Adelphiasophism
A Summary of Adelphiasophism Papers at AskWhy! Abstracts Piped from Yahoo!
Abstract
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Contents Updated: Monday, 21 April 2003
Abstract
These abstracts are taken from the actual pages and piped here via Yahoo! Pipes. They allow you to get a flavour of each page to see whether it might be of interest without having to load every one. An aid to browsing the website! The Heading in each case is a link to the page.
Adelphiasophism Abstracts
This example gets abstracts from each page on the Adelphiasophism directory of the AskWhy! main website.
Nature and her Rule of Life, Free of the Patriarchal God
What we need is a manual for personal survival, and for preserving the world. It should serve for reading for pleasure, for devotion, as a source of facts and as a basic text for primary schoolchildren. It would be a primer of philosophy, science and ourselves. We should be able to dip in it anywhere and feel enlightened. It would explain the natural selection of all living things, and give the key facts of living, ranging from our relationship with other creatures, and our place in the Solar System and the Universe, to our duties and responsibilities to each other and to Nature. The guiding stars of naturalism are wisdom and empathy. Adelphiasophists do not fear the vengeance of any vindictive and jealous god, but picture Nature as the Goddess, the Great Mother of all things, who prepares the world into which we are brought so that it can nourish and protect us. If we damage our world, it will damage us back—eventually. The Way of the Adelphiasophists, the natural religion of the world, the truth of the Goddess Nature
NeoPaganism—The Wise Woman’s Way
Awareness of our surroundings, experience, reason and intuitive sense of conscience should be the authorities in our lives. No one should accept a creed or be bound by any “permanent” statement of belief, which might be proved wrong. Wisdom is ever changing, and our understanding of life and death, Nature and Her mysteries, is never final. Revelation is is continuous, through the processes of Nature and human enquiry into them. Authority lies not in a book, person, or institution, however sacred they are declared to be, but in our own response to the natural world. We should teach people to think for themselves and search for truth. We know what we are doing, and should choose to benefit natural diversity and future generations. Choosing the right thing—moral living—is the true test of our place in Nature. Our relationships with one another should be governed by justice, compassion and caution for the future.
Natural Spirituality—No Spirits!
We are at a great turning point in history that might be the last one for humanity. Abstract spirituality is anti-Nature. Even when the natural world is accepted not as evil but as divinely created, abstract spirituality is above the ordinary and the natural. More commonly the natural world is seen as an obstacle to spirituality, or even a prison for the soul—supposedly the supernatural spiritual body. The world and the flesh are the realm of the devil. It is hardly surprising that Christian spirituality devalues the natural world. Believers in the spirituality of Nature cannot stand by while Christians pervert natural spirituality, deflect justice and prevent action. They owe it to the web of life on the planet not to be pious about this. Christianity has had 2000 years of continuous strife and planetary destruction. NeoPagans and those of no religion at all must join in the refutation of other worldly and selfish Christian spirituality.
Roots and Influences—From Vietnam, Lovelock, Schumacher, Roszak to Self-sufficiency
Science has two different meanings, one as a body of knowledge about Nature that can be shown by the other, the method by which it is revealed. No method that gives such consistent agreement with the real world could be faulty, but, if there is a method that gives better agreement, then the critics of science should tell us what it is. Inasmuch as science is concerned with discovering eternal truths, it only does so progressively, and does not jump immediately to the answer, just like that! Science requires hypotheses to be formulated about how some aspect of the world works, and then it is tested, revised, and replaced, if necessary. Because scientists are no more gods than any other human beings, they cannot fairly be blamed for not doing what only gods can do—instantly revealing eternal truths—but science lets us approach them, however slowly. Roots of, and influences on, Adelphiasophism.
A Guide to the History, Principles and Practice of Permaculture
The market can only work to eliminate hunger when people have enough money to spend. Most free-market dogmatists cannot see that people must have money if the free market system is to work. If corporations will not employ people so that they have money to spend, then governments must. Government has to counter the tendency toward economic concentration through tax, credit and land reforms to disperse buying power toward the poor. Small farmers typically achieve four to five times greater output per acre, in part because they work their land more intensively and use integrated, and often more sustainable, production systems. More privatization and de-regulation are the opposite of the answer, by reducing the means government has of redistributing wealth to the poor so that the economy will cough into life.
A Guide to the History, Principles and Practice of Permaculture
The ethics of permaculture provide a sense of place in the larger scheme of things, and guide us to right livelihood in concert with the global community and the environment, rather than selfishness and indifference to other things. These ethics require us to think and act responsibly in relation to each other and the earth. We must care for the Earth and all living and non-living things—plants, animals, land, water and air. We must care for people, promoting self-reliance and community responsibility and access to the resources needed to live. We must set limits to population and consumption, giving away our surplus time, labour, money, information, and energy to achieve the aims of caring for the earth and its population. Natural diversity should be added to the principles above. With no cultivation, no fertilizer, and no chemicals, many insects and animals return. The balance of Nature has to be encouraged to return.
Adelphiasophist Praxis—The Earth is Sacred
Should we return to their idea of a living, sacred earth? Yes and No! We have lost the relationship with Nature as part of our everyday lives that ancient people had, but we have what they did not have—a knowledge that unless we do respect the Goddess we shall surely be destroyed. And we have a better understanding of how things interexist. We must think of equality not superiority. We must affirm the sacredness of all life and of the earth as a whole. The sacred cannot be devalued. If the earth and all upon it as sacred, we must protect it. In so doing we shall protect ourselves from ourselves. It is Nature that is divine, so we get salvation ourselves as part of Nature by treating Nature as divine—all of Nature, not an empty figment of our thought, because, if we fail, we shall destroy ourselves and our imaginary God dies too.
A Cyclical View of Culture—Seasonal History
Oswald Spengler was a German historian of the last century who preceded Arnold Toynbee with the idea of analysing major civilizations to extract a general theory of history. The story of the eight High Cultures is that of societies that ultimately fail. Cultures eventually die, but produce fossils, canons of art and science and political forms. The period of fossilization, after the end of the culture proper, is what Spengler calls “Civilization”, which he said began for the West at the end of the 18th century. The work of modernity is the completion of the final forms. Spengler expected society to collapse or stagnate by 2200 AD, and maybe the recent robbery of the world’s finances by the bankers is another sign of it. Spengler was the first philosopher of world history to write about the other great civilizations not as a mere prologue to Western history.
The Patriarchal Religion, Dogmatic and Immovable
If Christianity contains a perennial truth revealed by God in person, why is it so subject to doubt and slander? Why do Fundamentalists, Catholics, Protestants, Progressives, and the rest disagree so vehemently, and squabble like starlings on a waste heap. Ah, it is the world that is wrong, not the Christian revelation. Here is another fundamental difference between Christianity and the natural religions—Christians have always blamed the material world, natural religions have always revered it. Liberal Christians advocate sincerity not ritual. Why then not accept a proper religion of sincerity. It is hard to be sincere over a lot of patriarchal mumbo jumbo but sincerely wanting to secure a decent world for our children means something to us all. Believe that Jesus is properly the Goddess Wisdom, depict her as a crucified woman and then worship her in truth before she really dies!
Discussing Christianity and Christian Confusion
People want authority and reassurance for their position. If they are Christians, they seek biblical authority for whatever awful prejudices, intolerance, and racism they hold, and, as the scriptures are intolerant themselves, they will find justification there. To nourish belief on insufficient evidence, or by suppressing doubts and avoiding investigation, is wrong. Belief is only properly based on truths established by long experience in the real world of life—not the fantasy world of ghosts and demons—and which have withstood free and fearless questioning. Unquestioned statements for the solace of the believer can be like lighting a match in a firework store. Though just tinsel for people conditioned against the wonder of our lives, they ignite dangerous prejudices. Though they yield a bright mirage beyond death, they distract attention from the life we have, and our responsibility and privilege in having it.
Matthew Fox, Rupert Sheldrake, and Creation Spirituality
Two old Christian lags, Rupert Sheldrake and Matthew Fox, exchange tips for conning the new generation of people into thinking that Christian spirituality is compatible with Nature sprituality. They tell us Creation Spirituality is about bringing science, mysticism and art together to allow the spirit to flow and humans to recover their deep and spiritual selves, bringing about a cultural transformation. We are all imperfect, and in that revelation, in our very diversity, lies the beauty of life. Imperfection is not a sin. Rather than dwelling on repenting and transcending our imperfections, we should focus on the magic of our creation, of all creation. Creation Spirituality celebrates the universe story and our active participation in that story, thought art, education, and ritual. If all this is so, isn’t it time to abandon Christianity all together to concentrate on Nature and science.
Adelphiasophist Thinking on Christianity and Religion
Once it was considered a pleasant trait to be “laid back”. Fundamentalism has driven it out, yet being “laid back” is a much more effective way of being happy than believing impossible and dangerous things. The Christian incarnated God preached two central qualities people needed to be saved—to love one another and to be poor. Most Christians do not notice they ignore both of these central beliefs and still think they are saved. Yet these beliefs amount to being “laid back”, not letting other people’s faults get to you, and not being acquisitive—not coveting as the bible puts it. “Loving” others does not mean having to smother them in gifts and kisses, but treating them as you would wish to be treated yourself, as the bible explains, but which few Christians ever now seem to notice. It means thinking the best of people and not the worst as modern people do. A miscellany of Adelphiasophist thoughts on religion.
Veneration of Women
The male sex with its invented god of masculine vengeance, ego, rationality and vanity cannot bear the thought of dying. It is not fair that such a noble, wise and beautiful creature as a man should just die. Men think they are gods and want to be gods. They want immortality and only gods can have it. Yet, they pretend they have invented ways of escaping death in immortality, though the depiction of the Great Goddess Kali with her necklace of severed male heads shows that the illusion of male immortality is really perpetual death. Masculine ambition and pretentiousness forever add to her necklace of male trophies. Man’s insensitivity and selfishness pollutes the earth and the Cosmic Mother but there will be only one outcome. She will be victorious. The patriarchs imposed male dominance and set back the development of society for thousands of years.
Christianity and the Women in the Gospels
Magdalene was not a reference to a place but was an Essene title. Essenes were known as “Watchers” because they watched for the kingdom of God, and Magdal is a “watchtower”. The Essene camp at Qumran excavated in the 1950s has a watchtower. Why Mary had this title, we do not know. It seems an honorific title and perhaps she had some special relationship with the Nazarene leader—in this case Jesus—maybe as his real mother, but more likely in some ceremonial position as a ritual mother related to his rebirth at the age of 30. The only woman in the gospels likely to be significant probably had a ritual role. Jesus could have been illegitimate. Mary had no husband called Joseph. Having an illegitimate child, whether by rape or not, she was an outcast. Mary joined the Essenes because they took in unfortunates, as the classic writers relate.
Feminism and Religion
The Christian has no god of the feminine sex, and has not provided fulfilment and a path of hope for women. Only thus can it establish as concrete qualities of good those attributes belonging to women, and to rediscover the love of a real God as a haven for them. The Catholic Church knows that feminist theologians, whether men or women, do not want the Church reformed—they want it dead. If this is true, it is something that feminist theologians should be told. They seem to think that something can be made out of Christianity. If feminists really want it dead, they are right. A profoundly patriarchal religion like Christianity cannot be salvaged. Theology is a Latin name for patching up torn dogmata. The patriarchal character of Christianity is irreparable. These clever women should gave up their religion of indoctrination and turn to one of reason and Nature.
Materialism, Evolution, Consciousness: It's Nature
Today, materialists are the only idealists. Materialism has two meanings. One is as a theory of the reality of Nature. No feature of the real world requires anything different beyond it. Nothing in the cosmos suggests a spirit breathing on it. The human story is only a sentence in the saga of the material universe. The world of Nature is intricate, awesome and mysterious enough in itself without inventing unneeded obscurities beyond it. It is a solid, material, natural fact.
Naturalism and Science—True by Practice
Naturalism is established or rejected by examining and justifying its statements as a scientist would examine and justify the statements of a scientific theory. Statements thus verified can be accepted as true knowledge—they are supported by empirical evidence, they have a reasoned and logical structure, and they have been exhaustively tested and corroborated. As with all scientific truths and unlike theological ones, the truth of naturalism is established through scepticism and held tentatively subject to future tests of its statements and their implications. So, as far as we can tell, naturalism is true. To accept religious dogma on faith while rejecting truths acquired by scientific research, and proved by reason and experience to be true, is to wilfully choose ignorance. The religion of the Goddess has to be scientific because science is the means the Goddess has given us to understand her.
Ignorance and Criticism of Science
People have used discoveries for their own good since the beginning of humanity. Science per se has nothing to do with the way governments and businesses destroy the world in their selfishness and greed. If poetry could kill, it would be a weapon. Human frailties are not induced by knowledge—we have them through our evolutionary history, not through science. Science has showed us that rigour and objectivity work to reveal the world. People that have always preferred ignorance—religious leaders, creationists and mystics of all kinds—attack the scientific method because fostering ignorance and superstition allows them to control people. Attendants of the Goddess or matriarchal women should not cast aside the path to knowledge and truth.
Magna Matricide: The Destruction of the Earth
Plants introduced from overseas like rhododendron and Japanese knotweed are called superweeds, and these some supporters of GM say are what should worry us, not GM. Examples like these, though not GM cases, make the case against GM. 60 alien species have hybridised with native species giving problems from the “unpredictable consequences of mixing thousands of new genes in a continuing process of illegitimate gene flow”. Yet they cannot see the relevance of this to GM at all! However alien these genes are to our locality, they are not alien to plants. What they want to set loose on the world are. They want to be able to devise their homunculi and let them loose while we cheer them on, or at least let them get on with it unencumbered by protest. Non-native species proved to be superweeds but they want to let loose barely tested synthetic vegetables knowing nothing of possible consequences.
Murdering the Earth: Stop Magna Matricide
Question politiciansÂ’ blind faith in unlimited economic growth. They say it is desirable, but in some areas the world economy cannot outgrow its physical limits without collapsing. Economic efficiency is not based on size. The biological reality is that we now use about 40 per cent of the photo-chemical energy that supports all forms of life. If population growth continues, rising consumption could double this share to 80 per cent within 40 years.
Science and the Supernatural
William Rees-Mogg, is a smug old hack who, like most hacks, does not like scientists because they know a lot more than he does. Worried about his own mortality, he is concerned that the duality of materialism and idealism might turn out to favour materialism. He labels the acceptance of scientific explanations as “scientism” in an attempt to disparage it. “Scientism” disregards the idea of survival after bodily death, the unreality of religious and psychic phenomena and regards the brain as a machine and evolution by natural selection as its own justification. Religious people, who we infer include Mogg, believe in the survival of the spirit after death, the growth of the spirit as the purpose of human existence and the brain as merely a transmitter of thoughts from the spirit to the material world.
Survival of Death and Immortality: Belief in Life After Death
Out of body experiences (OBEs) are cited as parapsychological evidence for survival after death, but other than the personal experience that people have, there is no evidence for them. We are in a dream world. Dreams are real though they are not physical happenings, but phenomena of the mind. Despite using all of the sensitive means of detection at the disposal of science, no one has been able to get a reproducible correlation between someone passing by in an OBE and a detectable effect. An experiment was designed to determine if OBE subjects can retrieve information from a remote location by viewing target letters, numbers or pictures, placed in distant rooms. Some tried to reverse the procedure by determining where subjects went during OBEs. Results were mixed and inconclusive. No paranormal phenomenon was clearly manifest.
Naturalism versus Supernaturalism: Christian Creationism
The concept of creation by God was using God to explain a gap in natural scientific knowledge. Originally, religion was the only science there was. It gave explanations for the questions people were asking. “How was the world and it creatures made?” was perhaps the most fundamental question and God provided the answer. At first, God provided all the answers but gradually experience showed that some answers did not need a god. God remained to fill the unanswered gaps. With the arrival of the scientific method the gaps closed astonishingly quickly and rational folk began to realise that perhaps God was an unneeded hypothesis. Every time natural scientists solve a natural mystery, a gap closes and the room for the intelligent designer gets smaller.
Problems, Pressure Groups, Experts, Leaders
The most influential experts in our lives are exactly those people who claim expertise in these unsolved problems—politicians, scientists and evangelizers. We want to improve community relations or get better social services so we set up a pressure group. We choose a politician to lead it—one of the experts who have consistently failed to solve or even address the problem. And politicians always set up a circus of other experts—sociologists, policemen, probation officers—to obfuscate and delay for as long as possible under the guise of looking into it. We want to get justice and better conditions in our inner cities. We turn to the local priest or bishop. Forget it! Experts in matters spiritual have never consistently chosen God above the secular authorities.
Apathy, Obedience, Optimism: The Human Syndrome
If the human syndrome comprises a catalogue of maladaptations inclining us toward death, analysis of the human psyche is needed to tease out its elements. Of its many components are apathy, obedience to authority, and the dominance of the left brain, and its link with obsessive optimism. Milgram's experiments on obedience revealed one way we, as human beings, behave. Yet, criticisms by psychological experts were severe. These critics found other psychological studies on human subjects perfectly acceptable, but they did not dig at the foundation of “civilized” society—obedience—the cement of our hierarchical structures. The volunteers mainly supported Milgram, saying he had discovered an important causes of the trouble in the world—people should avoid harm to others even at the risk of violating authority.
Ring, Cross, Nature, Goddess: What should We Worship?
Candlemas or Imbolc is a quarter day (1 or 2 February) dedicated to the Goddess, Bride, Bridget or Birgit, who represents the first stirrings of life afer winter. It is the beginning of Spring. (The present custom of calling the equinox the first day of spring is confusing to most people because it is wrong!) The Goddess throws off her guise as crone to be renewed as the virgin. The symbol of Bridget is the asymmetric cross which is the equivalent of the sun cross and the Ankh, a symbol of procreation, it being a cross topped with the mound of Venus, thus representing a penis entering a vulva.
Intuition
Misled matriarchs attack science by denying that accepts intuition. It is hard to see how something as numinous as intuition could have some prescribed role in the scientific method but scientists like Einstein admit to drawing on intuition for their discoveries. Is there any book on science history that does not tell about the discovery of the benzene ring by Kekulé? It is a prime example of intuition—the unconscious mind working on a problem the conscious mind has failed to solve. Intuition is probably a central part of scientific discovery but is hidden by subsequent rationalisation by the discoverer. It is the harmony of the Goddess. Animals do what is natural with no blame attached. Only humans can consciously act counter to their instincts. Adelphiasophists think they should be more ready to listen to their intuition than they have been.
Life, Purpose, Health and Spiritual Health
People naturally want a purpose in life, as is proved by their constant invention of supernatural purposes like devotion to god. It proves how important purpose is, but also is a huge waste of lives. Those who imagine a formless being somewhere outside of Nature miss the obvious beauty around them and their plain purpose and duty of conserving it for our future generations and our cohabitants of this planet. We can neither help nor be helped by a void, yet thousands of lives have been wasted by people trying to see into it. Any help we get from our illusion of God is psychological and can be had from sincere belief in a lucky penny. But the real world in which we live can both be helped and protected by us and will in return help and protect us, or our children. The Goddess gives us physical as well as psychological rewards. Because belief in God is not based in reality, it has no checks and balances, and can end up in bigotry and usually does.
Society
Not one of us is a fully rational creature. Our beliefs and disbeliefs are seldom arrived at through reason, though we might think they are. Many young people today do not seem to believe anything at all, though a substantial minority will believe anything they are told, as long as it is fantastic enough. Parents and teachers should work together in giving children respect for what is in the world, whether it is other people, hedgehogs or trees, all of which are victims of delinquency. It is a puzzle for Adelphiasophists why people, however frustrated and angry they might be, should want to make their circumstances even more unpleasant by barking trees, mugging their grandparents and torching local schools and shops. It might be argued that society has a responsibility here, and indeed it has, but society is the sum of its parts and if the parts have been neglected, society also decays.
Our Religion: Principles and Practices
Let us cast aside all thought of the fate of our supposed souls. The most pure and sublime religion is to labour and love here in this world without hope of reward in some fantasy elsewhere. For Christians, Jews, Moslems and even Buddhists the material world is an alien landscape, and life is an agonising test of our loyalty to the patriarchal god. But the world is a womb and all other creatures and plants our brothers and sisters constantly being reborn. Let us kiss the grass and flowers growing on the brink of the cliff, sing to the waters and the winds, and greet the beasts and the birds, saying: “Together we do the work of the Goddess, the work of Nature”.
Are you an Adelphiasophist?
Adelphiasophists do not fear the god of the Jews and Christians or His Son because they are as mythical as Zeus and Medusa. What we fear is that our own greed, selfishness and indifference will cause us to lose our Goddess, Nature, the world that we live in, are accustomed to and depend upon. That is a real reason to be frightened. But what Christian is when they are smugly dreaming of a life of eternal bliss instead of the only life they will, in fact, ever experience. How do Adelphiasophists explain the beauty and harmony of nature? We are supposed by the implication of the question to attribute the beauty and harmony of Nature to the Christian God. That it should be attributed to anything other than evolution is ridiculous. A dung beetle finds its own world beautiful and harmonious.
Organizing Action Kinunities: AS Guidelines
The secretary should draw up the agenda in conjunction with the chair, but quite frequently they draw it up on their own, bearing in mind the chairÂ’s suggestions, and give a copy to the chair before the meeting. Although the agenda is not posted to all members, it is quite usual to give notice of the meeting on postcards on which can be mentioned any special business that is going to be discussed. When the meeting opens, usually before the minutes of the last meeting are read, the chair or secretary should read the agenda so that all members will know what is before them. This is more important in big meetings or in those meetings where an adjournment is almost certain, or where it may be desirable to ask for certain items to be taken out of their order as laid down by the agenda. The chair may do this if they wish, and if a reasonable request is made by a member to take certain matters first, they should usually accede to this wish.
The Campus Adelphiasophist: Information and aAvice for Students
Remember, Paganism has traditionally been a private matter, but Pagans can no longer stand aside while the earth is excavated into soilheaps. Our duty to the Goddess is not to stand aside while she is ravished by Patriarchal entrepreneurs but to defend her, as you would defend the mother that gave birth to you! In religious terms, arrange coventions and parties of veneration. Moonlit parties in someone’s garden, in a wood, a park or on a beach are great for building adelphism, but begin with a brief ceremony, a toast for the Goddess or a speech of wisdom (sophism) as a reminder of the purpose of the festivities. Adelphiasophism does not prescribe any set way to venerate our Goddess, so guests from different NeoPagan groups could be invited to conduct a ceremony of veneration in their own way. Use the chance to explain Adelphiasophism to them!
Adelphiasophist Correspondence: Your Views, Our Replies 1
The Way of the Adelphiasophists, correspondence
Adelphiasophist Correspondence: Your Views, Our Replies 2
The Way of the Adelphiasophists, correspondence
Adelphiasophist Correspondence: Your Views, Our Replies 3
The Way of the Adelphiasophists, correspondence
How I lost a God and Gained a Goddess
An Anglican clergyman's account adapted from Winwood Reade
Sacred Poems and Anthems
Many put faith in a god but they are easily changed to Goddess or Great Mother or some other such title of the Nature Goddess. For example, changing the 23rd psalm into a poem to the Goddess shows how artificial it ever was to make a male god into a poetic muse in the first place. Poems and Anthems dedicated to the Goddess and the people who accept themselves for what they are and aim to live together symbiotically instead of in rivalry or war
The Gospel of the Goddess—Books Review
Intuition is not as the authors seem to think—an alternative truth. It is an alternative mental process to rational thought. Just as computers can be digital or analogue. Rational thinking needs the figures in place to work properly. If the figures are not all available then assumptions have to be consciously made to supply them. Intuition only needs partial information to yield an outcome—and working unconsciously. Scientists often work on hunches, even if not often enough. But their hunches still have to be tested in the real world because there is no guarantee that a hunch will be correct. It is this very testing of ideas against reality that New Age critics of science do not like, and Bond and Suffield go to the ultimate of insults and call it patriarchal. Though they speak frequently of harmony, they cannot see that intuition and logic are not competing systems of thought but complementary ones.
The Gospel of the Goddess: William Bond Replies
Love is about both loving yourself and loving others at the same time. So the loving Mother Goddess is not a patriarchal sacrificial Mother. She has more wisdom than that. The problems we all have in learning how to love both ourselves and others. Women have learnt in the patriarchal age how to just love others while men learnt just how to love himself. We need now a matercentric age where women can learn to love themselves and men learn to love other. And so restore the balance.
Baal, Yehouah, A Goddess: Hosea’s Marriage
Christian critics delight in emphasising the orgiastic nature of Baal worship, which the Hosea readings are assumed also to be highlighting. The whole book is sexually explicit even though it purports to be a criticism of sexually oriented worship. Yehouah proposes to humiliate Israel by exposing her breasts (Hos 2:2) and even her genital areas (Hos 2:9-10). If the Baal worshippers were used to this sort of thing in worshipping Baal, it would seem that it could not be terribly humiliating to the woman. Is Yehouah proposing to adopt these practices himself? Some say it is an ancient punishment for an adulterous wife, but in all honesty it sounds like sexual titivation for failing patriarchs.
Matriarch's Way: Journal of Female Supremacy
N Penny argues in a note that we are a part of the cosmos and have no need to worship anything beyond it, least of all, Old Beardy, the absurd invention by men of the male transcendental god. It was plain to everyone that the Goddess was the very Cosmos itself, she was Nature. Any god was necessarily part of her, so they decided that Old Beardy lived beyond Nature, an irrational and non-intuitive idea. Thus they invented the transcendental. If the Cosmos is everything that exists anywhere—as it is—then how can there be something else? Such arguments never deterred the male priesthood whose sky god suddenly passed over to the other side of the sky and being above and beyond Nature was superior to the Goddess. N Penny rightly declares this concept as nonsense and that worship of this male figment is therefore also nonsense. However N Penny declares prayer as equal nonsense, leaving us in disagreement.
Christians and Allah: Moors, Christianity and the Goddess
Christians like to disparage Islam by pointing out that Allah was a pagan god in pre-Islamic times. Islam and its god Allah, they say, did not come from the Bible but from the paganism of the Sabeans of Yemen who worshipped the moon god, Sin, and his daughters. That is why a crescent moon sits on top of their mosques and minarets and a crescent moon is found on the flags of Islamic nations—it is the symbol of Islam. Before Mohammed founded Islam, these pagan worshippers of Sin prayed toward Mecca several times a day, made a pilgrimage to Mecca, circled the temple of the moon god called the Kabah, kissed the black meteoritic stone and cast stones at the devil. These curious customs are of course still preserved in Islam. Allah was the title given by Arabs to the moon god, and Moslems are therefore pagan idolaters.
Modern Druids: OBOD, the Order of Bards, Ovates and Druids
For Carr-Gomm the supreme being is still God, essentially the Christian god and one is not surprised to discover that his tutor in Druidism was a lifelong confirmed Christian, Philip Ross Nichols. Thus Carr-Gomm tells us that religion is a “top-down” structure and “it is a well known occult dictum” that the spiritual is causal to the physical. A dictum is a dogmatic assertion, invaluable to priests and preachers who would control people’s ways of thinking and behaving but not something that anyone should respect, occult or otherwise, unless it is based on sound evidence. Our Druid speaks like a Catholic bishop. Yet Carr-Gomm writes with admiration about John Tolund, also a Christian but said to be a seventeenth century founder of the modern Druids, who opposed “priestcraft” as the exploitation of religion for personal and political ends. Quite so!
Prominent People Quoted on Organized Religion
George Borrow (1803-1881), whose book “The Bible in Spain,” almost ranked as a missionary classic, in later years when “Lavengro” and “Romany Rye” had given him a high position as a writer, rejected Christianity and, refused to call the “great spirit” God. Teenage romantic admirers of Rupert Brooke (1887-1915), British poet of great promise, killed in the First World War, might be surprised that in “Heaven” he satirizes the Christian myth, and denies any future life. Professor Frederick Soddy (1877-1956) was a distinguished British chemist, who said, “the ancient creeds are working an infinitude of harm in the world” and called on man to disown them. He also said that the universe was eternal, not created, and “the task of controlling it is man’s not God’s.”
Treatment of Women and their Religion
A schoolmaster misunderstood a local ritual in honour of the god Adonis or Attis, who died and was revivified at Easter, and certainly under Christianity, Pan himself was resurrected as the Devil in an altogether more sinister role. But the story has been perpetuated as a good tale under Christianity. Inasmuch as Pan represents the countryside, his death is gravely symbolic of the subsequent progressive destruction of the natural world under Christianity. And, along with Nature, the growing emancipation of women was also halted. Christianity was to fill women with despair, degrade them and empty their lives, in a way never seen before under Greek or Roman. Along with the Christian saviour, a half of humanity was crucified. Information on how women have been treated through history and particularly by Christians
Wise Women’s Review of Reviews
Our duty is to do all we can to make sure the world is healthy for the next generation—as healthy or healthier than it was when we inherited it from our mothers. We have no right given by God or any other cause to “enjoy ourselves” to the detriment of future generations—not only of humans but also of earthworms. Nature is the Goddess of earthworms as well as of human beings. God is not only not the God of all humanity for He denies salvation to those who do not believe in Him, he is also not the God of all other life on the planet because he has left the role of “steward” of all other life on the earth to mankind. Man therefore is the “de jure” God of the world, according to Christianity. An examination of some book reviews in Ecotheology
Richard Rudgley: Lost Civilisations of the Stone Age: Review
Denise Schmandt-Besserat, like many ancient and prehistorians had noticed the curious clay tokens found everywhere in the Ancient Near East from the earliest settled times. No one had apparently given them a second thought. Then she discovered an egg shaped container inscribed on the exterior with a list of sheep and goats. Inside were different clay tokens of just the kind that were common everywhere and the numbers of each kind corrsponded to the list on the outside. The list, the container and the tokens constituted a primitive accounting system, and the earliest form of writing. They dated from 8000 BC. Civilization is traditionally associated with writing and assumed to begin with the use of hieroglyphics and cuneiform scripts in Egypt and Mesopotamia respectively. But people had been writing down accounts for 5000 years before. Will civilization be now extended back for another 5000 years?
Le Milieu Divin: The Trouble with Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
Teilhard de Chardin joins in another theological struggle here. The natural world is divine and indeed it is God’s own place, yet it requires death. Why? Because it helps us, with God’s assistance, to overcome evil. Like the individual soldiers who die to bring about peace, we all die in the God’s divine world to bring about an ultimate triumph. And besides that, death gives us access to our “inmost selves”. None of this tortuous and unreasonable argument is needed if Death is seen as good not evil. It is the ultimate sacrifice that we all—not just some god called Christ—make for the benefit of future life! And, for most people, it comes as a welcome relief from pain or decrepitude.
The Goddess and the Serpent: Mary Condren and the Jewish Scriptures
Condren says several times that God was “technically” neither male nor female. Some women beguiled by Christianity and the Hebrew god might have persuaded themselves that it is so, but they are merely seeking a justification for refusing to ditch the patriarchal monster while remaining a feminist in name. The God in the bible is plainly male! No one can read the Judaeo-Christian scriptures and come away with any idea other than that the Hebrew god and the Christian father is male—not androgynes or hermaphrodites—and He makes man, not women, in His image. If these feminists are saying that God is not male then they are already rejecting the Hebrew god and the Jewish and Christian scriptures. Instead of pussy-footing around trying to find ways of resurrecting Him so that He is no longer misused, they should boldly turn away from all of this patriarchal nonsense and return to the Goddess.
Fr Barrett on the Evolution of the Afterlife
It implies resurrection not immortality. Greek speaking Jews begin to express their hope in the Septuagint. Even in the lifetime of Jesus, belief in the afterlife or immortality was still being argued among the Jews, paradoxically because the Greeks were more sophisticated and had largely dropped the idea. This explains Jesus’s encounter with the Sadducees. The Pharisees accepted it from their faith in Persian religion. The Greek influenced Sadducees, modernists, found the idea distasteful. Jesus corrected them when he was asked to respond to their question on the resurrection of the dead. His response must have been devastating at the time, apparently agreeing with them at first—God is a God of the living not of the dead—but seemingly explained as meaning that righteous people did not die at all but merely “slept” until the day of resurrection.
Overpopulation and the Pro-lifers: Russell Odell
Trying to find a workable method to control the world's population problems is, an impossible cherished endeavor. China and Africa and some of the other countries have had a population problem for centuries. They have learned to live with and do not feel concerned about it like we in the Western world do. It is their way of life, their bred-in cultures. They thrive on it the best they can and go on living with it year after year. However, look at the leaders of any one of these countries. They are well fed, clothed, housed and educated. Why they and not their subjects? Because it is their culture. It always has been that way. Whose responsibility is it to change their culture? You can send them all the money and food you want to and it will feed them and clothe them but it will not change their culture. Russell Odell explains the attitude of the pro-life lobby in our overpopulated world
The Goddess Unmasked: Skeptical Inquirer and Other Critics of the Goddess
The majority rules for Sheaffer, a view that would have stifled science at birth had it been accepted as scientific method. We base our ideas scientifically on the evidence that exists, irrespective of the opinion of this anonymous majority. What do the opposition base their ideas on? Have they got evidence for continual bullying and warfare in the Stone Age such as we have seen under the patriarchs? We are reminded of Christian missionaries claiming to be civilising tribal people living in straw huts. An excuse was that the natives fought tribal wars! The missionary was incapable of noticing his utter fatuousness, when the wars of the civilised Europeans were killing millions. So much for Christian objectivity. If there was no widespread Goddess movement, were the thousands of female figurines discovered in Neolithic Europe just pornographic images for prehistoric masturbators—male graffitti?
Ibn Arabi and Sufi Mysticism
God is immanent yet transcendental. Patriarchal religious leaders want us to believe ten impossible things before breakfast, then they know we are gullible and malleable. Again they offer us a contradiction, but one which is possible with God because everything is possible for Him. He can be dead and alive at the same time. It is a proof of divinity and we can be the same if we have faith! The truth is that we are dead not alive after natural death. Few people are willing to accept this simple fact of life—we die! We convince ourselves that we do not because most of us are so arrogant we cannot conceive of the world continuing without us. Some are also scared of death and it mollifies their terror to pretend that we do not die. We cannot die and remain alive and God cannot be within something and outside of it at the same time. The Christian God cannot be a man and remain a god.
Visible Queen or Invisible King?
Gnostic sects like the Cathars, Paulicians, Albigenses and so on, held, with the Manichaeans, that the God of Nature, God the Father, was evil. Like the Christians they have added an unnecessary entity behind Nature, but if the entity which supposedly controls Nature is evil, then so must Nature itself be. Opposed to this evil God of Nature, and therefore to Nature itself, was the Christ God. Wells thought the Essenes, the Pythagoreans and the Zoroastrians all saw this antagonism as the basis of their dualist philosophies, and Buddhism too. Moslem teaching and modern Judaism seem to combine and identify the two, the creator god of Nature is the same as the god in people’s hearts. Wells thought the reality of religion deals wholly and exclusively with the God of the Heart. The reality of religion, the fact of salvation, is our self-identification with this God.
The Horrors of Paganism according to Culture and Family
Human sacrifice was certainly common in the ancient world, and it is impossible not to accept that the biblical commandment that people should not kill has not influenced our present refusal to accept ritual murder. What Christians ignore is that Christians for more than ten centuries happily killed people in a variety of ways without any sacrifice being a part of the act. No excuse was offered for these myriads of deaths other than it was God’s wish. These authors of the cosy website “Culture and Family” dismiss these undeniable truths as aberrations! It is like saying it is an aberration that crocodiles eat gazelles, and Christians actually believe this too, because their infantile belief is that crocodiles will cuddle up with gazelles in heaven! No doubt in heaven, crocodiles have no need of food because God will feed them spiritually, but then again perhaps they will have no need of food because they are dead.
Wicce and Magick: What Witches Believe
All this shows that there are witches who are just like Christians in being determined not to use their brains, or being cynical enough to think that there are plenty of dopes out there who will not. Doubtless some witches believe all this guff. If there were anything in all this, it begs the question of why Christianity defeated the witches at all. Because it did, Christian magick must have been more powerful or the witches that had such power should never have lost the struggle with the Church. To believe what this guide says is therefore to run to the nearest Catholic priest and ask for baptism and forgiveness. If this is witchcraft, it is no better than the Christian fantasy. Why does anyone want to believe it? What we need is a believable religion that really empowers people not deceitful gobbledegook.
Professor Ursula Goodenough on Religious Naturalism
But Goodenough asks, “What is to replace them?” She explains that each religious system is based on a cosmology rendered in poetry and art, infusing the texts with meaning and value, and from which ethical precepts flow. Gould forbids religions from having cosmologies because they are in the magisterium of science. Whether this is a necessary condition for NOMA or simply just a desirable one, it will not get much support from the various religions already built on their own cosmologies. If, in addition, the scientific understanding of Nature is disallowed as a source of new stories, as Richard Dawkins seems to think (see below) then where are the new stories to be found? By what criteria do we validate our moralities if we throw out revelation, authority and scientific inquiry?
Adelphiasophism in Short Sentences
Patriarchal gods demand obedience, service, and honour. Obedience is the prime one and in practice means obedience to the controllers of the religion, usually kings and priests, not god. Adelphiasophists offer obedience, service and honour to the Goddess Nature, but the obedience is to her own laws that are independent of the laws of kings and priests, as king Cnut proved. Adelphiasophism faces life and the laws of Nature including death with fortitude and serenity, and does not try to gull people into believing impossibilities for the nefarious purpose of taking a secular power over those who follow the religion.
Science, Politics and Evolutionary Psychology
These people are keeping religion alive in their approach to the applications of evolutionary theory. The book seems to want to sweep a host of people with different outlooks into one bucket. Moreover the complaint is political not one of science. The religious bias is meant to be a political one, religion being intrinsically conservative, but that all makes it difficult to get a grip on just what the complaints are from a scientific viewpoint. The book would have been better approached from the validity of the science rather than from the hypothesis that people have secret agendas beyond the science. A discussion of evolutionary biology and sociobiology in relation to politics and science.
