Sean Sellers

Sean Richard Sellers (May 18, 1969 – February 5, 1999) was a 17 year old American murderer and an ex-Satanist, who converted to Christianity while in prison. He was executed by lethal injection in 1999.

Quotes



 * All the people who are hating me right now and are here waiting to see me die, when you wake up in the morning you aren't going to feel any different. You are going to hate me as much tomorrow as you do tonight. Reach out to God and he will hear you. Let him touch your hearts. Don't hate all your lives.
 * Final statement before his execution (5 February 1999), quoted in "Man Who Killed 3 as Teen Is Among Pair Executed" in Los Angeles Times (5 February 1999).

Open Letter To Satanists

 * Full text online


 * In prison, I found out who God really was, who He is, and that too took some time. I had seen God as an arbitrary rule maker. He made His rules the same way my parents did. The reason was "Because I said so!". But that was a false image of God. The way Anton LaVey saw God also affected his view of Satan.


 * Satanism to Anton LaVey was the celebration of that part of ourselves. His rituals were parodies of Catholic rituals. His philosophy was to embrace that "darkness" within ourselves, since it led to pleasure and pleasure was the real aim of life; after life there was nothing. No Heaven, no Hell, just the grave. We cease to exist.


 * The fact is nearly everyone forces God to fit into his own perception. Even Christians serve a God they perceive rather than the God who truly is. They limit Him according to those special needs of their own psyche. It's actually hard not to do that, but every time we do, it has consequences. Seeing God for who He truly is takes effort and always has one inevitable result that many people cannot accept: our understanding will always fall short.


 * It's so much easier to create our own gods; gods that are fully knowable. Those are the gods of atheism, occultism, religion and sometimes even Christianity. Then, of course, there are those prejudices that we demand of our gods. Women who take offense at a "male" God create for themselves a female or neuter god. There, we have all the racial gods, the black gods, white gods, and cultural gods, the Spanish gods, African gods, Indian gods and so on. All of them called god. And yet none of them are truly Him. Some may be tiny glimpses of Him. Maybe His big toe or little finger, but nothing more. Others are not even that. They’re only delusions from our prejudices.


 * I've watched closely and I believe most people who turn from God do so for one of two basic reasons. One, they mistake some aspect of religion as God (like Anton LaVey did). Or two, they are unable to overcome their need to understand what can not be understood. I honestly don't think it's easy to turn from God if we see Him as He really is. Every Satanist I've ever encountered has fallen into one of those two categories. They either have a warped, distorted perception of God, based on what they were taught by some idiot, or they don’t believe in the goodness or even the existence of God because of the injustice of the world. The first is a problem of perception. The second is a problem of pride. Both are hard to get past.


 * To be a Satanist is not to be liberated. It is to be bonded to death. The freedom it offers is an illusion. And this is something I know every Satanist knows, because I was there. In the dark and quiet, all alone, without the buzz of alcohol or drugs, or the rhythm of music to drown out the sounds, there is an empty echo inside us. A vacancy. A feeling of loss and cold and turmoil and hunger. That emptiness gnaws and hurts worse than anything else in life; we take up knives to carve our skin just to escape it, or run into the arms of a lover to smother it, but it doesn't go away. It grows. It is death at work, emptiness causing decay. No matter how much we feed it SIN, it will never fill up.

The Confession of My Crimes

 * Full text online


 * I'm not in any way trying to pass blame to any other person. There are reasons why I did what I did, but I'm still the one who did it, and the responsibility, no matter the reasons, is still mine.


 * I was not a cruel person. I didn't commit murder because I enjoyed causing pain. I had pets all my life and I wanted to be a veterinarian. I never was a bully, or provoked fights, or picked on people weaker than I was.


 * I was mad at God, I didn’t LIKE God because of how I perceived Him, and the stuff I read on Satanism said two things that appealed to me. #1 — it offered freedom, and #2 — it promised power to control my life, and others. I’d been carted all around the state and Colorado all my life, slapped, smacked, hit, and had whatever I wanted ignored.  I was mad and the idea of controlling my life to get what I wanted was like candy to me.  Plus I looked at the way everyone around me lived and the stuff I read in the Satanic Bible in principle was lived out in lifestyle by Mom and Dad and everyone else I knew.  No one was a real Christian.  We didn’t go to church.  We didn’t talk about God. … What was the point of pretending to serve God when we lived like Satanists?  Satanism taught me that I should make my own rules to live by in life, and that’s just what everyone I’d grown up around did, so I got very involved in Satanism.  I truly thought it was an honest way to live, and the rituals of it would enable me to control my life.  Even then I didn’t want to kill anyone.  That desire didn’t start until later.


 * These are the ghosts I live with and I hate myself for all I became and did. I am not just sorry, I am haunted. I think of all the people I hurt, of all the moments I stole from your lives, and I know I deserve to die.


 * Please, know that for as long as I live I will be haunted with the sorrow for what I did and when I die I will have counted it more mercy than I deserved to have lived the life I did. Until that day, I want you to also know, I will spend my life trying to do things that will touch the world in a good way, to give back for all I took from you. That’s the only thing I can offer with my hands and my heart. It’s simply all I have.

Quotes About Sean Sellers

 * He took his last dig at us. … It is very presumptuous that he would know how we would still feel.
 * Stepsister Noelle Terry, as quoted in "Man Who Killed 3 as Teen Is Among Pair Executed" in Los Angeles Times (5 February 1999)
 * He was quite a thinker … I think if his life had been different, if he'd zigged instead of zagged, I could see him growing up to become a college professor — at a Christian college, probably, though the administration would no doubt have bitten their nails to the quick more than once over some of his ways. I have several letters from him where he expounded on the oddities of life.  The joys and the quirks.  He might have been a sociologist, even.  People fascinated him.  Life fascinated him, since he had squandered his chances of living a normal one.  But he made the most of it, more so than anyone I've ever met.
 * Kimby, a personal friend, in an open letter at seansellers.com