I'm a big fan of Black Mass Appeal. They do an excellent job of making modern Satanism approachable and fun for ordinary people. However, I'm not one to listen to podcasts "religiously" as they post every week. I trawl through the episode archive and pick the ones that jump out at me.
Recently, I listened to the episode about Satanists with Disabilities. I was particularly struck by the discussion about how Christians hope for a heaven in which we will have perfect bodies, with no disease or deformity. It's a variation on the way in which the hope of an afterlife makes people less worried about their actual life being bad in some way. "Oh well – it sucks that I'm starving and miserable, but in Heaven I'll be well-fed and happy!" But that in some sense minimizes the impact of things people deal with in this life.
Not everyone with a disability considers it a defect. Many people who are neurodivergent value their different view of the world. It's not a given that everyone with every disability would choose to "fix it," and even less clear that all of them would choose to have history rewritten so it never happened.
But Christianity layers a far more vicious perspective onto this question. God is omnipotent. God works miracles. God's will is all, and will be done. So why is there still sickness in the world?
As he went along, [Jesus] saw a man blind from birth. 2 His disciples asked him, “Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?”
3 “Neither this man nor his parents sinned,” said Jesus, “but this happened so that the works of God might be displayed in him.
7 [...] So the man went and washed, and came home seeing.
-John 9:1-3, 7b
The prevailing belief at the time was that physical deformity was a result of sin – either the parents sinned and were cursed with a child who would be a burden, or the child sinned and was cursed with a deformity that developed later in life. (Or, perhaps, the child would sin and was pre-cursed for the sin he would commit.) The disciples ask Jesus whether it was the parents or if pre-cursing was a thing.
Jesus rebuts this belief, at least in this man's instance, and says that instead he was disabled to give Jesus an opportunity to cure him. Think about that for a second. God is supposed to have made this person disabled, making it impossible for him to have any kind of social standing in that society, so that Jesus could show off. That doesn't exactly cast God in a favorable light: He creates problems so that He can fix them and get your gratitude, when He could have just not created the problem in the first place. And the gospels are filled with stories of Jesus or the disciples healing someone from physical or mental illness to demonstrate their connection to the divine.
But okay, let's take that presupposition and run with it. Say disability isn't always the result of sin (though it might be), it's just an opportunity for God to heal you and show you how much He loves you. What happens when the disability isn't miraculously healed? Most people who've ever died had an injury or illness they hoped would heal, and it didn't. I would guess that at least some portion of people who are disabled – particularly if they subscribe to the belief that they have a perfect "spiritual" body trying to be expressed in their imperfect flesh – have hoped and perhaps prayed for it to be fixed.
I got that driven home this past Sunday during the psalm. Psalm 113 concludes:
7 [The Lᴏʀᴅ] raises the poor from the dust
and lifts the needy from the ash heap;
8 he seats them with princes,
with the princes of his people.
9 He settles the childless woman in her home
as a happy mother of children.
-Psalm 113:7-9
I call bullshit. Look around us. The poor, by and large, remain poor. They're not seated with royalty.
And the childless woman? Ask anyone who's struggled with infertility how often they've wished and prayed for that to change. Sure, some of them eventually have children, either biologically or via adoption. (But adoption is crushingly expensive, so see that "raising the poor from the dust" bit.)
Despite our decade and more of fertility issues, my wife and I are lucky enough to have both a biological and an adopted child. She credits God with making that happen, and perhaps finds some joy in this psalm. But during the years we were trying and hoping, verses like this merely highlighted that she wasn't "good enough" to be healed, didn't deserve it.
We have friends who aren't as fortunate. They don't have the financial resources we've had to pursue extensive medical intervention, to pursue the arduous and denigrating path of becoming adoptive parents. They desperately want children, ardently believe that God could give then children... and doesn't. I remember being in that place, envious of all the couples who could have a child merely by having incautious sex and, oopsie-doodles, here comes another baby.
Satanism says to forget the invisible deity who supposedly decides whether sperm and egg make contact, or whether body parts miraculously reshape themselves to match our idea of "normal." Instead, the Tenets have this to say:
The First Tenet tells us to show compassion and empathy to everyone equally, not treating the disabled as lesser or suggesting they've offended an invisible spirit. The Second, Third, and Fourth Tenets tell us we need to fight to ensure everyone is given fair opportunities to participate in every aspect of life, the ability to exercise their rights just as much as someone who is "able-bodied." It is each person's decision how to use their body, and not anyone else's. The Fifth Tenet says we need to embrace a healthy regard for science; specifically medicine, in this instance.
But beyond all that, the Sixth Tenet calls us to embrace that we have learned from our society prejudices and misconceptions about disabilities that we aren't even aware of. The disciples repeated culturally accepted ideas which now seem outmoded and offensive; Jesus radically rebuffed them with a new viewpoint... which still seems outmoded and offensive today.
So we, too, have outmoded and offensive ideas that we don't understand until they're called to our attention. Even the most "woke" or "based" of us have them; we're still making progress here.
To that point, if I've accidentally said anything hurtful to people who have different types of abilities, I sincerely apologize. Let me know, and I'll endeavor to improve.
Hail Satan! Amen.