might be called a "preaching station" to spread the Gospel. This young fellow (he was nineteen at the time) would confront them as a practicing Satanist. He always carried a copy of The Satanic Bible with him, not just so he could quote some of accusations LaVey leveled against Christianity, but also so he could correct anything these evangelists might say about Satanism by citing an authoritative source. I'm sure this is something of a caricature, but I was left with the impression of dueling religionists, Christians hurling Bible verses at my informant as he matched blow for blow with quotes from The Satanic Bible. This experience led me to pay attention whenever other Satanists mentioned The Satanic Bible

New Religion Adherents: An Overview of Anglophone Census and Survey Data

General estimates of the extent of the New Religions phenomenon vary considerably. The two basic quantitative questions in this area are: How many groups? And, How many people? These questions are not as simple as they might at first appear. A more fundamental question involves classification: Where does one draw the line between alternative and non-alternative religions? What one finds when one actually tries to determine where to draw such a line is that the difference between “mainstream” and “alternative” is a matter of degree rather than a sharplydefined distinction

Who Serves Satan? A Demographic and Ideological Profile

In order to test conventional wisdom about modern Satanists, an online questionnaire was used to gather data from 140 respondents. Based on this data, a demographic and ideological profile was constructed which indicated that the statistically-average Satanist is an unmarried, white male in his mid-twenties with a few years of college. He became involved in Satanism through something he read in high school, and has been a self-identified Satanist for more than seven years. Raised Christian, he explored one non-Satanist religious group beyond the one in which he was raised before settling into Satanism. His view of Satan is some variety of non-theistic humanism and he practices magic. The length of average involvement and the often reflective responses to openended questions indicates that, far from being confined to adolescent rebels, many Satanists are reflective individuals who--despite the fact that youthful rebellion was usually a factor in the beginning--have come to appropriate Satanism as a mature religious option

Sect-Bashing in the Guise of Scholarship: A Critical Appraisal of Select Studies of Soka Gakkai

We began by noting that, although certain kinds of analyses of religion have been rejected by the academic mainstream, older patterns of prejudicial scholarship have tended to persist in the subfield of new religious movements. While there is no sound reason for continuing to permit writers to articulate judgmental points of view in this subfield, popular prejudice against minority religions has served to make many scholars "tone-deaf" to an author's biases against such religious groups. The task the present paper set for itself was to argue against this double standard. The argument was built around an analysis of select scholarship on Soka Gakkai International, an organization chosen because it has been highly controversial and because a reasonable quantity of articles and books had been composed about the group. It was also argued that the scholar's primary goal should always be to articulate a humanly meaningful understanding of a given religion--both an understanding of the world of the participants as well as an understanding of what such religions mean for society as a whole

Autobiography of a Schism

In my youth, I was a member of Yogi Bhajan’s Healthy Happy Holy Organisation (3HO), a new religious movement that blends kundalini yoga with Sikhism. In the process of leaving that organisation, I formed a short-lived splinter group – the Spiritual Dawn Community – that lasted less than a year. In the present article, I recount the narrative of this splintering, and then reflect on the split in terms of different theoretical discussions of schisms and apostasy. Though prior theorizing provides certain insights, no analyst has thus far adequately captured the dynamic and fluid situation that leads up to a schism. From the perspective of someone who has experienced the schismatic process from the inside, it is clear that there are any number of different points at which a schism could have been prevented – even in cases where the split appears to have been inevitable

Photoelectrochemical water splitting: silicon photocathodes for hydrogen evolution

The development of low cost, scalable, renewable energy technologies is one of today's most pressing scientific challenges. We report on progress towards the development of a photoelectrochemical water-splitting system that will use sunlight and water as the inputs to produce renewable hydrogen with oxygen as a by-product. This system is based on the design principle of incorporating two separate, photosensitive inorganic semiconductor/liquid junctions to collectively generate the 1.7-1.9 V at open circuit needed to support both the oxidation of H_2O (or OH^-) and the reduction of H^+ (or H_2O). Si microwire arrays are a promising photocathode material because the high aspect-ratio electrode architecture allows for the use of low cost, earth-abundant materials without sacrificing energy-conversion efficiency, due to the orthogonalization of light absorption and charge-carrier collection. Additionally, the high surfacearea design of the rod-based semiconductor array inherently lowers the flux of charge carriers over the rod array surface relative to the projected geometric surface of the photoelectrode, thus lowering the photocurrent density at the solid/liquid junction and thereby relaxing the demands on the activity (and cost) of any electrocatalysts. Arrays of Si microwires grown using the Vapor Liquid Solid (VLS) mechanism have been shown to have desirable electronic light absorption properties. We have demonstrated that these arrays can be coated with earth-abundant metallic catalysts and used for photoelectrochemical production of hydrogen. This development is a step towards the demonstration of a complete artificial photosynthetic system, composed of only inexpensive, earth-abundant materials, that is simultaneously efficient, durable, and scalable

God Making in China: Notes Toward a Theory of Deification

Some religious leaders tend to gravitate towards claims of increasingly greater holiness. This sometimes results in the assumption of explicitly prophetic roles or in more extreme cases, claims of divinity. The present paper discusses the apotheosis of Li Hongzhi, the founder of Falun Gong. Although a comprehensive theory of divinization remains elusive, some general points can be made. First, we argue that any effort to theorize deification must include the observation that it is a process that arises in the context of social interaction between leader and followers rather than exclusively within the psyche of the leader, a point which has sometimes been missed in previous analyses. Second, divinization is a gradual process, with claims of divinity typically being amplified over time. Third, one must consider that divinization typically takes place within social spaces more or less set apart from the larger society, with group dynamics that facilitate deification. Fourth, divinization can be a strategy for coping with external threats like critical outsiders and repression. Finally, we argue that any effort to understand deification needs to consider the wider cultural and religious context. ‘God’ is a polythetic term, and divinization may therefore take on many different forms