I personally categorise satanists as extreme anti-christians. My view, as with any religion: as long as they don’t bother anyone, why not? Put a mirror in front of catholicism and you pretty much got it, from where i stand. And yes, they generally are extremists, but everyone has extremists.

As far as “bigots” go… As an atheist, i’m not too familiar with the term. dict tells me that bigotry is: “narrow-minded intolerance of beliefs opposed to them”. Hrm.

So. Can morality only exist in a religious context?

Or: Is your sense of morality based on the fear of getting mysteriously turned into a pillar of salt if some set of rules are broken? Maybe you are selfishly working towards some good afterlife (ie heaven) while being very scared of the bad afterlife (ie hell)?

Surely that insults your intelligence.

This means that you might be unable to make a decision that is bound to land you in hell, even if logic says that it clearly is for the greater good. Since suffering plays an important role in various religions, you apparently need to force everyone to suffer in this life, just so you won’t have to suffer in a still unproven afterlife?

This is of course an extrapolation, but it explains what i meant with “selfish”.

Or maybe atheists and nihilists just don’t need the wrath of $god to be able to distinguish right from wrong. And maybe this pragmatism allows them to make choices that the religiously influenced see as morally depraved. Currently such topics are contraceptives, abortus, euthanasia, same sex marriages, and advanced genetic research. But going back further it is things like astronomy (galileo), medicine, physics, biology (darwin?), and even women wearing pants and voting.

For me, religion is something cultural. And a very important piece of culture that provided the rules of societies in the middle ages. Obey these rules, or be slain.

This role is now partly replaced by institutions like justicial and law-making institutions, such important pilars of democracy. Intelligence, that bit that supposedly made it so that we couldn’t have been related to monkies, covers the remainder.