Theistic Satanism blog network

I hope soon to launch a blog network for discussion about theistic Satanism and related matters. It will probably be at least another month before I'm ready to roll, because it will take me a while to finish writing the needed script.

In the meantime, I would appreciate it very much if interested people could (1) experiment with blogs on one or more of thg blog hosts we'll be using, (2) email me the URL's of your blogs, and (3) begin using network tags, so that, when the network script is ready, there will be posts ready to display.

Once the script is finished, there will be pages on my Theistic Satanism site containing automatically updated lists of recent posts with particular tags on all member blogs, one such page per tag. For more information, please see my pages about the Theistic Satanism Blog Network.

I would very much appreciate comments on my drafts of network policies.

Interesting blog by a CoS LaVeyan Satanist

Here on Google blogspot there is a blog by one "Magister Svengali," of the Church of Satan, titled Deep Satanism. Most of the blog isn't about Satanism, per se, except insofar as Satanism (LaVeyan or otherwise) encourages people to educate themselves and acquire wide-ranging knowledge. But the blog does have some interesting (to me, at least) recent posts on topics such as memory enhancement, the history of education, and the history of Western culture.

Copyright notices

I guess I better start putting copyright notices on my blog posts. Here on Google Blogger, I just now discovered that someone had copied and pasted this LiveJournal post of mine without any acknowledgment that the post was by me. The copy is here.

Copyright © 2007 Devil's Domain Press. All rights reserved.

Trackback? testing....

My Wordpress blog has automatic trackback capability. I'm now testing whether my other blogs do. I think Blogger does, but I'm not sure. Here is a link to a post on my WordPress blog.

Welsh religious right wing

Although the religious right wing does not seem to be as powerful in the U.K. as it is here in the U.S.A., the U.K. does have a religous right wing.

In Wales, there's a new political party called the Welsh Christian Party, whose first big issue is to change the Welsh flag to get rid of the traditional dragon emblem, which, to these folks, symbolizes the Devil. See WELSH and SATANIC...

Full-blown alleged SRA case in Italy

For at least the past few years, there has apparently been quite a bit of hysteria in Italy about "Satanism". But I was not aware of any full-blown "Satanic Ritual Abuse" allegations over there until just now:

• "Grandmothers arrested over 'satanic sex abuse'"
  by Richard Owen
  Rome, April 25, 2007
  Times Online (U.K.)

Like nearly all such cases, this one is blatantly fishy. The above article starts off as follows:

Three women teachers were among six people arrested today accused of sedating and sexually abusing children as young as 3 at a school near Rome.

The teachers — two of whom are grandmothers who had taught at the school and at Sunday school for decades — are said to have taken part in the repeated abuse of 15 children aged 3 and 5 for a year, filming them in sexual acts with satanic overtones at the teachers’ homes and in a wood.

Had there ever been any complaints about these teachers before, during their many decades of teaching? If not, it is conceivably possible that one old grandmother could suddenly start molesting kids in her old age, but two of them at the same school? I suppose that's possible too, but seems very unlikely to me.

The alleged abuse — in the town of Rignano Flaminio, 25 miles (40km) north of Rome — came to light when some of the children began describing their “games” to their parents. They drew pictures of a “man in black” who wore a hood and drank his own blood, and said they had played a game in which “a wolf chases a squirrel and eats it”.

So far, this sounds like a game that the kids could perhaps have come up with on their own, depending on what kinds of TV shows they had been watching. Kids can indeed have very gruesome imaginations.

However:

They were warned that if they told their parents about the “games”, they would be “taken away from their mothers by devils”. If the truth were to come out and they were asked who had taught them to perform sexual acts, they were to say “my father”.

How was this information elicited from the kids, I wonder? Was care taken to avoid asking the kids too many leading questions? In many alleged multiple-victim, multiple-offender (MVMO) child sexual abuse cases, there have turned out to be serious problems with the way the kids were questioned.

The parents also reported bruising and swelling around their children’s genital areas and that they had returned home from school in a confused state. Police say that the children were given tranquillisers and told they were sweets.

Assuming this is accurate, this does sound as if someone abused the kids. But it seems to me most likely that the questioning got out of hand, implicating innocent people as well as the truly guilty.

The article quotes a local priest and a former teacher at the school voicing skepticism about the charges against the teachers. But, amongst many other people in town, a lynch mob mentality is prevailing.

Thanks to iteration_x for mentioning this story in the "Satanic news" community on LiveJournal.