Glad Tidings I Bring; students are forming Satan Clubs at their schools throughout America to counter the subversion of democracy by Christian Identity fascist organizations which promote theocracy and anti-humanist values.
To this joyous news I wrote; What a lovely idea! Let’s make clubs of Rebel Angels in every school in America to learn and practice resistance to authority and systems of oppression, and to directly challenge theocracy and Christian Identity fascism.
In place of submission to authority, let us teach and practice the Four Primary Duties of a Citizen; Question Authority, Expose Authority, Mock Authority, and Challenge Authority. In place of a Bible, I suggest I.F. Stone’s The Trial of Socrates as a primary text. Though for poetic vision in the reimagination and transformation of systems of oppression and unequal power, Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra, which I claimed as my own voice and counter text to the Bible in eighth grade, remains unparalleled.
Who stands between each of us and the Infinite serves neither.
As written by Erum Salam in The Guardian, in an article entitled Uproar as after-school Satan club forms at Tennessee elementary school: Satanic clubs, whose members do not worship the devil, usually formed in response to presence of religious groups in schools; “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 non-profit 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.
Satanic after-school clubs are usually established in a school district in response to the presence of religious clubs, such as the Christian evangelical Bible group the Good News Club. The temple says it “does not believe in introducing religion into public schools and will only open a club if other religious groups are operating on campus”.
But parents and faith leaders in the Tennessee community members expressed outrage at the news.
In a meeting with more than 40 pastors and other religious leaders, the district board chair, Althea E Greene, said: “Satan has no room in this district.”
Jenny Kincaid, a grandparent of a student at Chimneyrock, told the local Memphis news station Action News 5: “I’m about to come unglued right now. I cannot believe … this is a kindergarten-through-fifth-grade school and they’re letting a satanic club come in here?”
The MSCS interim superintendent, Toni Williams, reportedly said there were no plans to prevent the club from operating in the district.
“I do not support the beliefs of this organization at the center of recent headlines,” Williams said. “I do, however, support the law.”
Chimneyrock would be the club’s fifth chapter in the country.
Other school districts have also pushed back against the club’s presence on their campus in the past. In March, the Satanic Temple took legal action against Pennsylvania’s Saucon Valley school district for allegedly discriminating against the ASSC by preventing it from holding meetings on campus and using school facilities. In November, the district settled with the temple for $200,000.
June Everett, ASSC’s national campaign director, said in response to the reaction of the Chimneyrock community members: “I’d like to believe that people that don’t agree with us and don’t think that we should be allowed equal access into the same schools that these other clubs are running, that this is a reminder of what a great and free country that we live in.
“It’s the first amendment at work.”
What of our traditional culture? If by this phrase those who would enslave us mean first submission to authority, second authorized identities of the Elect chosen by God as elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege to dominate and control others, and third legitimation of theocratic states of tyranny and imperial dominion, to all of this I say to hell with it.
Faith weaponized in service to power is among the legacies of history from which we must emerge in liberation struggle.
As I wrote in my post of May 7 2023, The Abjection of Faith as Sadism: Case of the Dalai Lama’s Command “Suck My Tongue”’ Thousands of years of history speak to us with the voice of the Dalai Lama, and what it says is; “Suck my tongue.”
I have heard the Dalai Lama speak when I was a Buddhist monk, during the revolution in Nepal when we overthrew the system of monarchy. I’m not sure what the topic was, because all I heard was this; “I am better than you, and I want to steal your power.”
Actually, this is always the true purpose and design of those who claim to speak for the Infinite, and of any faith weaponized in service to power and authority through exploitation of trust, falsification, and the Wilderness of Mirrors; lies, illusions, rewritten histories, alternate realities, and terminating in subjugation and narratives of belonging and exclusionary otherness as divisions of identitarian politics and theocratic elite hierarchies of the Elect.
“Suck my tongue.”
This is the sum of all wisdom which can be offered to us by such tyrants and theocracies as we go forward into the future and create new ways of being human together; authority and elite hegemonies of the elect and of wealth, power, and privilege serve themselves alone and the systems of unequal power of which they are apex predators, and all their apologetics are nothing more or less than the weaponization of faith and trust in service to power and the subjugation and falsification of those whom they seek to enslave.
There is no meaning or value in theocratic ideologies beyond this, and we may say with Diderot; “Humankind will be free when the last king has been strangled by the guts of the last priest.”
Who stands between each of us and the Infinite serves neither.
“Suck my tongue”; possibly this shocks only Westerners who embraced Buddhism as so many have in reaction to the vile history of imperialism, patriarchy, racism, and wars of religion of traditional European Christianity, in the naïve hope that beliefs outside its boundaries may reify humanistic values and offer real change even when they reinforce rather than challenge systems of patriarchal authority and theocratic dominion.
Traditional authoritarianism mixes poorly with Western permissiveness. Here I speak of the precise and unique ferocity of Orientalism, so well articulated as colonial apologetics by Edward Said, of which the Western embrace of exotic cultures including religions during periods of civilizational fracture, disruption, and collapse from its internal contradictions such as those of the 1960s is a form, embedded in the history of the counterculture and its aberrant New Age faiths both empowering as liberation struggle and dangerous as colonialist assimilation of alien cultures and submission to authority.
Something like this wave of disgust at the nihilistic moral vacuity and dehumanizing arrogance of power as sexual terror now ripples through the global Buddhist community exactly as it has the Catholic Church, which operates globally as an organization of patriarchal sexual terror now that they’ve given up imperial crusades and witch burnings, and the Shia dominion of Iran, whose democracy movements are in part driven by revulsion at the selling of temporary marriages which finances the theocratic regime. The Dalai Lama, the Pope, and the Ayatollah are different not in kind but merely by degree from other apex predators of unequal power as tyrannies of the Elect, figures of vast systems of harm and dehumanization and organizations of subjugation and imperial dominion as weaponized faith.
There is always someone in a gold robe who has tricked others into doing the hard and dirty work for him and his chosen co-conspirators. In the case of the Dalai Lama as the exiled ruler of Tibet and the leader of a faith organization authorized as national identity, we have an actual theocracy like the priest-kings of Pharaonic Egypt combined horrifically with fascist identity politics and nationalism.
One need only look at current examples of theocratic state terror as wars of ethnic cleansing to see how such universal systems of oppression work; Sri Lanka, India, and Yemen as examples from Buddhist, Hindu, and Islamic nations. Putin’s mad conquest to rebuild the Russian Empire, a Third World War with many theatres of conflict, is authorized by the Russian Orthodox Church. And Gaza, where the state of Israel has weaponized Jewish identity in service to power, enabled by the same America Pentecostal-fundamentalist network of Christian Identity churches responsible for the Mayan Genocide of the 1980’s, the end of Roe v Wade, and the capture of the Republican Party as a tool of theocratic state terror.
The Buddhist magazine Lions Roar once had a long article about the pervasive and endemic sexual abuse of students by Buddhist teachers and priests; it began “Of course you must accept some authority”. This is where you lose me, and why I no longer live as a monk and Dream Navigator of the Kagyu Vajrayana order, for I say you must never accept a thing as true on the basis of authority, and anyone or any system of politics or faith that demands your obedience is an enemy which must be resisted to the last, a tyrant who has no legitimacy, a deceiver who must be questioned and disbelieved, and a system of lies and stolen power from which we must awake and emerge.
As Kazantzakus teaches us; “I believe nothing, I hope for nothing, I am free.”
The power and impunity of religious authority is a precondition of abuse and a corruptive force.
Treat a man as the voice of revealed truth and an intermediary and substitute for the Infinite long enough, and it will destroy both of you.
As written in Huffpost, in an article entitled Dalai Lama Apologizes After Video Shows Him Telling Boy, ‘Suck My Tongue’; “During a February event, the Dalai Lama asked a boy to kiss him on the lips and stuck out his tongue. “And suck my tongue,” he added, prompting laughter from audience; “Tibetan spiritual leader the Dalai Lama apologized Monday after a video showing him kissing a child on the lips triggered criticism.
A statement posted on his official website said the 87-year-old leader regretted the incident and wished to “apologize to the boy and his family, as well as his many friends across the world, for the hurt his words may have caused.”
The incident occurred at a public gathering in February at the Tsuglakhang temple in Dharamsala, where the exiled leader lives. He was taking questions from the audience when the boy asked if he could hug him.
The Dalai Lama invited the boy up toward the platform he was seated on. In the video, he gestured to his cheek, after which the child kissed him before giving him a hug.
The Dalai Lama then asked the boy to kiss him on the lips and stuck out his tongue. “And suck my tongue,” the Dalai Lama can be heard saying as the boy sticks out his own tongue and leans in, prompting laughter from the audience.
The footage triggered a backlash online with social media users condemning his behavior as inappropriate and disturbing.
“His Holiness often teases people he meets in an innocent and playful way, even in public and before cameras,” the statement from the Dalai Lama read.”
As written by Slavoj Zizek in Project Syndicate, in an article entitled Suck My Tongue, Crush My Balls; “The controversy surrounding a recent video of the Dalai Lama greeting a seven-year-old boy was not merely a classic case of “lost in translation.” It also speaks to the deep, ineradicable abyss that can separate cultures, and invites reflection on the confusion surrounding intentions and desires that can occur within cultures.
In a recent viral video, the Dalai Lama can be seen asking a seven-year-old boy, at a widely attended public ceremony, to give him a hug and then, “Suck my tongue.” The immediate reaction from many in the West was to condemn the Dalai Lama for behaving inappropriately, with many speculating that he is senile, a pedophile, or both. Others, more charitably, noted that sticking out one’s tongue is a traditional practice in Tibetan culture – a sign of benevolence (demonstrating that one’s tongue is not dark, which indicates evil). Still, asking someone to suck it has no place in the tradition.
In fact, the correct Tibetan phrase is “Che le sa,” which translates roughly to “Eat my tongue.” Grandparents often use it lovingly to tease a grandchild, as if to say: “I’ve given you everything, so the only thing left is for you to eat my tongue.” Needless to say, the meaning was lost in translation. (Although English is the Dalai Lama’s second language, he does not possess native-level mastery.)
To be sure, the fact that something is part of a tradition does not necessarily preclude it from scrutiny or criticism. Clitoridectomy is also a part of ancient Tibetan tradition, but we certainly would not defend it today. And even sticking out one’s tongue has undergone a strange evolution in the last half-century. As Wang Lixiong and Tsering Shakya write in The Struggle for Tibet:
“During the Cultural Revolution, if an old landowner met emancipated serfs on the road he would stand to the side, at a distance, putting a sleeve over his shoulder, bowing down and sticking out his tongue – a courtesy paid by those of lower status to their superiors – and would only dare to resume his journey after the former serfs had passed by. Now [after Deng Xiaoping’s reforms] things have changed back: the former serfs stand at the side of the road, bow and stick out their tongues, making way for their old lords. This has been a subtle process, completely voluntary, neither imposed by anyone nor explained.”
Here, sticking out one’s tongue signals self-humiliation, not loving care. Following Deng’s “reforms,” ex-serfs understood that they were again at the bottom of the social scale. Even more interesting is the fact that the same ritual survived such tremendous social transformations.
Returning to the Dalai Lama, it is probable – and certainly plausible – that Chinese authorities orchestrated or facilitated the wide dissemination of a clip that could besmirch the figure who most embodies Tibetan resistance to Chinese domination.
In any case, we have all now gotten a glimpse of the Dalai Lama as our “neighbor” in the Lacanian sense of the term: an Other who cannot be reduced to someone like us, whose otherness represents an impenetrable abyss. Western observers’ highly sexualized interpretation of his antics reflects an unbridgeable gap in cultural understanding.
But similar cases of impenetrable otherness are easy to find within Western culture. Years ago, when I read about how the Nazis tortured prisoners, I was quite traumatized to learn that they even resorted to industrial testicle-crushers to cause unbearable pain.
Yet lo and behold, I recently came across the same product in an online advertisement:
“Pick your poison for pleasure … STAINLESS STEEL BALL CRUSHER, STAINLESS BALL CLAMP TORTURE DEVICE, BRUTAL COCK VICE TORTURE TOY, HARDCORE STAINLESS BALL TORTURE … So if you lie in bed with your partner, melancholic and tired of life, the time is right. Your slave’s nuts are ripe for crushing! It is the moment you have been waiting for – to find the right tool to brutalize his balls!”
Now, suppose I walked by a room where two men were enjoying this device. Hearing one of them moan and cry in pain, I would probably misread what was happening. Should I knock on the door and politely ask, at the risk of being an idiot, “Is this really consensual?” After all, if I just kept walking, I would be ignoring the possibility that it really was an act of torture.
Or, imagine a scenario where a man is doing something similar to a woman – torturing her consensually. In this age of political correctness, many people would automatically presume coercion, or they would conclude that the woman had internalized male repression and begun to identify with the enemy.
It is impossible to render this situation without ambiguity, uncertainty, or confusion, because there really are some men and women who genuinely enjoy some degree of torture, especially if it is enacted as if it was nonconsensual. In these sadomasochistic rituals, the act of punishment signals the presence of some underlying desire that warrants it. For example, in a culture where rape is punished by flogging, a man might ask his neighbor to flog him brutally, not as some kind of atonement, but because he harbors a deep-seated desire to rape women.
In one sense, the passage from Nazi ball crushers to the erotic kind used in sadomasochist games can be seen as a sign of historical progress. But it runs parallel to the “progress” that leads some people to purge classic works of art of any content that might hurt or offend somebody.
We are left with a culture in which it is okay to engage in consensual discomfort at the level of bodily pleasures, but not in the realm of words and ideas. The irony, of course, is that efforts to prohibit or suppress certain words and ideas will merely make them more attractive and powerful as secret, profane desires. The fact that some superego has enjoined them furnishes them with a pleasure – and pleasure-seekers – that they otherwise would not have had.
Why does increasing permissiveness seem to entail increasing impotence and fragility. And why, under certain conditions, can pleasure be enjoyed only through pain? Contrary to what Freud’s critics have long claimed, psychoanalysis’s moment has only just arrived, because it is the only framework that can render visible the big inconsistent mess that we call “sexuality.”
Uproar as after-school Satan club forms at Tennessee elementary school
The Trial of Socrates, I.F. Stone
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/51330.The_Trial_of_Socrates?ref=nav_sb_ss_2_10
Thus Spake Zarathustra, Friedrich Nietzsche
What Is To Be Done?
The venom of our age’: James Carville on the danger of Mike Johnson’s Christian nationalism
Wisdom of the Big Lamaperv; “Suck My Tongue” for I am a king and you are my slave, and I speak with the voice of the Infinite
Slavoj Zizek’s essay on the abjection of faith as sadism
Torch of Liberty 
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