are the motivating forces of ambition - and without ambition, very little of any importance would be accomplished.
Gluttony is simply eating more than you need to keep yourself alive. When you have overeaten to the point of obesity, another sin - pride - will motivate you to regain an appearance that will renew your self-respect.
Anyone who buys an article of clothing for a purpose other than covering his body and protecting it from the elements is guilty of pride. Satanists often encounter scoffers who maintain that labels are not necessary. It must be pointed out to these destroyers of labels that one or many articles they themselves are wearing are not wearing are not necessary to keep them warm. There is not a person on this earth who is completely devoid of ornamentation. The Satanist points out that any ornamentation of the scoffer's body shows that he, too, is guilty of pride. Regardless of how verbose the cynic may be in his intellectual description of how free he is, he is still wearing the elements of pride.
Being reluctant to get up in the morning is to be guilty of sloth, and if you lie in bed long enough you may find yourself commiting yet another sin - lust. To have the faintest stirring of sexual desire is to be guilty of lust. In order to insure the propagation of humanity, nature made lust the second most powerful instinct, the first being self-preservation. Realizing this, the Christian Church made fornication the “Original Sin”. In this way they made sure no one would escape sin.
Your very state of being is as a result of sin - the Original sin!
The strongest instinct in every living thing is self-preservation, which brings us to the last of the seven deadly sins - anger. Is it not our instinct for self-preservation that is aroused when someone harms us, when we become angry enough to protect ourselves from further attack? A Satanist practices the motto, “If a man smite thee on one cheek, smash him on the other!” Let no wrong go unredressed. Be as a lion in the path - be dangerous even in defeat!
Since man's natural instincts lead him to sin, all men are sinners; and all sinners go to hell. If everyone goes to hell, then you will meet all your friends there. Heaven must be populated with some rather strange creatures if all they lived for was to go to a place where they can strum harps for eternity.
"Times have changed. Religious leaders no longer preach that all our natural actions are sinful.
We no longer think sex is dirty - or that taking pride in ourselves is shameful - or that wanting something someone else has is vicious.“ Of course not, times have changed! ”If you want proof of this, just look at how liberal churches have become. Why, they're practicing all the things that you preach."
Satanists hear these, and similar statements, all the time; and they agree wholeheartedly. BUT, if the world has changed so much, why continue to grasp at the threads of a dying faith? If many religions are denying their own scriptures because they are out of date, and are preaching the philosophies of Satanism, why not call it by its rightful name - Satanism? Certainly it would be far less hypocritical.
In recent years there has been an attempt to humanize the spiritual concept of Christianity. This has manifested itself in the most obvious non-spiritual means. Masses which had been said in Latin are now said in native languages - which only succeeds in making the nonsense easier to understand, and at the same time robs the ceremony of the esoteric nature which is consistent with the tenets of the dogma. It is much simpler to obtain an emotional reaction using words and phrases that cannot be understood than it is with statements which even the simplest mind will question when hearing them in an understandable language.
If priests and ministers were to have used the devices to fill their churches one hundred years ago that they use today, they would have been charged with heresy, called devils,