Fluffy
A fool
When trying to understand exactly why there is so much disagreement and misunderstanding over this, please keep the above quotation in mind. The word Satanism has been adopted and applied to many different belief systems. These belief systems are almost completely unrelated to each other in all but name and so it is often a very confusing topic to debate on because when you are arguing from one Satanist belief system, another person is arguing from another.www.religioustolerance.org said:There are probably dozens of different religious belief systems and practices that have been called "Satanism." Depending upon the precise meaning given to the word, the total number of Satanists in the world can be anything from a few thousand to four billion individuals. Dialog on the topic is almost impossible because there is such variability in the meaning of "Satanism" and "Satanist."
There are, however, 2 main belief systems which have been pushed under the umbrella term of Satanism. Whilst I may believe that they both deserve to call themselves whatever they may wish, this is obviously totally impractical in an environment such as this since a differentiation between them needs to be made so that debate and discussion can happen in a more constructive manner. Therefore, for this purpose, I will refer to them as Luciferism and Satanism.
Now I am not a member of either of these 2 religions but hopefully I can lay down a few of the important differences between them so that there is no more confusion.
Luciferism
This name is not one I have ever seen used outside of this forum. I'm shaky on using it for reasons that will become clear.
For starters it is not a religion. It is a umbrella term for many different belief systems (such as Paganism for example but much smaller).
It is completely decentralized and has no central or core beliefs to speak of except that they all believe in and worship the antagonist in any given religion. Now for Christianity, this would be Lucifer. However, other forms of this religion exist such as Setianism, whose followers believe in and follow the Egyptian god Set. It is for this reason that I don't like bracketing all of these religions under "Luciferism" because it implies they all have a link with Christianity which is not neccessarily true.
Now the Temple of Set is the only organization I know of which demonstrates a form of this way of thinking on a large scale but keep in mind that any beliefs which is followed in this religion, other than the one mentioned above, are very likely to not be found in any other religion which is also under this term.
Satanism
As a religion, this is much easier to define. For starters it has absolutely no link whatsoever with Christianity in any form except for the Black Mass which (correct me if I'm wrong) is not practiced anymore and this was more of a political statement than a ritual of religious belief.
The deity either takes the form of a god, a force (such as nature) or doesn't exist depending on which denomination you are dealing with. This deity is either viewed as good or neutral in terms of morality but never evil.
All satanist denominations branch from the Church of Satan (though some Satanists claim to go back and look at the original ideas which Anton Levey based his teachings upon though I do find the idea a little spurious).
Satanism focuses on the self (sometimes represented by the upsidedown pentacle with the 5th point, on the bottom, symbolizing the spirit being the basis for everything else). It has quite a few similarities with older religions that existed before Christianity, in ethical beliefs only, such as the Ancient Greek and Roman religions.
Conclusion
Not exactly comprehensive I know but hopefully this will give a good overall view of these 2 DIFFERENT trains of thought.