Satanic

Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses is probably destined to be one of the leastread best-sellers of all time. Its main claim to fame is the violent exception that Muslims of the yahoo variety have taken to seventy of its 547 pages. In a thinly disguised parody of the life of the Prophet Mohammed, Mr. Rushdie implies what many critics have long suspected: that the Prophet's message was a little too worldly, and too subject to opportunistic policy adjustments, to have been divinely inspired. The mere suggestion has enraged some of the faithful, and led to book-burnings in England, bloody attacks on U.S. information centers overseas, and the Ayatollah Khomeini's generous offer of $1 million to whatever godly gunsel manages to rub out Mr. Rushdie

In 2013, when the state of Oklahoma erected a statue of the Ten Commandments on the grounds of the state capitol, a group calling themselves The Satanic Temple applied to erect a statue of Baphomet alongside the Judeo-Christian tablets. Since that time, The Satanic Temple has become a regular voice in national conversations about religious freedom, disestablishment, and government overreach.