Community members in a Tennessee school district want to banish Satan from their children’s halls after the formation of a new club was announced.

The After School Satan Club (ASSC) wants to establish a branch in Chimneyrock elementary school in the Memphis-Shelby county schools (MSCS) district.

The ASSC is a federally recognized nonprofit organization and national after-school program with local chapters across the US. The club is associated with the Satanic Temple, though it claims it is secular and “promotes self-directed education by supporting the intellectual and creative interests of students”.

The Satanic Temple makes it clear its members do not actually worship the devil or believe in the existence of Satan or the supernatural. Instead Satan is used as a symbol of free will, humanism and anti-authoritarianism.

  • @[email protected]
    link
    fedilink
    607 months ago

    If god is omniscient they would know exactly what everyone is going to choose, nullifying free will entirely

    • Cosmic Cleric
      link
      fedilink
      97 months ago

      If god is omniscient they would know exactly what everyone is going to choose, nullifying free will entirely

      Yeah but if God knows every choice that’ll be made ahead of time, it doesn’t mean he’s taking the choice away from the person actually making the choice, they still go through the motion of making the actual choice, and hence, they have free will to make the choice. God just predicted it ahead of time.

    • @[email protected]
      link
      fedilink
      English
      57 months ago

      This is a great example of why I don’t believe free will is a coherent concept outside of religion. It’s basically a perk that negates God’s omniscience as it applies to you, but if you don’t believe in God, it’s meaningless.

    • TigrisMorte
      link
      fedilink
      27 months ago

      Ah, but that is the point, until Man chose it hadn’t happened, it is the precognition paradox. Until the event occurs, what is known is all the possibilities.

      • @[email protected]
        link
        fedilink
        27 months ago

        That’s… just like your opinion man.

        Then god isnt omnipotent, cause you know, it lacks the power of whats actually to come and is only good at knowing all the hypotheticals. Or may be lacks omnicience, but one could argue that knowing all the possibilities counts.

        All that matters is that its lacking something, when it shouldnt

        • TigrisMorte
          link
          fedilink
          07 months ago

          Spirituality is all opinion man.

          But no, it not lacking anything.

            • TigrisMorte
              link
              fedilink
              07 months ago

              How would an explanation of a religious concept have morality or empathy? Words don’t generally have Human emotions in my experience.

    • @[email protected]
      link
      fedilink
      17 months ago

      If there exists a being that experiences time the same way we experience space, do we have any less free will just because the being can continue knowing about it before it happened? The person is making the choice, not the being that knows about the choice.

    • @[email protected]
      link
      fedilink
      1
      edit-2
      7 months ago

      Is that true. Could he know what we will do but what we do is still our choice without influencw

      • @[email protected]
        link
        fedilink
        English
        157 months ago

        Take the garden of Eden story.

        Did God know that if he put the tree there then the people would eat from it?

        Did God have a choice to put that tree there?

        Could God have made a world where they did not eat that fruit?

        If he picked this possible world out of all possible worlds based on an outcome that he had in mind, then we’re just playing out the parts that he assigned for us.

      • @[email protected]
        link
        fedilink
        English
        147 months ago

        God is supposedly all powerful and all knowing. God created the universe and everything in it. He did so with the full knowledge of everything that would happen in advance. He chose to do it anyway, despite knowing all the suffering it would cause. And then he chose to create a realm of eternal suffering (either by literal fire and brimstone, or by ‘absence of God’, it doesn’t really matter) for those fleetingly finite-lived humans that he created knowing they would screw up. Less than a hundred years of life in exchange for billions of years of torment. And he created them in a way that is fully capable of realizing how horrible a way to treat someone this is. It’s nothing but cruelty of an unimaginable scale. Part of the reason I don’t believe the Christian God exists is because I can’t accept something that evil. It’s too horrifying.

      • @[email protected]
        link
        fedilink
        English
        117 months ago

        True, if somebody comes from the future and knows what you’re going to eat tomorrow morning, that doesn’t make it suddenly not your choice. But to add to the other comment, an important point is that he made us all as well. Because if a god creates you according to his grand plan—knowing full well every single decision you will ever make—it is no longer a choice. Every one of your decisions were predetermined from the start.

        Something I like to think about is that it is impossible to go against the Christian god’s plan. If such a thing were possible, then this god would not be omnipotent nor omniscient. As such, everybody that has ever gone to hell did so because god designed them to.

      • @[email protected]
        link
        fedilink
        47 months ago

        How is that a choice. If they know exactly what’s going to happen I don’t have the power to do anything except for what is going to happen. If you only have an apple at home, you can’t get any other kind of food and your gonna die if you don’t eat the apple, did you really choose to eat the apple?

      • TigrisMorte
        link
        fedilink
        17 months ago

        My knowing what you shall do in no way invalidates your free will. That is invalidated by the futility of your choices. Totally man made and not to be confused with determinism.

        • @[email protected]
          link
          fedilink
          27 months ago

          I think its still possible that I could freely choose my actions and you knowing what they would be would not invalidate that it was an action I choose based on my own free will.

    • @[email protected]
      link
      fedilink
      07 months ago

      The funny thing about the free will argument is that theoretically if you could build a galaxy powered “super” computer, you could potentially track every single movement of every single particle in the entirety of the universe, so that level or scientific inquiry nullifies free will.

      • @[email protected]
        link
        fedilink
        17 months ago

        That’s where it gets interesting though! A set of all numbers cannot contain itself! It’s out of control! Call the alphabots!