Spirituality: LaVey vs Gilmore

Gilmore and Spirituality

I was banned from the Church of Satan Facebook group shortly after posting my essay on spirituality in Satanism. I had not violated any of the rules posted in the group; I merely challenged the bubble of security that the Church of Satan hides behind in their echo chamber. Upon flipping to page 65 of the Satanic Scriptures and reading "On the First Anniversary of 9/11" by Peter H. Gilmore, it became clear just where I hurt the Church of Satan's insecurities.

The essay started out strong, showing sympathy and remorse for the lives lost in 9/11. I had anticipated this essay to continue its trend as a synthetic memorial, but it soon reared its head and showed its ugly face as having an ulterior motive of preaching Gilmore's rigid ideal of his own version of Satanism. It is not hard to tell that Peter H. Gilmore does not grasp Anton LaVey's groundbreaking Satanic philosophy. Although they both agree that religion can lead to violence, Gilmore attributes all violence to all forms of religions with all different kinds of gods, not just the Hermetic religions.

He has nothing to back up his claims that simply believing in any form of God automatically causes a person to become violent. He further goes on to generalize all individuals with a sense of spirituality as narrow-minded and unable to accept diversity. He makes no distinction between decent people who hold individual beliefs in the God or Gods of their choosing or who hold spiritual beliefs and the Zealots who carried out the terrorist attacks.