The American Civil Liberties Union said Thursday that the Saucon Valley School District had agreed to pay $200,000 in attorney’s fees and to provide The Satanic Temple and the After School Satan Club it sponsors the same access to school facilities as is provided to other organizations.
The ACLU filed the lawsuit in March after the district rescinded its earlier approval to allow the club to meet following criticism. The After School Satan Club, with the motto “Educatin’ with Satan,” had drawn protests and even a threat in February that prompted closure of district schools for a day and the later arrest of a person in another state.
Saucon Valley school district attorney Mark Fitzgerald told reporters in a statement that the district denies having discriminated against The Satanic Temple, its club or “the approximately four students” who attended its meetings. He said the district’s priorities were education and the safety of students and staff.
I assume the Satanic Temple is the non-theist one, which doesn’t actually believe in Satan, and just uses it to troll religious nutjobs.
It’s a pity the Christian right are invariably functionally illiterate, or they would have known to not kick themselves in the dick.
Correct on The Satanic Temple (TST) being non-theistic. While it did start off as trolling, it has coalesced into a religion of its own (much to the chagrin of the nutty christians here), just without the superstition used to coerce people in abrahamic religions.
Why would you assume anything? The answer is provided in the article itself. Why can so few people be arsed to read the information provided before leaping to an attempt at pithy commentary?
The group … views Satan not as a supernatural being but as “a literary figure that represents a metaphorical construct of rejecting tyranny over the human mind and spirit.” The club’s programs, they say, focus on “science, critical thinking, creative arts, and good works for the community.”
(Boldface mine. “science” comes to us from Latin’s “scientia”: knowledge)
The irony of assuming something instead of learning/confirming it from the information provided, as regards an article about an organization whose stated focus is on knowledge and critical thinking, is disappointing.
greatest reply of the season
Tbf, to really believe the things that organized religion tells you, you have to be on the wrong side of the IQ bell curve, so it’s not really something they have the ability to avoid.
IQ has very little to do with this. There are some very intelligent people who are also very religious.
A lot of people confuse intelligence with wisdom. If you considered a human mind like a computer, intelligence would correspond to the CPU and RAM, which determine how fast you think and how much memory you have (and how good it is) whereas wisdom is like the software that runs on the computer.
Install shitty software, and the most powerful, fastest computer will just give you shit. Garbage in, garbage out, as they say.
You take a guy like Elon Musk, for example. Clearly intelligent. Definitely not slow. But he’s spectacularly wrong about many things. Because he was not taught right when he was a kid, and he then learned the wrong lessons in life afterwards. Bad software, bad data. Still very intelligent.
