your yearly PSA on the TST and COS:

some clarification here. The satanic temple, or the TST as it's known is actually really based, while it is "satanic" that's mostly a funny haha thing, the majority of it is mostly based around being a religion that isn't awful. I.E. being nice to people, because you should do that.

A lot of flak they've gotten is for things like putting a satanic club into a school (that school had a bible study club) and various other shenanigans, notably the one satan con thing they had, where people protested, but inside it was pretty chill. It's performance art and statement pieces primarily, which are perfectly apt, i feel. Freedom of religion and all. It seems perfectly reasonable to me.

Anyway, the point i came here to make was that the TST is the good one, and the church of satan, or COS, is the less based one, for instance, they believe that consuming blue cheese makes you gay. That's like the religion religion one. Nobody likes that one.

secular humanism is seriously needed as a mainstream social movement everywhere, locally and globally.

Don't you realise you basically sound the same as someone saying

Chrisrian Nationalism is seriously needed as a mainstream social movement everywhere, locally and globally.

Islamic Sharia is seriously needed as a mainstream social movement everywhere, locally and globally.

In general, I hope it becomes taboo and outlawed to base rules or laws around mythology-based scripture.

In a democracy, if there is a sizable Christian population, it makes sense for them to base laws around Christian values. Same if there was a sizable amount of Muslims, Hindus, etc. It doesn't make sense to give Atheism a special status above all of them as some form of "arbiter of morality"

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_atheism

As a quasi-religious person I do agree that public policy and moral imperatives should have a secular basis. For example, when people look back at this point in history they're going to see a particularly nasty stain in the way that 99% of the human population is responsible for a sort of perpetual holocaust of many other species of animal, all for nothing more than a little gluttonous sensory pleasure. That kind of morality is easily argued on a secular basis for all the substantial harms those lifestyles cause, and the sheer amount of tangible benefits for choosing a better way.

But secular policy is dangerous if it does not also support religious plurality. When one or two belief systems dominate, they invariably oppress smaller groups. Diversity of belief is a natural buffer against that.

That said, a religion does not necessarily need to base its exegesis on interpretation of arbitrarily chosen writings. One of the best things religious groups can do for themselves now days, if they want to adapt to the times and survive into the future, is embrace the scientific method in their own ways. Evolution shows us that the things that aren't willing to change and adapt die.