The religious belief that has always made the least sense to me is devil worship. Religioustolerance.org don’t delve to far into what satanism actually is (although they do rule out many things that it isn’t), so I’m at a loss as to what an actual satanist believes. Rock music apparently has a deep connection with the devil, so why not look at prominent satanist musicians?

Slayer’s famous line “God Hates Us All” has always puzzled me. I once met a guy at a festival who was wearing a Slayer jumper, so I asked him what it exactly meant. He told me that it meant exactly what it said; god hates us. I asked him why he believed in god, and secondly, why this god hates him. Apparently he didn’t actually believe in god, but still insisted that god hated everyone. I pointed out the contradiction and left it at that.

Now, I’ve seen some pretty crazy footage of Slayer shows. One guy bit a beer can in half. And I’m pretty sure that I’m safe attacking Slayer over the anonymous interweb, but just in case; I actually like a bit of Slayer stuff! My metal is much blacker than my coffee. The new album has some really nice soloing. I just fail to understand the whole satan thing.

Let’s go to the source of my confusion:

Slayer - Disciple

Drones since the dawn of time
Compelled to live your sheltered lives
Not once has anyone ever seen
Such a rise of pure hypocracy
I’ll instigate I’ll free your mind
I’ll show you what I’ve known all this time

God Hates Us All, God Hates Us All
You know it’s true God hates this place
You know it’s true he hates this race
…
What if there is no God would you think the fuckin’ same
Wasting your life in a leap of blind faith
Wake the fuck up can’t ignore what I say
I got my own philosophy

I hate everyone equally
You can’t tear that out of me
No segregation -separation
Just me in my world of enemies

I never said I wanted to be God’s disciple
I’ll never be the one to blindly follow
I’ll never be the one to bear the cross-disciple

I reject this fuckin’ race
I despise this fuckin’ place

So.. that was.. interesting. They have their own philosophy, but I’m not sure what it is. I think that there’s two parts to their worldview here. The first part is a failure to identify with any traditional omnipotent, omniscient and loving deity. So I think that when they refer to God, they is referring to themselves. This can be supported by the change in the last lines. Secondly, I think that they’re influenced by the argument from moral law: they think that without a God, there is no morality. This isn’t arguing about what morality is, be it absolute, situational, subjective, consequestionalist, etc. It’s arguing for moral nihilism, that there is no morality without the aforementioned deity.

I won’t go into why the latter argument is incorrect and why it shouldn’t be argued because most of the people who will read this will probably understand anyway (and I can’t be bothered.. I’ll save it for another time). I’ll just point out the main incoherence of these lyrics. Apparently they know that God doesn’t exist, but at the same time insist on moral nihilism. But they can’t know that God doesn’t exist just because they’re ignorant of any available evidence - they can only be agnostic. They need an argument to justify their position, and in accepting the argument from moral law they deny and sliding into moral nihilism they’re denying themselves access to the problem of evil in the world.

This probably seems like a stretch for some people - yes, I actually tried to honestly examine Slayer lyrics for philosophical content. Did I succeed? I don’t think so, but I’ll let you be the judge of that.

I still don’t get the whole satan thing. Do you??

xoxoJames