Checkmite
Skepticifimisticalationist
http://www.cnn.com/2004/WORLD/europe/10/24/uk.devilworship/index.html
Worship on a warship? How quaint...
Actually it's LaVey "Satanism", which can't really be devil worship since Satanists don't believe in the devil. Unless, of course, you're a fundamentalist Christian, in which case everyone who's not a fundamentalist Christian does, in fact, worship the devil.
In actuality, LaVey's "Satanism" is actually nothing more than a bunch of people who simply hate Christians, choosing the label and performing a tongue-in-cheek "Black Mass" for no particular reason, except to antagonize Christians. Of course, many Christians have been scaring themselves with stories of bogeyman-like "Satanic cults" for ages before LaVey started his "church"; LaVey attempted to make fun of this silly superstition by writing a "Satanic Bible" and founding the Church of Satan. What LaVey probably didn't realize (not that he would care about it if he did) was that the actual founding of the church put a material face on the bogeymen, and many people were led to believe that if the "Satanists" were real after all, then all the ghastly activities that had been attributed to them for decades were probably factual as well. These sorts of misunderstandings led directly to the Satanic Ritual Abuse panic of the 1980s in which hundreds of children were forced to invent stories of abuse that jailed scores of innocent people. LaVey emphasised throughout his bible that Satanists were not allowed to "harm animals or people, especially children", but of course people who would never touch a book called "The Satanic Bible" couldn't possibly know about such restrictions.
Worship on a warship? How quaint...
Actually it's LaVey "Satanism", which can't really be devil worship since Satanists don't believe in the devil. Unless, of course, you're a fundamentalist Christian, in which case everyone who's not a fundamentalist Christian does, in fact, worship the devil.
In actuality, LaVey's "Satanism" is actually nothing more than a bunch of people who simply hate Christians, choosing the label and performing a tongue-in-cheek "Black Mass" for no particular reason, except to antagonize Christians. Of course, many Christians have been scaring themselves with stories of bogeyman-like "Satanic cults" for ages before LaVey started his "church"; LaVey attempted to make fun of this silly superstition by writing a "Satanic Bible" and founding the Church of Satan. What LaVey probably didn't realize (not that he would care about it if he did) was that the actual founding of the church put a material face on the bogeymen, and many people were led to believe that if the "Satanists" were real after all, then all the ghastly activities that had been attributed to them for decades were probably factual as well. These sorts of misunderstandings led directly to the Satanic Ritual Abuse panic of the 1980s in which hundreds of children were forced to invent stories of abuse that jailed scores of innocent people. LaVey emphasised throughout his bible that Satanists were not allowed to "harm animals or people, especially children", but of course people who would never touch a book called "The Satanic Bible" couldn't possibly know about such restrictions.