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The Seven Tenets

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The Seven Tenets

The Satanic Temple states its position not as a creed about the supernatural but as seven ethical commitments, published from 2015 and treated as open to revision by its members rather than fixed by a single founding authority. Among them: one should strive to act with compassion and empathy toward all creatures in accordance with reason, the struggle for justice is an ongoing and necessary pursuit that should prevail over the written or spoken word, one's body is inviolable and subject to one's own will alone, and beliefs should conform to one's best scientific understanding of the world, revised if that understanding changes.

The organization describes Satan not as a being to be worshipped but as a literary figure representing rebellion against arbitrary authority, in the tradition of Milton and the Romantic poets rather than in the tradition of ceremonial occultism, and explicitly states that it does not believe in a supernatural Satan or in the supernatural at all. On this point the Temple stands apart even from LaVey's Church of Satan, whose atheism concerned Satan's literal existence but which retained a broader occult and ceremonial framework the Temple does not.

The Seven Tenets have functioned in practice as the doctrinal basis for the Temple's public activism, including legal challenges to religious displays on government property and to abstinence-only sex education, framed as the direct application of tenets concerning bodily autonomy, scientific literacy and the separation of religious privilege from public life.

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