This is fun. The Satanic Temple is taking-on the odious Good News Club — which improbably persuaded the Supreme Court that it has the right to use public facilities to peddle the most degrading fundamentalism to grade school children — by relying on that same Supreme Court decision to demand that they, too, be allowed to operate after-school clubs.
They point out that Christian evangelical groups already have infiltrated the lives of America’s children through after-school religious programming in public schools, and they appear determined to give young students a choice: Jesus or Satan.
“It’s critical that children understand that there are multiple perspectives on all issues, and that they have a choice in how they think,” said Doug Mesner, the Satanic Temple’s co-founder.
Watch the promotional video.
Is that great, or what?
In this area, they’d probably have to be protected by police snipers to even set foot on school property; even so, I love the in-your-face attitude. As for the Good News Clubs, they are unspeakable.
But the snacks, games, prizes, songs, and fun activities mask a dark message of shame and fear indoctrination. The Good News Club curriculum is filled with over 5000 references to sin and thousands more to obedience, punishment, and Hell. It stresses Old Testament narratives of a retributive God who must punish sin, warns children that they will suffer an eternity in Hell if they refuse to believe, and stresses complete obedience as the supreme value. Meanwhile, salutary themes such as the “Golden Rule” are almost entirely absent from the curriculum.
As documented in this site’s sections on “Shame” and “Hell” and individual lesson reviews, Good News Club tells children as young as preschoolers that they have “dark” and “sinful” hearts, were born that way, and “deserve to die” and “go to Hell.”
The local Good News Club sponsor teaches that the world is less than 10,000-years old, that the Bible is literally true, that it is sinful to prioritize your family and wedding vows ahead of Our Invisible Friend, that secularists are evil and the Bible is the only book anybody really needs to read … well, in short, that church is the exemplar for everything that decent, educated people find repellent in Christian thought. I wish the Satanists success at drawing attention to the indecencies being promoted in public schools.