There are people who will tell you that to be a Satanist, you have to read Anton LaVey because he invented it, that no such thing existed prior to him.

We would not grant that as so. The Satanisms that predated and have rejected his are quite rich. (In our estimation, much richer.)

It is true that there are some of things in The Satanic Bible that are not terrible. “Do not harm little children” — who is going to take issue with that?

But sometimes people will say, “Your Bible says X while my Satanic one says Y” as like a gotcha, well, one wonders how much they’ve really read The Satanic Bible, how much they’ve really thought about it, and then how much deeper they’ve gone into LaVey’s life and writings beyond that.

Ideas like “your home”, “open territory”, and “mating signal” require an awful lot of apologetics to explain; it’s quite easy to see why douchebags take the idea of “psychic vampires” or a license to treat people cruelly and run with it to hurt vulnerable people in their own lives. That’s before we even get into eugenics, smellz theories, reproductive autonomy, and philosophical and personal friendliness with reactionaries up to and including fascists. “#SatanismSoWhite” ain’t just a weird 50-plus year coincidence.

Now, a person can be a LaVeyan Satanist, read all of his works, take only the good stuff and leave the rest behind. that’s fine. You can subvert his philosophical grounding and uplift your own as superior to it. That would be fitting, even.

At this point, though, you are a “Reconstructionist Satanist,” and you ought to at least respect the Reconstructionist Jews and Radical Christians out there doing the same with their texts and rituals without any ideas of textual superiority.

“B-but your book says-” look, if you’re still so culturally Christian you think you’re bound by the dead letters of dead men, you’re going to be in for a bad time nearly everywhere. “The Torah is not in heaven”, yes, but if you’re a Satanist, you should let go of the idea of prophets and scripture entirely.