They put cool shit up in state capitols (see: snaketivity), have “after school satan” clubs, abortion rituals. All sorts of shit to use the cover of religion to assert freedoms.

Things that you normally don’t think about. For example if you tried to get a job and the owner refused to hire you, because you don’t believe in his religion, you can sue that they are discriminating. If you are atheist, that won’t work, because you don’t have a religion.

If a certain group claims to be offended by something, because it affects their religion, atheists have no say, because they have no religion.

There’s no tax exemptions, money that might be directed to religious institutions won’t go to atheist organizations, because again that’s not a religion and so on.

As for the other commenter’s, about putting Capitol displays and after school programs is meant to emphasize separation of church and state and religion in schools. The “abortion rituals” are for fighting recent SCOTUS ruling, that it apparently infringes their religious freedoms and prevents practicing their religion (kind of contra to Christians imposing their beliefs on others). Though, with current SCOTUS and states that are banning abortion, I don’t know if it does much.

That’s because they don’t believe Satan or dark magic exists.

All religion is as meaningless as the meaning we attach to any word.

U.S. Christian Nationalists are engaged in a campaign of legal and political efforts to change U.S. law and public policy in such a way that it removes divisions between public policy and religious doctrine, or uses public money for Christian causes. The Temple of Satan was (at least partially) founded to combat those efforts and to set people free by spreading knowledge. They do this by subverting the laws that privilege Christians (religious holiday displays, religious after school clubs, etc); by working to shine a light on what Christian’s are doing while offering a community and guidelines for moral living without fear of gods concocted by prehistoric man. In many of their materials, they allude to being the snake in the garden of Eden, whose only crime was sharing information with Eve. In the one bit of research I did for this comment, I also learned that satan is just the Hebrew word for “accuser” - and originally they just pointed out how dumb some things were.

Contextually, the Temple of Satan name is honestly probably more relevant to them than Christian is to U.S. Jesus worshippers.

What do you think Satanism is about? I model my behavior on a rational, scientific, and humanistic worldview and I fight against superstition. One of the predominant superstitious organisations in my country have a mythical being that espouses all of these same traits and they call it Satan. It’s convenient for us to refer to ourselves using their own language, so they instantly know we are against anti-humanism and superstitious oppression.

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But merely being able to communicate with people has never been sufficient to make peace with them, at least from my experience. Otherwise I’d be much more popular with people, because I never had trouble reading, listening to, and writing to people, but I’m not good at talking to people. I typically need a lot more prior information (i.e. cultural norms, dictionary of body language, recent local history, a catalog of an individual’s interests and their definitions, etc.) to talk to people effectively, which I often don’t have or acquire by fucking up enough times to figure it out by hand 🙃.