this post was submitted on 23 Feb 2025
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The Satanic Temple
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I noticed there wasn't a TST Lemmy community. The Satanic Temple is a modern satanic religion that aims to promote human rights and compassion. Check out their about page on their official website at https://thesatanictemple.com/pages/about-us. Note that this community is not an official affiliation. TST is also separate and not affiliated with the Church of Satan, who have a slightly different viewpoint of what satanism truly is. Dunno what to post in here, but maybe some will search for this and take part. Hello!
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I hear you. I was a member from early '18 through mid-pandemic. The chapter I was in was moderately active, and I had a number of friends. There was a fair amount of shit-talking about Doug Mesner from disaffected people, but it was pretty easy to ignore. Then the new Code of Conduct came out, and it was... Bad. Like, members weren't allowed to publicly talk about their own experiences in their chapters on Reddit without prior permission and having their statements vetted first. It was clearly authoritarian. I also saw a person that was fairly high up in the org use slander and lies to get someone he personally disliked--a former chapter head!--completely thrown out.
So I dipped. And in leaving, I lost most of my closer friends in the area.
Unfortunately, you can't separate the org out from Mesner and Solling; they have completely legal ownership of the brand and all associated trademarks and IP. No matter what rules are put in place, as long as they have legal control over the entity the rules are meaningless. ...As has been demonstrated by Mesner throwing out a lot of ministers that were critical of his bullshit.
If you want to find people that are like-minded locally, your best bet--assuming you aren't in a hard-red state/province--is to find an anarchist mutual aid organization that's close by. I've found that anarchists--not ancaps--closely align with the values that TST claimed to hold.
This right here has been one of my major issues. Even if I could disregard some of the things that Mesner is said and done, the organization starts and stops with him. It's unfortunate because it really did seem like such a great thing to be a part of.
But I suppose the old quote "power corrupts..." stands true here.
Unfortunately, it's super red here. I considered starting my own chapter here just for name recognition, getting people together, then leaving to start something new with the members, but... that wouldn't go over well.