PRESS RELEASE: Teen sends e-mail to Church of Satan threatening to kill
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Church of Satan works with FBI in arrest of teen threatening to kill.
December 16th, 2007 - Peter H. Gilmore, author of The Satanic Scriptures (ISBN 978-0-9764035-9-3) and High Priest of the Church of Satan, is back in the news this week. A Cortland, Ohio teen sent an e-mail to the Church of Satan last week in which he threatened to kill his grandparents and steal their guns and car.
Gilmore forwarded the e-mail to the FBI, and they contacted local police, coordinating efforts to investigate. After the teen was arrested, he claimed it was all just a joke. During a press conference following the arrest, the police credited Gilmore for his stepping forward to bring this to their attention.
“To send an e-mail making specific threats, to sign your name, that to me is not a joke,” Bazetta Township Police Chief Charles Sayers said.
If it was a joke or a serious threat is still under investigation, but the Church of Satan has been outspoken over the past 40 years about their supportive stance on law and order. Church leader Peter H. Gilmore reaffirmed this position in his just released book, The Satanic Scriptures. Writing on a range of topics in this collection of essays, Gilmore gives a Satanic perspective on related stories, such as the Columbine shootings, demonstrating that Satanism does not condone these murders.
Gilmore said his church discards most of the hundreds of e-mails it receives daily. But this teen’s message stood out, he said.
“I thought it could be a sick joke, but with recent events in Colorado and Nebraska, I thought it was best to play it safe,” he said, referring to mass shootings in an Omaha mall, a missionary school near Denver and a Colorado Springs church that killed a total of 13 people, including the gunmen. It should be noted that there has been no connection in any of those cases with the Church of Satan or its philosophy.
Gilmore said members of his group are epicurean atheists who see Satan as a symbol of liberty, pride, and individualism, not evil. “To the Satanist, he is his own God,” reads a statement on the group’s Web site from Gilmore.
Contact:
Kevin I. Slaughter
Scapegoat Publishing
info@scapegoatpublishing.com
Baltimore, MD
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The Satanic Scriptures

