Skip to main content

Hail Satan?


This will likely be the click-baitiest post title of Startical 2.0, but it is in fact the title of the film I watched on Netflix while taking a lunch break.  And it was good.

If you haven't yet seen it, let me perhaps surprise you with the seven fundamental tenets of The Satanic Temple:
  1. One should strive to act with compassion and empathy toward all creatures in accordance with reason.
  2. The struggle for justice is an ongoing and necessary pursuit that should prevail over laws and institutions.
  3. One’s body is inviolable, subject to one’s own will alone.
  4. The freedoms of others should be respected, including the freedom to offend. To willfully and unjustly encroach upon the freedoms of another is to forgo one's own.
  5. Beliefs should conform to one's best scientific understanding of the world. One should take care never to distort scientific facts to fit one's beliefs.
  6. People are fallible. If one makes a mistake, one should do one's best to rectify it and resolve any harm that might have been caused.
  7. Every tenet is a guiding principle designed to inspire nobility in action and thought. The spirit of compassion, wisdom, and justice should always prevail over the written or spoken word.
In short, if, like me, you've ever undertaken any activism in the name of continuous progress, the above should resonate quite well, as should the film itself.

All this reminds me of Yuval Noah Harari's book Sapiens from which one of my greatest takeaways was that:
Religion is both universal and missionary
 The film highlights the universal and missionary nature of the story of The Satantic Temple which applies equally well outside of religion to perhaps any progressive cause, including the visions of many startups.  Imagine if all these causes were to advance together in solidarity.  I often do and it makes me hopeful about the future.

            Popular posts from this blog

            Reminiscing about last year's epic rail journey

            Last year today I embarked on an epic rail journey from Montreal to Chicago via Vancouver and Seattle.  This time of the year is pretty much the only time I can completely escape startup life (and Internet connectivity), and a year ago I seized the opportunity to do something I'd been dreaming of since childhood: take "The Canadian" across Canada. Sat down with a beer and watched my videos from that trip (see playlists below) which brought back very fond memories not only of the trip itself, but also of Startical 1.0 which involved a similarly ridiculous Montreal to San Francisco rail journey. The playlists: "The Canadian" - Toronto to Vancouver by rail "The Empire Builder" - Seattle to Chicago by rail Also reminds me of my  Rails and Reels: History, Infrastructure and the IoT blog post from 2013, just after we had become "World's Best Startup".  Somehow rail journeys bring out the philosopher in me...

            Office painting continued

            There was fugly wallpaper on BOTH of those walls... ...the last to (soon) be painted white. Only just today realised that our new office, which is on the corner of Sherbrooke and Parc streets (Parc is French for Park) could cheekily be called PARC.  XEROX PARC (Palo Alto Research Center) is effectively the birthplace of much of the core technologies we continue to use today (tablet computers, graphical user interfaces, mice, object-oriented programming...).  See this reelyActive blog post .  I've been calling the office Sharc to date, but PARC is not only awesome, but also fitting since the intent is to use it as a living lab and showcase of all the emerging tech we have developed and continue to develop. It may seem silly, but this is the highlight of my day and unbelievably motivating!

            Office party