I guess I fell asleep at the mouse. I just recently learned that, late last year, the British Royal Navy allowed a young man named Chris Cranmer to register as a member of the Church of Satan.
Cranmer is now allowed to perform Satanic rituals on his ship. If killed in action, his funeral may be carried out by the Church of Satan.
The driving force behind the Royal Navy's decision is the same muddled thinking that catalyzes all those multi-cultural decisions that feel wrong but kind of make sense. You know the type: decisions to allow one student's objection to stop an entire school's Easter celebrations, the Supreme Court's crèche and reindeer cases, concessions to Pledge of Allegiance hypersensitivity. The Royal Navy's “rationale” was totally predictable, “We are an equal opportunities employer and we don't stop anybody from having their own religious values.”
As a preliminary response, it should be understood that “religious values” can be trumped. Even our Supreme Court acknowledges that. If a belief causes too many problems, the public entity can simply decline to recognize it. To take a simple example, your city's park department doesn't have to employ someone whose religious beliefs mandate that he not work from noon to 5:00 every day. In the Royal Navy case, plenty of arguments could have been mustered to the effect that recognizing Satanism would be too disruptive, demoralizing, and unnerving.
But that's not my main objection. I'm more concerned about logic. If the Royal Navy didn't want to block Mr. Cranmer's request on religious grounds, it could have blocked it on grounds of reason.
The Church of Satan justifies its odd beliefs on the basis that conventional thinking about the Devil is wrong. It's a fundamental tenet of their belief. It is also absurd or, to quote Jeffrey Burton Russell, author of a four-volume history on the Devil, “inherently meaningless”:
[Their claim] asserts that everything humans know about the concept of Satan is in opposition to the absolute, objective reality of Satan. It ignores the fact that we have no way of knowing the absolute reality of Satan, whatever it might be. The only thing that we can know about Satan is the human concept of Satan. The idea that the Devil is good, not evil, has further dimensions of irrationality, because the human concept of Satan was developed . . . precisely for the purpose of personifying radical evil. Satan is by definition evil. The claim that the evidence in favor of the good Devil has been destroyed, leaving only the evidence of his “detractors,” is equally silly… [E]ven the possibility of such “evidence” does not exist, because it would contradict the very definition of the subject.
Perhaps I'm asking too much of the Royal Navy. To expect them to spend more than, say, thirty minutes analyzing the situation and perhaps consulting someone of Russell's scholarly caliber might be burdensome.
But could they have at least picked up a copy of the Satanic Bible and glanced through it? Written by Church of Satan Founder Anton LaVey, it's not a religious book, as much as a book of “hedonistic maxims and misinformed occultism,” according to Russell.
I can't say I've read it, but I have a copy of LaVey's follow-up, The Satanic Witch, a book that helps woman put into practice the principles of the Satanic Bible. I bought it while in college. I was never drawn to any dark worship, but I remember thinking that the book probably contained something of merit, either interesting facts, wild speculations that would humor me, maybe even dark insight or other angles I'd never considered.
Man, I was disappointed. The book, not to put too fine a point on it, is stupid. It's embarrassingly immature, employing no more intellectual rigor than one might expect from an eighth grader. It basically tells women to do whatever is effective to get what they want, especially touting the use of sex to dominate others (in the Introduction, LaVey's witch daughter Zeena tells us she dominated so effectively that she got pregnant when she was 13).
In her famous study about Adolf Eichmann, Hannah Arendt said Eichmann did not embody radical evil, but rather exemplified the “banality of evil.”
The Church of Satan confirms such banality. They profess meaningless beliefs and adopt an ethical system of “do as thou wilt,” which is, of course, the ethical system of the average toddler in the midst of the “terrible twos.”
Couldn't the Royal Navy have used all this to reject Cranmer's request?
And if it didn't want to put that much effort into the decision, couldn't it at least have responded to Cranmer's request by scoffing? I realize scoffing isn't a rational response, but the Royal Navy apparently isn't interested in reason.
And in the absence of reason, I'll take gut-reaction scoffing over spineless relativism any day.
© Copyright 2005 Catholic Exchange
Eric Scheske is an attorney, the Editor of The Wednesday Eudemon, a Contributing Editor of Godspy, and the former editor of Gilbert Magazine.
