Christianity is a religion that has been divided and subdivided many, many times. There may be more distinct and separate sects of Christianity alone than standard, practiced religions as a whole in the world.
These range from the fundamental Bible reading and Sunday School variety of moral lecturing to the more out there, apocryphal revisionist sects that use the teachings of Jesus Christ in wacky ways to enforce their own beliefs.
But there are two sides to every story. While more people claim to be agnostic than strictly anti-religious, there’s nothing quite as antagonistic to the Christian cause as worshiping its central figure of evil: Satanism.
The Church of Satan is an official organized religion resulting as an offshoot of Christianity as penned by Anton Szandor LaVey.
His works include The Satanic Bible, upon which the faith is based, which all have the word Satan in their titles and three albums of electronic music, and a minor actor in a Satanic movie.
All things we know and fear – or not know and admonish – about modern-day Satanism have their origins in him.
10 /10 Ordinary, Everyday Prophet
Anton was born Howard Stanton Levey in Chicago, Illinois. He was raised in a secular Jewish household and had a healthy interest in music as a kid.
His family moved to the San Francisco Bay Area when he was young. He dropped out of school to join a circus where he “worked” with big cats.
Like those who laughed at the unfortunate, his views on religious people, then went to mass the following day, started to shift around then.
9 /10 Blessed Hands
Anton was gifted with music, favoring the pipe organ and calliope but had a solid rooting in piano as well. He left the circus and did gigs at nightclubs and lounges for a short time.
He claimed to fling with Marilyn Monroe when she worked as a dancer, which many claim she never did.
Once he moved back to San Francisco, he studied criminology and became a photographer for the SFPD. This, too, was disputed long after the fact.