Podcasts/FriendlyAtheist-Ep.31

Friendly Atheist Podcast Ep. 31 - Lucien Greaves, Spokesperson for The Satanic Temple
Dec 10, 2014, 1:19 PM
Lucien Greaves is the spokesperson for The Satanic Temple. You know his organization because they’ve been very active recently regarding church/state separation issues. In Oklahoma, where there was a Ten Commandments monument near the Capitol building, Greaves’ group requested putting up a statue of Baphomet… leading to all sorts of chaos. They’ve also tried to put up a Satanic display in the Florida Capitol building. And, my favorite, after a Florida school district allowed an outside group to do a Bible giveaway for students, they requested to distribute a Satanic coloring book… which may lead to an end to outside book distributions for good in that district. We spoke with Lucien about how he doesn't actually believe in Satan, what his group's relationship is like with other Satanic groups, and why they conducted a Pink Mass over the grave of Fred Phelps' mother.
https://audioboom.com/posts/7840635-ep-31-lucien-greaves-spokesperson-for-the-satanic-temple

Transcript

00:00:04 Hemant Mehta: I'm Hemant Mehta

00:00:06 Jessica Blimpie: and I'm Jessica Blimpie and you're listening to the podcast for friendlyatheist.com.

00:00:14 Hemant Mehta: Lucian grieves is the spokesperson for the Satanic Temple, you know his organization because they've been very active recently regarding Church State separation issues in Oklahoma, where there was a 10 commandments monument near the Capitol building. grieves group requested putting up a statue of bafflement, leading to all sorts of chaos. They've also tried to put up a satanic display in the Florida capitol building for Christmas, you know, and my favorite after Florida School District allowed an outside group to do a Bible giveaway for students, his group requested to distribute a satanic coloring book, which may end up leading to an end to outside book distributions for good in that district. So Lucia, thank you for being with us here tonight. Should I call you Lucian? I mean, I that's not your real name. But what do you prefer? And why do you use that particular name? Where did Lucian come from? And hell, where did your last name come from?

00:01:11 Lucien Greaves: Actually, that was a, that was pretty awful, because we needed to set up a Facebook page at the beginning, or thought we needed to set up a Facebook page. And I didn't want that attached to my actual profile, because I was under the delusion that I could remain in the background. So I need to set up another Facebook profile that could be an admin for the Satanic Temple page. So I chose the name Lucian grieves for that for that admin, and didn't expect that I would take over the role of "Lucian Greaves". At the beginning, I had this kind of idea for the Satanic Temple that we could be more like anonymous, that we could do things, and we could be pseudo anonymous, and there would be no central figurehead. And, and then we could maintain our anonymity and our privacy and try to avoid ruination of social lives and careers, and that type of thing, but very quickly, I think with the pink mass, people already started recognizing me in pictures, I started talking to press. And it just very quickly got to the point where I couldn't remain anonymous anymore. So now there's this kind of confusion. While I don't mind that people know that I'm Doug, for consistency sake, I often go by Lucian Greaves in my interviews nonetheless.

00:02:35 Jessica Blimpie: So I would love to kind of start off by talking about what exactly Satanism is, I don't think most people have a really firm grasp on it, because on your website, it says, you don't actually believe in Satan. Right?

00:02:49 Lucien Greaves: Right, I'm very open about being an atheist. And so this causes people to say, especially given the nature of the kind of activities we do, and our very political nature, that it's strictly a prank or a hoax. And that's not the case, either. I really think that we have deeply held values that are, aren't we put together with this kind of narrative structure of Satanism? It's a it's a metaphorical construct for us. But we don't think it's our beliefs are any less deeply held for it being a metaphorical construct? And they're just as just as given to legal deference is any other religion and I think that's a very important fight the fights that course from supernaturalism and should be.

00:03:47 Hemant Mehta: If I didn't know you were Satanist, I would probably call you a secular humanist. Just given your self description on the website of what a Satanist is, you know, you believe in good. You even like helping other people. It sounds awesome. And then as soon as you see the word satanist, people are like, "Oh, what happened there?"

00:04:06 Lucien Greaves: Well, we've gotten a lot of positive comments and positive press from the humanists, and atheists, especially in light of the Orange County decision to not distribute the religious books due to our presence there. But I think the best insight into why we're saying this or what, what Satanism is, would come from kind of an analysis of what I think we got the least amount of good press without and that was the black mass event at Harvard. And people really questioned whether this was hate speech, why we would be doing a black mass. One thing that was completely missed by a lot of the press was what we build this as to begin with, it was an academic of that in we're trying to demystify this idea of Satanism, and the black mass was never a thing that people really did. It was more of a...

00:05:03 Hemant Mehta: Let me ask you about this because I want you to explain to our audience, what exactly a black mass is because it's kind of like a Catholic mass. It's supposed to use a consecrated communion wafer, which is really like the big deal and all this. So what is the black mass?

00:05:22 Lucien Greaves: Well, I think that it started as a Catholic hate speech against maligned groups that they would refer to as heretics or which is or whatever else, some outgroup, and that they would want to purge. And they would justify this by attributing these crimes to them that never existed, that they did these sinister evil rites in which they would murder babies, to file a consecrated host and these types of things. And that was not happening. It was kind of this idea based off the witches Sabbath that then kind of merged into this Catholic narrative of the black mass. And the idea has become an inextricable from the idea of Satanism and something that I was explaining at the time, we were going to do this academic event with what we call the black mass reenactment based on the book, la bots by boys mix, which was written in the 19th century, and he was talking about attending a black mass, and he did kind of this credible account where it seemed like people were performing this ritual that they were referring to as a black mass. And you wonder why, why would somebody want to do this? And I think that gives you your kind of best insight into what what is Satanism? What does it mean to people, and people kind of gravitated to this idea of the black mass because they felt oppressed by the church, they felt oppressed by the superstition, or whatever was, whatever was being weighed upon them by those doctrines. And it was kind of a personal declaration of independence for them. Not necessarily an attack upon the church. But it's a way of kind of undermining that cultural programming that somebody has grown up with.

00:07:14 Hemant Mehta: And you were trying to reenact... you were trying to reenact all this at Harvard.

00:07:17 Lucien Greaves: I was trying to give an academic presentation that would, that would demystify this idea, give us historical background and talk about what that means to people today. And why some people do embrace blasphemy or blasphemous images, why they embrace Satanism and how they can attach a permanent values onto that. And it doesn't have anything to do now with a direct assault upon any group of people who are Church, which is something that's become assimilated from earlier culture. Till now, when people probably gravitate to that thing, that type of thing that most when they're coming away from their religion. And they're seeing that they can engage in these symbolic acts without consequence. And it was a growing experience for people and for lack of a better word, it can be transcended. And in that way, people can really embrace Satanism as a religious choice.

00:08:14 Hemant Mehta: And this was something that Harvard's people saw so offensive. I mean, even the president of Harvard was like, "Yeah, we don't want to see this on our campus basically."

00:08:24 Lucien Greaves: Well, even she didn't seem to bother to acknowledge what the event really was, we were clear that we weren't doing a black mass, we're doing a reenactment. And of course, in our case, we don't really see a reenactment of a ritual is any different from a ritual, but we are also clear, we weren't using a consecrated host, or weren't doing violence on anything.

00:08:44 Hemant Mehta: It's like a Civil War reenactments, even though you're like not trying to promote the ideas that they were fighting about, per se. We're just saying, Look, this is important for historical sake, in a sense.

00:08:56 Lucien Greaves: Right, right. And just the act of as I was saying, the engaging blasphemy, I think it's a good window into kind of a culture of Satanism and the kind of psychology that that that gravitates people to it. So it's not going to be something that's important to all secular humanists. I'm not trying to say that this is a kind of movement that could absorb atheism or define atheistic values. There is a lot of different atheistic religions in fact, and not all of them are going to resonate for atheists of whatever strike they are. But it so happens that we're atheist who feel we have a religion and faith

00:09:38 Jessica Blimpie: Well, you know, we talk a lot we've talked a few times on this podcast about about names and labels they're important to people people say they don't believe in God but I don't identify as an atheist they prefer humanist or bright or whatever. Do you think that you could have you know the the Satanic Temple has gotten in the press a lot for for your works. Do you think you could have gotten the same level of success or attention if you were, say, the atheist temple or some other

00:10:06 Hemant Mehta: Variance on that, right.

00:10:09 Lucien Greaves: I think we've already shown that that would definitely not be the case. And I think that was never more apparent than when we submitted to put a holiday display in Florida last year, and we were rejected, whereas Pastafarians and Festivus pole were not rejected. And it makes you wonder why, you know, the pastafarians seems to be openly making a mockery of, of religious symbols. And people feel or claim to feel the same about us. So what's different about Satanism and I think that Satanism is different in that it challenges the religious narrative, it challenges the Christian narrative, when it may even challenge the other monotheistic narratives, when you can embrace the other side and show that these narratives are open to interpretation. You know?

00:11:10 Hemant Mehta: It's worth noting that your display that you want it to put up in Florida, for those who aren't aware, it was a Bible verse, I believe, and it was kind of like one of those. I don't mean this in a disrespectful way. It was kind of like one of those shoe box panorama, what is the word that you make in grade school? Like, oh, one of those displays that featured a Bible verse and then a depiction of that Bible verse. But it wasn't one that's like favorable to Jesus. It was like something about hellfire. I correct me if I'm wrong, there.

00:11:42 Lucien Greaves: Well, yeah just a couple of biblical passages that are falling Angel. And in it was made. Yeah, it was made by some sort of a couple of our membership in Florida was just a homemade project. It wasn't Look, I don't think very intimidating.

00:12:02 Hemant Mehta: But the point was, it wasn't it didn't matter how it looked. The point was, this is your display. And they said no to it.

00:12:11 Lucien Greaves: Right, right. Well, this year, this year is different because Americans United is representing us,

00:12:18 Hemant Mehta: you got some legal background, you got some legal people on your side now.

00:12:23 Lucien Greaves: Right. In fact, Americans United have applied on our behalf and made it very clear that there was really no reason to deny our display. And we kept the same display from last year too. Which I like, because if having this kind of legal heft behind us now causes them to not reject the display. That's kind of a tacit recognition of the fact that they really had no grounds to do so last year, and I wonder if that's going to hold them back. But in any case, they haven't replied to our request. And Americans United has already given them an ultimatum dates, which already passed. So...

00:13:04 Hemant Mehta: ...we're gonna see some fireworks happen in very soon. Maybe by the time this podcast airs.

00:13:09 Jessica Blimpie: Yeah.

00:13:10 Lucien Greaves: Right, right. Well, in but, you know, back to the original point, obviously, Satanism is the whole a whole different issue to a lot of people rather than beyond Pastafarianism and beyond, you know, Festivus poles or, or any alternative religion in general. And it's something I feel it's, that's very important for people to come to terms with and reconcile themselves with. And it's not just a petty, petty, we we can to kind of equal rights senselessly whining about this kind of thing. I was very motivated by having witnessed the Satanic Panic of the 1980s 1990s kind of this talk show hosts moral panic.

00:14:05 Hemant Mehta: You were just the boogeyman. Just Satanists were the Boogeyman. They were out to get your kids and you all needed to fear them.

00:14:11 Jessica Blimpie: Puth things backwards in records.

00:14:12 Hemant Mehta: Yeah.

00:14:13 Jessica Blimpie: That's effective.

00:14:14 Hemant Mehta: They put razor blades and apples on Halloween.

00:14:16 Lucien Greaves: A lot of that material is laughable. But what's less laughable and what less people seem to realize is people people's lives were ruined by that was a prison for crimes that couldn't possibly have committed. Gerald's emerald Massachusetts spent 18 years in prison. Martha Coakley tried to keep them there. And for some reason she actually ran for governor this time. I'm glad she lost. But a lot of people never suffered for causing this kind of panic that they did. And there was Fran Keller and her husband Dan Keller, they were part of the daycare abuse, moral panic as well where Satanism was involved in the testimony. He talked about bizarre graveyard rituals and cannibalism and things they had no physical evidence for. And they were speaking in the most crass conspiracy theorists terms in the courtroom, where they'd have expert witnesses talking about how the satanists are such a ubiquitous power that you find people in the police departments and in the courtrooms that are actually secret Satanists, and that is why you can't find physical evidence of the crimes. It was one of those situations where lack of evidence became evidence of the criminal conspiracy networks.

00:15:36 Hemant Mehta: It is quite literally like a witch hunt from the 1600s or something.

00:15:40 Jessica Blimpie: It feels like...

00:15:41 Lucien Greaves: It was absolutely a witch on Anthem right here in the United States, people's lives were ruined. And it's, I feel it's such an under recognized piece of our history. But it helped me to realize that if you have this kind of floating out-group, this kind of label that you can just throw at people, it is still harmful. You know, I mean, you might not be saying, well, it's the Jews, and a lot of the ideas of a Jewish threat just migrated over to satanic threats. You know, and I guess people feel better about that, because it doesn't isolate a real culture or real people. But it does. We feel like we're, we're of a kind. We are the blasphemers, the doubters, the heretics, and we do have a place in the world too. And it doesn't necessarily translate from one to the next that we're also antisocial, anti-human and criminal.

00:16:39 Hemant Mehta: Let me ask you, what is your relationship with other satanic groups? Because I know there was another group in like Oklahoma that did a another black mass, I don't think they were reenacting it, they actually wanted to do one, but that was not affiliated with your organization. So, you know, I don't know the satanic landscape in America. Where do you fit in? Do you fit in? And what? Tell me about these other satanist groups?

00:17:09 Lucien Greaves: Well, it's, it's, it's kind of an uncomfortable relationship, sometimes. Modern Satanism really came into interview when Anton LaVey started the church of Satan in the 60s. And, you know, a lot of the scholars who talked about this kind of thing say that he was more like us in the early days, and then kind of withdrew into crankiness. And, and misanthropy later on, but he kind of had some of these. Some of these ideas were wasn't, he wasn't worshipping Satan either. It was an atheistic metaphorical construct.

00:17:53 Hemant Mehta: So these other atheists, these other satanic groups, they don't believe in Satan as a person, either. They're also atheists who just believe in this idea of, you know, goodness, whatever.

00:18:05 Lucien Greaves: Well, the Church of Satan still believes in magic and other mystical things, ritual magic, the other...

00:18:11 Hemant Mehta: Other satanist groups believe in the supernatural?

00:18:13 Lucien Greaves: Right? Right. Right. We reject supernaturalism entirely. The Church of Satan does not. And also where we really depart from the Church of Satan is bluebay based Satanic Bible off of a book called Might is Right. It was this social Darwinistic text. It was based on these kind of old school ideas of survival of the fittest, that we're wrong, not not really Darwinian ideas at all. But it really kind of disproven now by studies in game theory and reciprocal altruism. And we find that we work better in groups. And we in that we do have an altruistic sense. It was very motivated by Ayn Rand. And we kind of harken back to earlier literary Satanism, from Milton to Anatole France, where you have this kind of Revolt of the Angels idea where Satan for us is metaphorical, the ultimate rebel against the ultimate tyranny, always standing for personal sovereignty and individual rights wherever those issues arrive.

00:19:26 Jessica Blimpie: So do you ever recruit people into your group or like what actually what is your group look like? Is it is it organized, you have meetings? There's like a couple guys hanging out in a basement, or what do you guys look like?

00:19:38 Lucien Greaves: Well, you know, I've been working on the national level, and I started with this with a couple of other people. So first, we're almost faking it. You know, we're doing this kind of thing as Satanists and there isn't really a group to speak of. And now of course, we have so many people who want to help on whatever level they possibly can. In We're in the process now of cohering are different chapter houses all across the nation. And they're coming together now, and will all have their own flavor naturally. And I'm hoping that they can organically evolve, and we'll be able to see what works best for them. What kind of meeting structure, what they do and don't want to do. And we're not. It's kind of against our philosophy to keep an iron fisted grip on them. Just as we don't try to micromanage people's beliefs over we just have a basic value system that we put forward.

00:20:38 Hemant Mehta: It is always interesting to me that, you know, you're trying to organize all this stuff. Every time I've seen your name in the news, you're always the spokesperson of the Satanic Temple, you're not the president, you're not the chair, you know, I always wondered like...

00:20:52 Jessica Blimpie: The King.

00:20:52 Hemant Mehta: Yeah, you're not the king. Why that title, as opposed to something that conveys that you really, you're running the show? Because it seems to me like that is what you are actually doing. It's not like there's someone else who's the president of the group, and you're just, you know, a PR person, that's not the case.

00:21:09 Lucien Greaves: Well, of course, there's a lot of contradictions here that I'm trying to manage. And I don't want, I never want this to become some kind of personality cult, right? It's not about you. I'm opposed to developing any central figureheads. Now that seems to be the kind of direction it's ended up going for me. And people want to know what my own autobiographical experience has been. And I've avoided that kind of thing. And a lot of interviews, you know, in so far as questions don't relate to the Satanic Temple at all, I don't really have any interest in answering them, either. And I don't like the idea of lofty titles that don't relate to any actual real world activity. I think it's, it's silly, and it's kind of it's kind of outdated. I think. You never walk around with titles like Magus or Pope or whatever... At the time now,

00:22:06 Hemant Mehta: The Pope of the Satanic Temple has a nice ring to it.

00:22:10 Jessica Blimpie: Oh, I love that.

00:22:12 Lucien Greaves: Oh, yeah.

00:22:15 Hemant Mehta: Let me let me ask you about something.

00:22:16 Lucien Greaves: But I am organizing, I am doing a lot of the work behind the scenes, of course, but at the time, I'm talking to you, I'm acting as a spokesperson.

00:22:25 Hemant Mehta: Right. Right. Okay, let me ask you a serious question. We referred to this at the beginning of the conversation. But the first time I heard about you and your organization was when the Satanic Temple conducted a pink mass, and it was over the gravestone of Fred Phelps, the Westboro Baptist Church, guys, mother. And just to be clear, like this is a ritual that involves gay guys making out over her grave lesbians making out of her grave, you putting your own dick atop her gravestone in the hopes of at least ritualistically in the hopes of turning the dead person into a gay person. I think one publication said it was like Mormons baptizing the dead only much of gay-er. I mean, it's kind of hilarious and kind of disrespectful. But, I mean, you know, you don't believe in the supernatural. You know, none of that turns her spirit gay. So I mean, why bother?

00:23:19 Jessica Blimpie: Nobody knows anything, Hemant.

00:23:21 Hemant Mehta: It seems like it got you off on the wrong foot.

00:23:24 Lucien Greaves: I was open about that at the time to me, I would talk to press, national press, ABC, NBC or whoever else. Yeah, I actually told them that our position was we don't believe in the supernatural. However, it is our belief that due to their beliefs, they're obligated to believe that he is now gay, in the afterlife. And that they since our belief is inviolable, no matter what they say, we are free to believe that they believe that she's gay in the afterlife. And that was also kind of a commentary on their rather successful arguments in the Supreme Court where they kept falling back on the inviolability of belief. And we were hoping that...

00:24:09 Hemant Mehta: It doesn't matter if you're right or not. It's just that you sincerely hold these beliefs. That's all that matters

00:24:15 Lucien Greaves: ...with with the nuanced message we had there that we could leave whatever we wanted to believe about their beliefs. And, yes, it was disrespectful. And it was, it was contrived to be so. And it's funny because I also had interviews where people would say, "Well, I wouldn't want you to do that to my mother's grave." And I would say, "well, naturally don't don't act as Fred Felps acts." There's alot of things you wouldn't want somebody to do to you, but...

00:24:44 Hemant Mehta: Then again, it also sounds like you don't do it. "Don't do it to my grave." Well, what do you think's gonna happen if you do, like nothing's gonna happen. Well, so where did you when did you guys...

00:24:55 Lucien Greaves: Also I wasn't sure if they felt that I had just happened upon her grave at random.

00:25:01 Hemant Mehta: That's quite the coincidence...

00:25:02 Lucien Greaves: Ya know, nobody wants to go to prison either don't hold up 711.

00:25:05 Hemant Mehta: Right. Well, okay, so how did you go from? I guess being nationally publicized assholes in a sense, for that stunt, to going to kind of heroic Church State separation activists, which is what I've seen from your organization in the past several months. Like, it's not, I mean, on my website, we even coined a phrase for this. It's called, like Lucians law, which is that every time there's a Church State separation battle, that you know, it seems like you don't know which way it's gonna go. All you got to do is bring in the satanists and it's gonna go in the right direction. Where did you guys decide to do all this Church State separation activism, because that's kind of amazing.

00:25:47 Lucien Greaves: Actually, that was that was what we had in mind from the very outset and we had things in mind like the monument campaign at the time we went to go do the pink mass. So even though you see us doing this pink mass first and it's kind of this you know, shocking event that rattles people up and makes them really question Are we a joke a hoax political or actual religion? What what's going on? And then we move into these rather cerebral arguments, I think for Church State separation that they're certainly not expecting. I still do interviews now where people comment that they can expect me to be very articulate. But but that was really, really the point from the outset. The pink mass was something that was really quite we genuinely wanted to do that. It was kind of revenge for the Boston Marathon bombing. I was in Boston at the time, when the marathon bombing happened in was so disgusted with Westboro Baptists, three pi, they said they were going to come and pick up the funerals of the dead at the marathon bombing. And it seemed to be going too far to me, actually, when they didn't show up. And they posted these mocking tweets on Twitter are there they were there and spirits in you know, and everybody showed up for them because the counter protesters came, which should also be mentioned, as I feel like a target should be for entire of action, like there would be Alex Jones. He was no better than the Westboro Baptist Church. He sent some slob of reporter of his to heckle the governor, on the first press conference immediately in the aftermath of the Boston Marathon bombing, shouting out false flag theory right. And out of turn, all the morose audience stands by in so it was this bizarre. It was bizarre and surreal, following the the Boston Marathon bombing because he had this event that happened and the event got buried with little recognition I felt with all these people claiming that it confirms their deepest held fears, whatever those were, the Marathon Bombing confirmed it. For Alex Jones, it was that the government is working to initiate a police state and there they they acted this thing out it's entirely. To others it was because of gays because of gay marriage. Whatever else. Similar to Jerry Falwell saying that 9-11 could be attributed to gays and secularism, of course he backtrack because he's more of a politician than the Westboro Baptist. But the Westboro Baptists kind of served as a convenient focal point for that type of stupidity. And that was just something I wanted to do to show that people could use their rights to offensive speech against those who have decided that as well.

00:28:54 Hemant Mehta: I have a question that I've been dying to ask you for weeks. Now. For those who don't know, I mentioned this in your intro. Outside the Oklahoma Capitol building, there was this 10 commandments monument, you guys just decided to that you wanted to put up your own satanic sort of statue? And they said no, and there's been some legal back and forth about this. Well, a few weeks ago, as we're taping this anyway, someone with their car drove up and basically ran into the 10 commandments monument, they destroyed it. And right now they're in the process of maybe rebuilding it, putting it back up. But that's a separate issue. When I first heard that someone destroyed the 10 commandments monument. In the back of my head, my first thought was, oh, my God, I hope that's not an atheist, because that would suck. That's not the way you go about protesting, that sort of thing. And I wonder if because you guys were the main opponents of this 10 commandments statue or more that you were the ones who were pushing to get your own stuff up there. Did you have that thought in the back of your head that "I may have convinced someone to do this?" And by the way, I should point out, it was actually a Christian who was maybe off his medication who ended up doing it. So it wasn't any of it wasn't an atheist. It wasn't a Satanist whatever. Did you have that thought at least for a little while in the back of your head, like, I may have convinced someone to do this.

00:30:15 Lucien Greaves: Oh no, immediately. I actually the first I heard of it, they were already saying it was a satan.

00:30:19 Hemant Mehta: Yeah. They were.

00:30:20 Lucien Greaves: They were saying that Satan told him to do it, which is apparently where he was coming from.

00:30:28 Hemant Mehta: As a Christian. They were saying Satan told them to do it. Just like you hear a lot of pastors saying, "if you do something wrong, it was Satan." That's not necessarily a someone's saying Lucien Greaves made me do it. So it's a Christian who was saying that, but I did hear people suggest your people did it.

00:30:44 Lucien Greaves: It doesn't matter. I mean, he, if he was going to if he was actually a Satanist, and he was actually a registered member of the Satanic Temple, we never hear the end of it. You might well say "Lucian told me to do it."

00:30:55 Hemant Mehta: Right?

00:30:55 Lucien Greaves: It's funny, because like a week later, a, a, another mentally disturbed Christian, self identifying Christian, cut off the head of a kid in Oklahoma claimed he was practicing witchcraft, that the kid was practicing witchcraft. So he beheaded him. And this was not a very huge national story, that was something that did get some attention. But I was thinking then again, imagine if it was the other way around, you know? If somebody says he's a Christian, he cuts off somebody's head, say, "well, he's not a Christian," you know? Obviously, his religion had nothing to do with this. This is a mentally disturbed person.

00:31:39 Hemant Mehta: Which they would never do if it was actually a Satanist or something.

00:31:44 Lucien Greaves: Right, right. Somebody evokes Satanism, we will never hear the end of it. And there was cases like that, of course, in the 80s, there was a kid Sean Sellars, who killed his parents. And he said that Satanism made him do it. And he ended up on Gherardo. And all these other things. He had this very ostentatious conversion to Christianity. When he was in prison, it seems clear that he was, well, it seems he was sociopathic, and was trying to avoid the death penalty and thought maybe this conversion could help him. But his story about being involved in Satanism didn't even make sense. He was he, as he talked about it, you could tell he had this kind of anti satanist conception of what Satanism is, and Satanism could be blamed for these kinds of things, because that's what Satanists do. And so when the 10 commandments get run over, I knew immediately we needed to release a statement and make clear the position we had all along was that we weren't asking for the 10 commandments to come down. Our position has been that if the 10 commandments are there, we want our monument there if the 10 commandments come down, we don't want our monument there. So I wanted wanted to be quite clear that this this wasn't something that would help us. You know, this was an obviously, obviously, wasn't somebody working toward our benefits? Right? You know, and then as you said, it turns out that guy was supposedly this devout Christian, who had some kind of mental disorder and said, case, clearly, off his medication goes and runs over the 10 commandments monument. So now you don't hear a whole lot of the story. But the governor said that she was dedicated, even helping raise private funds to put it back up, and they seem very dedicated to putting the 10 commandments monument...

00:33:26 Hemant Mehta: Right, right.

00:33:27 Lucien Greaves: ...back up. So we're moving ahead with our plans nonetheless.

00:33:33 Hemant Mehta: Well, thank you so much for joining us. And, you know, as I said before, I'm a huge fan of the Church State separation work you guys are doing right now. Yeah. It's it's always seems to be that if Christians are doing something, atheists always seem to be the bad guys. You know, when we come in and say, we just want to be treated equally. And it's kind of interesting to just watch like, satanist thrown into the mix here and saying, "Yeah, we're raising our hands. We want in on this too." And then everyone's like, "Oh, we should just stop. We should stop trampling over the Constitution now because it's working against us." So thank you for everything you're doing and keep up the Keep up the good work.

00:34:12 Lucien Greaves: Thank you so much. See you this weekend.

00:34:14 Hemant Mehta: All right, man. I'll see you soon. We'll both be at skeptic con this weekend as we're taping this so thanks so much, and I will talk to you soon.

00:34:21 Lucien Greaves: Alright, talk to you soon. Bye.

00:34:27 Hemant Mehta: Thanks for listening to the podcast for friendly atheist.com. This episode was taped at cinnamon Sound Studios in Aurora, Illinois, and the music was written and performed by Brad Chagdis this. If you like what you're hearing, please consider making your contribution patreon.com/hemant and that's "he-man, T". We appreciate your support. I'm Hemant Mehta and I'm

00:34:47 Jessica Blimpie: Jessica Blimpie. We hope you'll join us next time.