Talk:Church of Satan

This page is not a forum for general discussion about the Church of Satan. Any such comments may be removed or refactored. Please limit discussion to improvement of this article. You may wish to ask factual questions about the Church of Satan at the Reference desk.

Article milestones
Date	Process	Result
July 14, 2014	Peer review	Reviewed

Alternative views Mid‑importance

	This article is within the scope of WikiProject Alternative views, a collaborative effort to improve Wikipedia's coverage of significant alternative views in every field, from the sciences to the humanities. If you would like to participate, please visit the project page, where you can join the discussion.Alternative viewsWikipedia:WikiProject Alternative viewsTemplate:WikiProject Alternative viewsAlternative views articles
Mid	This article has been rated as Mid-importance on the project's importance scale.

Secret Societies (inactive)

This article is within the scope of WikiProject Secret Societies, a project which is currently considered to be inactive.Secret SocietiesWikipedia:WikiProject Secret SocietiesTemplate:WikiProject Secret SocietiesSecret Societies articles

Occult

	This article is within the scope of WikiProject Occult, a collaborative effort to improve the coverage of articles related to the occult on Wikipedia. If you would like to participate, please visit the project page, where you can join the discussion and see a list of open tasks.OccultWikipedia:WikiProject OccultTemplate:WikiProject OccultOccult articles
???	This article has not yet received a rating on the project's importance scale.

Atheism

This article is within the scope of WikiProject Atheism, a collaborative effort to improve the coverage of atheism on Wikipedia. If you would like to participate, please visit the project page, where you can join the discussion and see a list of open tasks.AtheismWikipedia:WikiProject AtheismTemplate:WikiProject AtheismAtheism articles

???

This article has not yet received a rating on the project's importance scale.

For more information and how you can help, click the [Show] link opposite:

If you would like to participate, you can edit this article and visit the project page.

Quick help

Recent activity

To do

Join WikiProject atheism and be bold.

Add a userbox to your page ({{User WikiProject Atheism}} or {{User WPA2}}) and attract potential members.
Help with articles.
See this month's adopt-an-article.
Help out with this to-do list.

Be consistent

Use a "standard" layout for atheism-related articles (see layout style, "The perfect article" and Featured articles).
Add Atheism info box to all atheism related talk pages (use {{WikiProject Atheism}} or see info box)
Ensure atheism-related articles are members of Atheism by checking whether [[Category:Atheism]] has been added to atheism-related articles – and, where it hasn't, adding it.

Maintenance, etc.

Find sources for all positions of an article (see Citing sources and atheism references).
Try to expand stubs. Ideas and theories about life, however, are prone to generating neologisms, so some stubs may be suitable for deletion (see deletion process).
Watch the list of atheism-related articles and add to accordingly.
Always write for an encyclopedia.

Articles to improve

Agnosticism

Create

Articles on notable atheists

Expand

an atheism stub

Immediate attention

State atheism needs a reassessment of its Importance level, as it has little to do with atheism and is instead an article about anti-theist/anti-religious actions of governments.
False choice into False dilemma: discuss whether you are for or against this merge here
Clarify references in Atheism using footnotes.
Secular movement defines it as a being restricted to America in the 21st century.

Religion: Left Hand Path / New religious movements Mid‑importance

	Religion portal This article is within the scope of WikiProject Religion, a project to improve Wikipedia's articles on Religion-related subjects. Please participate by editing the article, and help us assess and improve articles to good and 1.0 standards, or visit the wikiproject page for more details.ReligionWikipedia:WikiProject ReligionTemplate:WikiProject ReligionReligion articles
Mid	This article has been rated as Mid-importance on the project's importance scale.
	This article is within the scope of Left Hand Path work group, a work group which is currently considered to be inactive.
	This article is supported by New religious movements work group (assessed as High-importance).

Archives

1, 2

This page has archives. Sections older than 66 days may be automatically archived by when more than 4 sections are present.

What seems like OR or possibly false referencing

I'm working my way through Category:Harv and Sfn no-target errors. This article contained a short ref to Lewis & Petersen 2014 that had no corresponding cite. However a cite for "Controversial New Religions" edited by Lewis & Petersen 2005 did exist. Controversial New Religions was actually published in 2014, so that should solve the problem. However as I was searching for a solution I read page 408 of Controversial New Religions.
Currently the text in the article that was using this ref is Instead, Satan is viewed as a positive archetype embracing the Hebrew root of the word "Satan" as "adversary", who represents pride, carnality, and enlightenment, and of a cosmos which Satanists perceive to be motivated by a "dark evolutionary force of entropy that permeates all of nature and provides the drive for survival and propagation inherent in all living things".

this text no longer appears in the article and there is no citation for Controversial New Religions --Louis P. Boog (talk) 01:19, 15 January 2024 (UTC)[reply]

The text in Controversial New Religions is actually a quote of Gilmoir 2007 "Satanism: The Feared Religion" and appears as In "Satanism: The Feared Religion," Peter H. Gilmore states:
[W]e do not believe in the supernatural. To the Satanist, he is his own God. Satan is a symbol of Man living as his prideful, carnal nature dic tates. Some Satanists extend this symbol to encompass the evolutionary "force" of entropy that permeates all of nature and provides the drive for survival and propagation inherent in all living things. To the Satanist, Satan is not a conscious entity to be worshiped, rather it is a name for the reservoir of power inside each human to be tapped at will. (Gilmore 2007: 31)

put this text in the article - ....-Louis P. Boog (talk) 01:19, 15 January 2024 (UTC)[reply]

The current version, specifically "dark evolutionary force of entropy that permeates all of nature and provides the drive for survival and propagation inherent in all living things", appears to have been picked up and used elsewhere but doesn't appear in the source material. Also the current version appears to be a very different interpretations of the subject than the source material.

and deleted this text from the article -Louis P. Boog (talk) 01:19, 15 January 2024 (UTC)[reply]

I don't have the subject knowledge to resolve this issue, so I have removed the ref and added {{citation needed}} tags. -- LCU ActivelyDisinterested ∆transmissions∆ °co-ords° 13:29, 10 November 2022 (UTC)[reply]

@ActivelyDisinterested Am attempting to cleanup CoS article. Do you see any more problems before I delete the tags? --Louis P. Boog (talk) 02:52, 15 January 2024 (UTC)[reply]

The particular OR issue I highlighted has been resolved, if your happy with the wrest of the article the that tag could go.
I didn't add the Third Party tag, but I can see why it was added. A large part of the references are either directly from The Church of Satan or an interview with the High Priest of the church. That hasn't been resolved so I would suggest leaving the tag in place. -- LCU ActivelyDisinterested «@» °∆t° 13:01, 15 January 2024 (UTC)[reply]

@ActivelyDisinterested Will work on the 3rd party issue. --Louis P. Boog (talk) 22:01, 18 January 2024 (UTC)[reply]

@ActivelyDisinterested Actually, this seems to have been a mistake (I think). There are two books called Controversial New Religions written by Lewis & Petersen. The first in 2005, and a second book in 2014. They present themselves as different "editions" but are in fact two different books with 0 content overlap (Lewis has done this multiple times, it's very confusing). Page 425-430 of the 2005 book does state the content that you removed. I'm not too involved in this page but that probably wasn't an OR issue. Just wanted to correct the record. PARAKANYAA (talk) 03:27, 14 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Will anyone add new documentaries?

I'm just wondering if anybody is going to add something about An American Satan (2019) and Into The. Devil's Den (2019) as they're both newer documentaries on the contemporary Church of Satan. MikoMek (talk) 21:28, 8 May 2023 (UTC)[reply]