When I was a teenager, I had a fascination with all things supernatural and superstitious.  It started out with me telling stories about witches and the occult.  Then I started to carry an astrology book with me and work out the horoscopes of my schoolmates.  My tarot card reading phase got me into trouble with a catholic priest once.  I must confess I actually read those incredibly boring books about witchcraft while the other kids merely put them on their shelves to impress fellow adherents to the gothic sub culture.  But one day a classmate produced something truly scandalous: a copy of “The Satanic Bible“.  Now I can’t for the life of me articulate what I actually was expecting to find in this book, I just knew it had to be bad.  Preferably dark, sinister, and disturbing so I could impress girls with my wicked seductions or some other nonsense.  However, I remember feeling disappointed with the book.  It just didn’t contain anything in it that sounded particularly evil.  The idea behind the book was the assumption that Christianity was altruistic and therefore Satanism logically should be the opposite of Christianity and thus be selfish.  However, the book quickly ran into some philosophical problems regarding the nature of selfishness and how it related to evil.  Namely the assumption was that being selfish was necessarily a bad thing, however, this assumption about selfishness quickly hits a brick wall.  So for a book that’s meant to be about being evil it ends up being a rather peculiar, if not silly, unintentional self-help book.

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