In the book The Happy Satanist, the author makes mention of cognitive dissonance, a Wikipedia article describes this as “In the field of psychology, cognitive dissonance is the perception of contradictory information. Relevant items of information include a person's actions, feelings, ideas, beliefs, values, and things in the environment. Cognitive dissonance is typically experienced as psychological stress when persons participate in an action that goes against one or more of those things. According to this theory, when two actions or ideas are not psychologically consistent with each other, people do all in their power to change them until they become consistent. The discomfort is triggered by the person's belief clashing with new information perceived, wherein the individual tries to find a way to resolve the contradiction to reduce their discomfort.”
I’ve made the statement before that Satanism Is not everybody’s cup of tea. So often we build comfort zones around us as we as humans naturally tend to adapt to our environment to what is pleasant. Overcoming comfort Zones can be a tough process, and Satanism can be a tool to achieve this. What makes Satanism so unappealing to you if it does? What is uncomfortable about the idea behind it? Is it the differences of expectations behind change? Is it the theory of Satan as a deity or deity concept?
The kingdom of heaven is within you, and the moral cosmological factors behind deity association is important in a lot of ways towards our motivations. People may not feel comfortable because Satan represents those sins and being an evil person and people don’t want to become that, so they leave it alone.
In order to rearrange your views about these topics one must in essence rearrange heaven and earth and note somethings, and a big picture that I have found that helps is to make mention that Satan is not the way that Christians portray him to be. Changing this factor seems like an uphill battle in so many ways, and I’ve learned to accept the fact that major standard cosmology just might not change, and I’m okay with that, that in essence is not my responsibility, the way it is not anyone’s responsibility.
But one can start by seeing Satan as a figure differently by realizing he is of both Good and Evil (Genesis chapter 3) and interpreting scripture differently like the temptation of Jesus meaning more than meets the eye, is as well a process of rearranging heaven and earth to different proportions.
Illegal activity is the consistent factor within this paradigm shift. No valid Satanist will ever seek illegal behavior as a means of membership or activity approved of any hierarchy within the world of Satanism at all...
A movie relative in other ways to this topic of comfort zones and cognitive dissonance, is “the free guy” the main theme of the movie in many respects being that the cool people wear sun glasses. What often times people see as forbidden is not the case, and feeling the pull to be different may be scary to you, but it may be worth the effort. You may find out something you’ve never found out before. Movies I am not really a big fan of applying lessons to in several ways for several reasons, it is often times too easy and very generalized and not meant to be the case. But the ideas are there.
The superhero tendencies of the movies are somewhat aligned to the idea of the dorky quiet unsettled and unlikely candidate becomes the confident, attractive, and bad ass dude who takes the lead after learning life’s lessons. This is the type of pull that I am talking about when someone feels they are lead to be different. The consistent factor here is that it is not against anyone’s will power whatsoever, there are always boundaries of what can and cannot be done.
Maybe it’s time to make some adjustments and get some of those desires met in life to lead you in a new direction.