A walk on the dark side

When walking in open territory, bother no one. If someone bothers you, ask him to stop. If he does not stop, destroy him.

http://www.churchofsatan.com/Pages/Eleven.html

No, the above is not from Julius Malema’s latest verbal palpitations. Neither is it an excerpt from Terror Lekota’s much talked about divorce papers. On a side note, it is laank interesting how, after a decade or so of fashioning himself as Mosiua, elder statesman and leader, Mr Lekota has gone back to his tag from the struggle days. Anything for that mass appeal hey? But I digress.

The above is number 11 in the Tenets of the Church of Satan. Why do I know this? Well I’m one of those voracious consumers of information, whatever it may relate to, and a friend happened to pass this around on our e-mail circle (after which the ever-observant Silwane pointed me to Deon Maas’s rather brilliant piece on Satanism from November 2007). Well I couldn’t resist exploring it further and it got me thinking about how one could live this rule on a daily basis.Were one inclined to do so obviously.

Certainly the world of devil worship has always played second fiddle to most major religions of the world. Christianity has always had PR mechanism second to none. Miracles ( I imagine when the apostles saw Jesus treading water, they must have felt the same way we did every time Madiba was dispensing wisdom and goodwill to other world leaders, like “ja, that’s OUR Prez, beat that!), resurrections, Damascene conversions, inquisitions and colonialism — Christians had their propagation sorted.

In fact as I write this I am having all sorts of paranoid nightmares about what unfortunate fate shall befall me for even entertaining such ideas. Nothing like a childhood devoted to Sunday School to leave indelible impressions on your subconscious.

Not that they were alone. Colonising Iberia and introducing the natives to art and architecture did no harm for Islam. But Satanism, naah, always left-field and discouraged they were. Even when the Romans were giving the lions and tigers protein boosts in Christian capsule form the Satanists didn’t do much to publicise their cause.

Or is that how they like to do their thing? Discreet, unseen but felt? All mystery to me and really kind of irrelevant, for what I am really intrigued about is the rule/tenet above. All of it. It is quite a fascinating idea really. For example: would it be irrelevant to an urban dweller? It’s not like our modern cities have a surfeit of empty fields one can stroll in waiting for someone, anyone, to act in a manner that could be construed as bothering. Can I have certain, relatively open areas (car parks, the stretching areas at gym, the part of the field Western Province are attacking towards), reclassified as open fields?

Then there’s the bothering; what constitutes bothering? Is there a standard or is it up to the individual and the dynamics of the context? Certainly what would constitute bothering at say the gym, would not be the same as at a packed Kings Park (sorry, Absa stadium — please don’t cancel my credit card now). Also, given the preponderance of hawkers, beggars and peddlers of sinful pleasures in our public parks for example, am I entitled to go all Judge Dredd on a person accosting me in such, even though I should have known beforehand that the chances of an undisturbed stroll through a CBD public park are as minute as those of Golden Arrows failing to molest a so-called big team?

And the destruction itself: is it physical, psychological, a combination of both? If I happen to be in a hurry and cannot mete out immediate punishment for being looked at the wrong way am I then in breach? Should I self-destruct? Or if I choose to spare the person (assuming such is not a sin, and convert them instead, does that act overrule my inaction? Or would they have to destroy me so the rules are still adhered to? Would sparing them be a sin?

Actually is sinning against Satanic rules really a sin? And if it is, what is the punishment, Heaven?

No doubt it is an awesome idea being able to deal at will with an annoyance fully knowing your belief system has your backing — turning the other cheek is quite a task at times. But I wonder about the every day applicability of such.

Anyone care to enlighten me?

Ps. Before anyone gets a pitchfork and rounds up a virtual lynching mob, this is not meant as a critique of Satanism or religion in any way. I just stumbled upon an exciting idea and would like to (hypothetically) test its applicability (hypothetically of course) to real-life situations, work with me