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.

  • @dewritoninja
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    636 months ago

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

    • Cosmic Cleric
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      96 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.

      • @BorgDrone@lemmy.one
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        36 months ago

        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

        That argument would only make sense if god wasn’t the supposed creator of the universe and everything in it. If god created everything, is omnipotent and omniscient then at the moment of creation she would have known every single event and circumstance in that person’s life leading up to making a certain choice and she would have been able to create the universe differently so that a different choice would have been made.

        If you set up all the dominoes, you cannot claim the 100,00th domino falling over wasn’t your doing because you only tipped over the first one.

        • Cosmic Cleric
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          26 months ago

          That argument would only make sense if god wasn’t the supposed creator of the universe and everything in it. If god created everything, is omnipotent and omniscient then at the moment of creation she would have known every single event and circumstance in that person’s life leading up to making a certain choice and she would have been able to create the universe differently so that a different choice would have been made.

          This actually makes my point though.

          God knowing everything doesn’t mean that God made you make that choice, God let you make that choice, but knew what that choice would be ahead of time.

          You still had free will, you still were the one that had the neurons fire off in your brain, and you made the choice. God was able to predict that choice ahead of time with 100% accuracy.

          On a side note, I love that you use ‘she’ for God.

          • @BorgDrone@lemmy.one
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            6 months ago

            God knowing everything doesn’t mean that God made you make that choice, God let you make that choice, but knew what that choice would be ahead of time.

            If she intentionally chose those circumstances to happen so that the choice would be made that way, which she would have to have done being omniscient and omnipotent then that choice being made is 100% her responsibility.

            If I put a child alone in a room with a powered on electric band saw, is it the child’s fault for getting their arm sawed off ? They had free will and could have chosen to not go near the saw. Or is it my fault for putting a child in that situation?

            • Cosmic Cleric
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              06 months ago

              If she intentionally chose those circumstances

              Why are you assuming she chose them, versus just letting them happen via free will, mapping them out ahead of time, precog style?

              If I put a child alone in a room with a powered on electric band saw, is it the child’s fault for getting their arm sawed off ? They had free will and could have chosen to not go near the saw. Or is it my fault for putting a child in that situation?

              The childs.

              • @BorgDrone@lemmy.one
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                36 months ago

                Why are you assuming she chose them, versus just letting them happen via free will, mapping them out ahead of time, precog style?

                Because she’s omniscient. That’s the problem with making up an all-powerful, all-knowing god. It comes with some inconvenient logical consequences. When she set up the initial state of the universe she already knew exactly how it would play out (because omniscient), she also could have chosen any other outcome (because omnipotent). It had to be a deliberate decision because as an omniscient being it’s simply not possible to claim ignorance of the outcome, and as an omnipotent being she could have chosen any outcome she desired.

                The childs.

                Do you really believe this or are you being disingenuous because it doesn’t fit your argument?

                • Cosmic Cleric
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                  06 months ago

                  The childs.

                  Do you really believe this or are you being disingenuous because it doesn’t fit your argument?

                  Truly believe it. The child’s neurons in the brain fired off, having them explore/examine the saw. You could say the same thing for any object in the room. A child will look at some of them, but not others.

    • @lolcatnip@reddthat.com
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      56 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
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      26 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.

      • @Girru00@lemmy.world
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        26 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
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          06 months ago

          Spirituality is all opinion man.

          But no, it not lacking anything.

            • TigrisMorte
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              06 months ago

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

      • @Zombiepirate@lemmy.world
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        156 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.

      • @greenskye@lemm.ee
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        146 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.

      • @Nelots@lemm.ee
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        116 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.

      • @dewritoninja
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        46 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
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        16 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.

    • @AdamBomb@lemmy.sdf.org
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      16 months ago

      I never understood this view. A person could have entirely free will, making a decision that was neither influenced, controlled, nor coerced, and another entity could, with perfect knowledge of how the first party makes decisions, accurately predict what they would decide in any given circumstance. This does not constrain the will of the other party in any way that makes sense to me.

    • @Pips@lemmy.sdf.org
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      16 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.

    • @jandar_fett@lemmy.world
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      06 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.

      • @Mango@lemmy.world
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        16 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!