Pending
Local Spotlights
Where the Assembly puts a position on record about local issues — council decisions, planning fights, whatever the Examiner's comment section is currently on fire about.
Northern Tasmania · Est. this year, arguing since forever
Skepticism has a face.
Apparently, it's a goat.
We're a congregation of atheistic Satanists based in Launceston. We don't believe in Satan. We don't believe in gods, ghosts, or the healing power of quartz either — but we do believe in evidence, bodily autonomy, and giving the state's various sacred cows a firm and public heckling.
On the Record
What we actually are
The Launceston Satanic Assembly is a congregation, not a costume party. We use Satan the way the character was always most useful: as a literary rebel against unearned authority, not as a being anyone here has met, prayed to, or would trust with a house key. There is no supernatural Satan in this organisation, in the same way there's no supernatural anything else. We are, functionally, atheists who liked the branding.
We exist because Tasmania, like everywhere, has institutions that get a free pass on scrutiny purely by claiming a pipeline to the divine. We think that's a bad system. If an idea can't survive being asked "how do you know that," it doesn't get to run a school, sit on a council agenda, or dictate what happens to somebody else's body.
None of this makes us edgy. Reading a peer-reviewed study is not edgy. Declining to discriminate is not edgy. We just turned up to the debate wearing horns, and it turns out that gets more of a reaction than turning up in a cardigan.
Ratified
The Seven Tenets
Not commandments. Nobody handed these down a mountain; we worked them out at a pub table and then tidied the language up later. They're a starting position, not a leash.
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I.
Act toward all people and creatures with compassion, and let reason, not habit or hierarchy, decide what compassion requires.
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II.
Justice is a job, not a destination. Laws and institutions are tools for getting there, and tools that stop working get replaced.
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III.
Your body answers to you and nobody else — not a parliament, not a parish, not a well-meaning uncle.
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IV.
Other people get to live by their own conscience too, including the freedom to find you tiresome. Challenge bad ideas; leave people alone.
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V.
Beliefs answer to evidence, not the other way round. When the evidence moves, so do we — reluctantly, like everyone, but we move.
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VI.
Everybody's wrong sometimes, us included. The job after being wrong is fixing what it broke, not defending how you got there.
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VII.
These seven lines are a guide for thinking, not a substitute for it. If a tenet and your own conscience ever properly disagree, that's a conversation, not a verdict.
Filed Under: Awe
Wonder, minus the worship
People sometimes assume that dropping the supernatural means dropping the sense of wonder along with it. It's the opposite. Deep time is stranger than any creation story we've encountered. The fact that a hundred billion neurons produce something that can sit quietly and wonder about its own existence is, genuinely, a lot to take in. None of it needs an author to be worth the awe.
Scepticism, done properly, isn't cynicism with better vocabulary. It's the discipline of caring what's actually true, which is a much higher bar than caring what's comforting. We'd rather hold an honest "we don't know yet" than a confident answer someone invented to fill the silence. The unknown doesn't need to be dressed up as sacred to be worth taking seriously — it can just be unknown, for now, and that's plenty.
Philosophy, science, and a functioning bulldust detector are the actual load-bearing walls here. Everything else — the goat, the horns, the theatre — is decoration on top of a fairly unglamorous commitment to thinking clearly and treating people decently.
Frequently Litigated Questions
Questions we get asked at barbecues
No. We're atheists. There's nobody home to worship, on either team. Satan here is a literary and political symbol — the sceptical outsider who asks questions authority would rather weren't asked — not an entity anyone in this Assembly believes exists.
It's a genuine, organised set of beliefs and practices held sincerely by real people, which is generally the test that matters. Whether that entitles us to whatever perks other religions get is precisely the point we intend to keep making, politely and repeatedly, to anyone who'll listen.
None of the above, although we accept upsetting people is sometimes a side effect of pointing out a double standard rather than the goal. There's no recruitment drive, no summoning circle, and no interest in anyone's children. If a claim about us sounds like it belongs on a chain email, it probably started on one.
Consistency, mostly. If a public prayer or a religious monument is allowed on public land or at a public meeting, we want the same door open to everyone, including us. If a policy is justified by "it's what God wants" rather than by evidence, we want that said out loud so it can be examined properly.
Functionally, an organising group with no clergy, no tithes, and no infallible anyone. See "Not a Cult," below, which we've written with a straight face because people do ask.
For the Record
The "not a cult" section, because someone always asks
No fees
Membership costs nothing. We're not funding a compound.
No hierarchy to obey
Organisers coordinate logistics. Nobody outranks your own judgement.
No secrecy requirement
Come once, come never again, tell your mum. Entirely your call.
No isolation tactics
We'd actively prefer you kept your other friends. Please keep your other friends.
Everything's disprovable
We hold our own claims to the same standard we hold everyone else's. That includes us being wrong.
You can leave, obviously
There is no ritual for leaving. You just stop turning up. This has never once been a problem.
In the Works
Coming soon, allegedly
These sections are under construction. We'd rather ship them right than ship them fast, and northern Tasmania has never once rewarded rushing.
Pending
Candidate Scorecards
A sourced, receipts-only scoring of local government candidates against our tenets. Public voting record and public statements, nothing invented — we're sceptics, not tabloids.
Pending
Satanic-Adjacent Directory
Metal gigs, witchcraft meetups, folk-horror film nights, and the local businesses and organisations who've earned a friendly nod rather than a heckle.
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Get in touch
Questions, corrections, media enquiries, or an offer to debate us at a barbecue. We read everything; we don't promise to enjoy all of it.