This community has now moved instances and can be found on lemmy.blahaj.zone. Please update your subscriptions :)

Yesterday, 10th August was International World Day Against Witch Hunts.

Hammer of Witches, published in 1486 by the German Dominican, theologian and inquisitor Heinrich Kramer (1), states:

“…in various ways midwife sorceresses kill the fetuses in the womb and cause miscarriages, and when they do not do this, they offer the new-borns to demons” (page 211)

and

“‘No one harms the Catholic faith more than do midwives.’ In instances where they do not kill children, they take the baby out of the room as if to do something, and raising them up in the air they offer them to the demons.” (page 212)

And here we are nearly 600 years later still fighting the accusations of witchcraft and using religion as justification to prevent women accessing abortion.

Judge Alito in the US Supreme Court cited (2) Sir Matthew Hale (3), the English 17th Century Witch Trial judge who sentenced numerous ‘witches’ to death and who is responsible for the school of thought that women cannot be raped by their husbands (an idea not completely overthrown in the US legal system until 1981) in support of his legal justification for overturning Roe vs Wade. Hale was also anti-abortion in all circumstances, because of course he was and Alito cited the misogynistic Hale on these grounds, describing Hale as ‘great’ and ’eminent’. High praise for a man who clearly hated women and who presided over the witch trial which later inspired the more famous Salem Witch trials.

More and references on Post

You might've noticed no posts by the bot today. The log did record an error and it seems that because lemmy.world has had no choice to go behind cloudflare until the script kiddies get bored with their ddos attack on the database, the bot isn't making it past the cloudflare challenge, which is not surprising.

I'll leave it up and running and hopefully .world can ease back as and when the ddos attacks retreat. Hopefully at that point the bot will resume normal activity.

Hi :)

A couple of days ago I set up a bot account on lemm.ee using the Lemmy Mega Bot code. This bot grabs an RSS feed and posts new items from it lemmy.world/c/metal - there's never more than 2 a day.

Today it failed to post anything at all. I checked the logs and there was an error I didn't fully understand so I talked to the author of the script. They suggested that this could be happening if .world had set up a Cloudflare challenge script (due to the ddos attacks), so I'd just like to confirm if that is the case and .world is using a Cloudflare challenge?

Thanks!

"RoS discovered a number of new findings, and we would like to thank them for their thorough and detailed report. They stated , amongst other things that: that whilst they found some issues, that: “The Mullvad VPN relays which were the subject of this test showed a mature architecture…” and “During the test we found no logging of user activity data..”

I was thinking of creating a bot that took the RSS feed of album reviews from the Angry Metal Guy site and posted new album reviews to this Community. The site seems to post one or two a day on average.

But obviously, I'd like to hear people's thoughts on this idea. Not everyone loves bots so I'd like to gauge community reaction before I just go ahead on do it.

EDIT: Upvotes and favourable comments are a good sign so I've created it. I did a dry run to store all the historical reviews so everything the bot posts now should be brand new. This also means you might not see a new post for the next 24hrs depending on when AMG next update.

If it misbehaves let me know! And if it's awful or annoying I can easily disable it.

Dymna Lotva are a Belarusian band who had to flee their homeland following persecution from the pro-Putin gvmt. They're currently based in Poland. Their music is about the attacks on their homeland by extremists.

Off their just announced new album 'This Heathen Land' out in October.

Newark Local Council (Newark is in Nottinghamshire) has been a Tory stronghold for a long time and the local council meetings there were always started with a christian prayer, despite not all the councillors and certainly not all their constituents, or even a majority of them, being christian.

In the recent local elections, in Newark as in most of the UK, the Tories got absolutely rinsed and dropped from holding 29 out of 39 seats to 14.

In a mark of progress and recognition that the majority of people in the UK are not christians and holding prayers before meetings designed to serve the public is, at best, unrepresentative, the new majority leaders have scrapped the prayer requirement, saying:

>“...[C]ouncillors will now be asked to spend a moment before the full council meetings in contemplation of the business of the meeting, or other matters from the wider community which may impact on our residents. It is felt that this being a replacement for pre-meeting prayers demonstrates the way in which the council wishes to work to be inclusive of, and truly representative of, all our communities.”

Newark are now the third Council to do this, along with the Isle Of Wight Council and Congleton Town Council.

This is a good step forward and I hope more Councils start being reflective of the communities they've been elected to serve.

Bonden the champion pugilist? Davies who once beat up a bear? Padeen who breaks limbs for fun?

Quite a few people over the years, whilst fully accepting that I was an atheist, were puzzled as to why I extended that to Satanism. There's a variety of reasons for me. Firstly, whilst I'm not interested in theistic religion, I do like the 'religion' part of that phrase. The word 'religions' Latin root word is religiō which means an individual virtue of worship in mundane contexts; never as doctrine, practice, or actual source of knowledge. The ancient Roman's used it not in the context of a relation towards gods, but as a range of general emotions which arose from heightened attention. So to me a religion is a personal thing, practiced by an individual or as part of a group that concentrates on the self and the realities of life. No gods necessary. That way of seeing religion fits in very well with atheistic Satanism, which is comprised of a lot of fiercely individual people who in this one aspect of their lives come together.

I also don't have much time for theistic religions, particularly the 'big 3' Abrahamic ones (Islam, Christianity and Judaism). Learning about them as a child (In the UK, state schools are legally mandated to have Christian content/worship every day) it appalled me the amount of logical gymnastics people used to justify the hate and cruelties I saw exhibited in their religion in the name of what I saw as a petty, vainglorious, needy child of a diety. By the age of about 8 I knew I was an atheist but I also resented the fact I and my peers were repeatedly indoctrinated in this mess of contradictory, violent, difference-hating theism.

But at the same time, I also knew I quite liked the idea of community that an organised religion could offer. I just didn't know what my community was. Then when I was around 11 years old, I read John Milton's epic poem Paradise Lost and I read these lines;

>From their own mouths. All is not theirs it seems; One fatal tree there stands, of Knowledge called, Forbidden them to taste. Knowledge forbidden! Suspicious, reasonless. Why should their Lord Envy them that? can it be sin to know? Can it be death? and do they only stand By ignorance? is that their happy state, The proof of their obedience and their faith?⁠ Oh, fair foundation laid whereon to build Their ruin! Hence I will excite their minds With more desire to know, and to reject Envious commands, invented with design To keep them low, whom knowledge might exalt Equal with Gods. Aspiring to be such, They taste and die: what likelier can ensue?

It is Lucifer who speaks these lines. In Milton's two pronged tale of the Fall of Satan and the Fall of Humanity, Satan learns of Adam and Eve and resolves to destroy them via knowledge in order to have a measure of revenge on god. Milton was a product of his time and wrote his epic as a cautionary tale but when I read those lines I saw:

>Knowledge forbidden! Suspicious, reasonless. Why should their Lord Envy them that? can it be sin to know? Can it be death? and do they only stand By ignorance? is that their happy state, The proof of their obedience and their faith? ... Hence I will excite their minds With more desire to know, and to reject Envious commands, invented with design To keep them low, whom knowledge might exalt

And I thought, 'He's right! Why would a god make knowledge death? A sin?' I agreed with Milton's Satan that this was an envious command, made to keep humanity low. So now I had both words to put to my feelings and ideas and also a (literary but obviously non existent) figure to assign them too. Milton's Satan embodied that idea of Adversary, someone who stands against. And Milton's Satan didn't stand silently, he offered humanity knowledge, or at least knowledge of how to gain knowledge. Humanity by and large values knowledge. It's seeking after knowledge that has given us advancements (and, yes, detriments too) that have given us the potential and ability to live longer, be healthier, find out things about the Universe we live in. Milton's Satan, it seemed to me, gave us nothing less than the desire to pursue science, whereas god wanted us to stone people to death that didn't worship him and only him.

So, from that point on, I was both an atheist in the sense that I don't believe in gods, demons, ghosts or monsters but also a Satanist in order to not only passively not believe but also to be openly adversarial to beliefs that oppress people. For a very long time, I genuinely thought I was the only person who had this mix of atheism and Satanism but then I first found The Satanic Temple and then, when I found out just how problematic their leadership is, I walked away and then I eventually found The Global Order Of Satan, where there aren't awful people and the desire to effect change and help both ourselves as individuals and stand with people being oppressed is the core of our religion.

New album Weltende is out on the 28th July.

Apple has said planned changes to British surveillance laws could affect iPhone users’ privacy by forcing it to withdraw security features, which could ultimately lead to the closure of services such as FaceTime and iMessage in the UK.

A poll by YouGov(educational data starts on page 15) shows that Religious Education (RE) is seen as either 'not very important' or 'not important at all' by 58% of British people.

In the UK, RE is a mandatory subject and it's clear most people see it as increasingly irrelevant. Most of us who suffered through these lessons know they're not really about educating someone about religion, they're stealth christianity lessons. I can't recall one RE lesson as child where we discussed any other religion or the basis for religion at all.

I personally wouldn't mind RE if it were not just christian indoctrination under the guise of education. If pupils were taught about a wide range of religions and non-religions and non-theistic religions. At least it would be interesting then.

From their new album Eloah Burns Out, due September 29.

The vast majority of the money the Order generates, whether through the Shop or donations goes to good causes in one way or another. For example, the Daily Mail newspaper recently violated the copyright of our UK Order, which they settled. We regifted the money in it's entirety to MermaidsUK (one of the oldest Trans supporting charities in the UK) and The Sophie Lancaster Foundation (a charity tackling hate crimes in the UK) so if you buy something from us, it will go towards something good for real people in difficult situations. No Order members take any form of reimbursement or salary.

Our official site has an online shop which ships products all over the world (including The Vatican of course), so if you want to let people know how you feel about faith based arguments, or be open about your allegiance to Lilith or greet someone Satanically or annoy the locals with a well placed sticker then we have you covered :)

And your doggo too.

!Image

Alt text for image: A small dog curled up on a blanket wearing a wooly hat branded with the Sigil of Lilith.

Theyre coming to my area later this year apparently. I was wondering if anyone had an opinion on the quality of service?

Also, the Linksys router they provide - can you manage your own DNS? Their documentation isn't clear.

Cheers :)