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To: alt.magick,alt.freemasonry,alt.magick.tyagi,alt.satanism,talk.religion.misc
From: catherine yronwode 
Subject: Re: Masonry's position on suicide
Date: Tue, 02 Mar 2004 03:01:20 GMT

Joseph Arba wrote:
> 
> On Mon, 01 Mar 2004 10:00:23 GMT, catherine yronwode
>  wrote:

> The focus of the BBC report was a 17 year old
> honors student who killed himself.
>
> Your husband gleefully posted the gory details of
> that child's suicide in a Yahoo group.
>
> Your husband goes about the suicide support newsgroups talking
> basically to depressed young people.

I believe the previous two paragraphs contain falsehoods. I
know that he reposts and reports on media accounts of
evolving social attitudes toward suicide, but that he does
so "gleefully" is your twisted fantasy. You also fantasize
that he talks "basically to depressed young people," as if
he were singling them out, but the suicide newsgroups are
peopled with anonymous posters whose ages and conditions are
unknown to anyone except insofar as they choose to tell
stories about themselves, which may or may not be accurate. 

> He maintains a FAQ called the "suicide encouragement faq" at
> a website on your ISP.  There, he uses the pseudonym "boboroshi."
> 
> The website is called "satanservice"--because your husband is a
> Satanist.

The previous two paragraphs are essentially correct.

Apparently you have a difficulty accepting Satanism as a
religion or philosophical belief structure. I'm not that
fond of some of forms of it myself, but i have learned that
there are different forms of Satanism, just like there are
different forms of Judaism and Christianity and Islam, and
that some forms are essentially peaceful and friendly, while
others are not. 

There are Aryan anti-Semite Satanists, for instance, who
scare me terribly -- but when i look at what the anti-Semite
CHRISTIANS did to the Jews (among whom i number myself) from
the Spanish Inquisition through Nazism, i am just as scared. 

There are peaceful Muslims and Muslim terrorists. There have
even been Buddhist warlords, in historical times, although
many Buddhists are pacifists. 

Naming someone's religion does not define their beliefs or
behaviour. Virtually every religion has room for people of
different beliefs, within the larger structure of the
religion. 

A great web site that may help you understand religious
variations in the world is the Ontario Center for Religious
Tolerance. Check them out on the web at

http://www.religioustolerance.org

-- i think you'll be glad you did. They maintain
encyclopedia-like entries on every known religion. Their
detailed article on Satanism, in case you want to remedy a
possible point of ignorance on your part, is at 

http://www.religioustolerance.org/satanism.htm
 
According to their well-reasoned definitions:

------------from OCRT-------------

We strongly recommend that the terms "Satanist" and
"Satanism" be used only to refer to religions that have some
direct involvement with Satan in some form. Thus a
"Satanist" is one who either: 

     1. Worships the Christian devil. Although the Christian
Churches taught during the Renaissance that devil worshipers
were very common, such individuals were in fact extremely
rare, and remain so. The very few who do exist appear to be
solitary practitioners; they do not appear to have formed an
organization. 
     2. Accepts Satan as a pre-Christian life-principle
concept worth emulating. These are religious Satanists, who
follow a number of  religious traditions, of which the
largest by far is the Church of Satan. 

-------------end OCRT-------------

Siva roughly falls into group 2, with the exceptions that 
1) he does not define Satan as "pre-Christian" except
insofar as Wild Nature existed before Christianity, 
2) he does not consider Satan a "concept" but rather a
reality -- that is, undomesticated living beings of various
species, uncontrolled meteorological and geological events,
stellar and cosmological objects, etc., 
3) he does not consider Satan or Wild Nature "worthy of
emulation" but rather worthy of "defense," and
4) he does not follow a congregational mode of religious
expression, but is, in neo-Pagan terms, a "solitary." 

He  is an unaffiliated Satanist of the type i have come to
call eco-Satanists -- that is, it is their belief that since
mankind has warred with Wild Nature for millennia (since
before the advent of Judaism and Christianity), what people
define as Satan tends to be anything not under human control
-- violent weather, poisonous animals, dark forests, rivers
that have not been dammed. What Siva serves -- and that is
why the site is called Satan SERVICE, not Satan WORSHIP --
is Wild Nature. His view of Satan, therefore, roughly 
meshes with the OCRT site's definition as "a pre-Christian
life-principle concept worth emulating."

Siva is not unusual among Satanists, by the way. I have met
a number of eco-Satanists online. Also, as i learned in the
freemasonry list, back in the 1990s, the US government
officially recognizes Satanism of various types as a
religion, and hence there have been Satanists initiated in
some regular (all-male) Masonic lodges, alongside Muslims,
Buddhists, Jews, Christians, Jains, and folks of other
religious persuasion. 

Live with it, Joe. That's my advice. 

> >He is not a "predator."
> 
> The BBC called him that, and so did several people in
> alt.suicide.holiday.  

Names are just names; he isn't as named. Does this make
sense to you? I could call you a "truck driver" and so could
ten of my friends, but if you weren't a truck driver that
would be an inaccurate name for you. I have been called a
"skank crack whore" in usenet, and i am not a skank crack
whore. Do you see my point? I hope so. 
 
> > He has never been "investigated" by the BBC,
> 
> Their press release says the show "investigates the encouragers" of
> suicide.

That is just shallow sales hype. Investigative journalism
comprises actually learning about a subject, interviewing
people at length, meeting with them, digging into
background, doing fact checks, The BBC did none of that. 

> > but he was interviewed by them,
> 
> And he is so out of it that he launched into a grandiose diatribe,
> when the investigative reporter got to talking with him.  Absolute
> disconnection from reality, I'd say.
> 
> > although they declined to state his real name
> 
> Do you ever tell the truth? The show identified him as "nagasiva
> yronwode" and called your store, asked for him, and then talked
> to him on the phone.

If i erred, it is because i have not heard the show. It
aired in November, 2003 in England. The URL you gave for a
realplayer version of it did not work for me, although i do
have realplayer and use it regularly. All i have to go on is
the text version at the BBC web site and his real name was
not given there, only the screen name boboroshi. 

Now, unless you respond with gentility, i shall not be
posting further to this thread. I am not interested in
spending much more time trying to convince you that you are
confused and wrongheaded in your beliefs. I have other
things to do. Please take what i have written as sincere and
well-intentioned, and do a bit of research yourself before
you castigate those you do not know. You can always reach
Siva at his email address (boboroshi at satanservice dot org).

Cordially, 


cat yronwode