Vice: Interview with "Pink Mass" Irritator Lucien Greaves

Vice is about ten percent interesting journalism, ninety percent narcisstic outrage creation.  This article, with Satanic Temple member Lucien Greaves (née Li'l Doug Mesner), is worth a read.

Instead, when we performed our Pink Mass at the grave of the mother of the Westboro Baptist Church’s founder, Fred Phelps, we were playing upon his own ludicrous superstitious fears. Ironically, the Church of Satan has never fully renounced supernaturalism, as we have.

My basic problem with Satanists is that they are always talking about how they don't worship Satan.  Satanism, from the LaVey seed, has always been a (nuanced) Social Darwinist, Objectivist, pleasure-focused philosophy.  Attaching Satan to the name not only confuses the issue but is a particularly cynical piece of marketing.  The black outfits, pentagrams and goat heads are all just logos.  Effective, I suppose, but always more important than their message.

The Pink Mass is of a piece with with the Texas, pro-abortion "Hail Satan" chant a few weeks back.  These people hate their enemy, middle-class Americans, so much that they're willing to, well, pledge allegiance to the Prince of Lies, just to piss them off.  I'd love to see these smirking idiots, laughing at their brave performance as the demon they summoned rises above them, seconds from eating their souls.  The biggest trick the Devil ever pulled, and all that.

Dougie--I mean, Mr. Greaves, and I do share a common interest:

In 2009, I went to a “Ritual Abuse/Mind-Control” conference in Connecticut where I listened to “experts” elaborate upon their beliefs in Satanic Ritual crimes. I thought they would be a fringe grouping of delusional people holding firmly to incredible beliefs, hurting nobody but themselves. What I found instead was a twisted subculture of licensed therapists, and their clients, who subscribe to a pseudoscientific belief in “dissociative amnesia”: The theory that some events—particularly sexual abuse—can be so uniquely traumatic that the conscious mind cannot comprehend it, and thus those memories are “repressed.”

I had quite a run researching this subject, fueled entirely by incredulity.  Some of the "memories" are beyond implausible.  It's hard to believe that the same mayor that fumfers through a city council meeting is an evil mastermind who has engineered a massive baby-sacrificing ring as well as completely obscuring it.  The people portrayed in these recovered memories are nothing like any person I've ever met.