Your thoughts on Satanism and the petition for a Satanic statue.

[Esquilax]

The only thing about it that I find offensive is the fact that is was meant to offend, Esq.

Sure, but my point is that you're hardly going to be the only person objecting; people outside of your culturally dominant religion deal with this stuff all the time. What's one more objecting voice, if we're never going to be free of them anyway?

That's what I'm trying to say. And I know you don't believe that it was meant to offend, but I do.

Then you're doing one of the things I objected to in my first post: you're ascribing nefarious motivation to people you don't know, directly contrary to their stated goals, based upon a misunderstanding of the history of Baphomet, the occult figure. You have no way at all of knowing that, secretly, the Satanists are just out to offend, but you continue to assert it anyway and are apparently refusing to see the difference between "Satan the devil," and Baphomet, which grew out of something completely different, means something else, and has different cultural and religious significance than what you're ascribing to him. Satan predates Baphomet by centuries, and even the (christian religious) people who coined the term didn't think it was Satan, so why this insistence that your (mistaken) interpretation of the character is the one that should stand? Seriously, the image of Baphomet as seen on the statue didn't exist until 1856, based on a drawing within an occult book, not a christian religious text.

If you're just going to persist in this assertion that it's actually Satan the devil, when the literal history of the character shows that it is not, then I don't know what else to say to you. Other people don't owe it to you to work around your mistaken views simply because you refuse to correct them.

Otherwise, I think it's petty to be "offended" by other people's religious symbols. It's only when it's meant to be offensive and hateful that it's offensive and hateful lol. 

So how about just limiting them to the ones that aren't deliberately meant to be hateful towards a group of people? That's where I stand on this.

But how do we determine what's hateful? Apparently you're ready to discount the stated motivations of the people involved, and the actual history of the character depicted, and are prepared to just label it hateful anyway because your religion happens to contain a figure in it that you can mistakenly match up with Baphomet. That's ridiculous.