Adelphiasophism
Adelphiasophism in Practice: The Earth is Sacred, Life is Sacred
Abstract
© 1998 The Adelphiasophists and AskWhy! Publications. Freely distribute as long as it is unaltered and properly attributed
Contents Updated: Thursday, August 10, 2000
The Earth is Sacred
Body, mind and spirit are one, a truth essential to balanced living and a healthy world.
In ritual and song, we call upon the “Kinunity of the Goddess” to heighten our awareness of our mutual connectedness and to fill us with love and compassion for all creatures and for the physical environment as a whole. We do not call upon a “Spirit of the Goddess” because the Goddess pays no attention to us but only to her whole creation. The “Kinunity of the Goddess” is however the interconnectedness of her creation, and, as humanity proves, can have an awareness and be a force of goodwill to the creation as a whole. The trouble is that so far we humans have not been.
The sense of a living earth enjoyed and practiced by earlier, non-industrial cultures grew out of living experience and a closeness to Nature that our culture has set aside. It was woven into the fabric of life and culture. This is not true for us. The Judaeo-Christian tradition arises from the perspective of God being separate and above creation and from a patriarchal outlook. Hitherto, sacredness has been authority, power, distance and maleness that would have been alien to the spirituality of ancient cultures that incorporated a sense of the living earth. We strive for the sacredness of the earth in a different cultural context than those who took for granted an immanent holiness pervading all things.
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, because we have already prepared the ground thoroughly. And we have a better understanding, if we care to use it properly, of how things interexist.
Long ago, theologians rejected the notions of the Great Chain of Being in which each and every life had a purpose, a place, and a meaning. Instead philosophers conceived of Nature as a mechanism. But even a mechanism must have all its parts working or it will not work at all. Society happily destroyed cogs here and failed to oil bearings there until now Nature’s machine has started to clink and clatter. And Nature is more complicated than a machine. Nature has more added value, more nonlinearity of response.
Complexity could not evolve, if the more complex form was not more than the sum of its parts. The added value of complex systems cannot be understood using solely analytical techniques. Science is the Goddess’s epistemology, but it must be used with Wisdom or it becomes a monster. Her science emphasises that analysis is merely a way of discovering Nature’s added value. Her science is sensitive, systemic, holistic, and symbiotic. Nature is interconnectedness, patterns, processes, change and nonlinearity.
We lack a sense of the interdependence of Nature. We lack a sense of the many ways in which the elements of Nature are interwoven and interdependent in ways extending beyond the human horizon. Biologically, the basic structures and functions of our bodies are those of swallows and seals, frogs and fish, and fundamentally, those of beetles, broccoli and bacteria. We are not the masters of Nature or even its stewards—we are in Nature, an element of it, advanced in many ways, having evolved late, but not essentially different from Nature’s other creations.
Equality not Superiority
For humans, kinunity means coming alive through wonder, admiration, practice, forethought, skill, and conservation to maximise the interconnectedness of the strands of life on the earth. We must be conscious of it in every aspect of our lives. Yet knowing of the kinunity of the Goddess is not enough unless we understand just how we shape and participate in that kinunity, and how we in turn are shaped and participated in by it.
Hierarchies were imposed on us by patriarchy and so that is how we think. God appointed us to harvest the rest of Nature. We are inferior to God but superior to the rest of Nature. To exploit the world, we devalue it, making it lower than ourselves.
Now, we must think of equality not superiority. We must affirm the sacredness of all life and of the earth as a whole. Our aim in revering the sacred is that it 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. In realizing that the whole of the cosmos is sacred, we eliminate the destructive hierarchy that we have been brought up to believe for countless generations since the patriarchs captured the power in human society. The Goddess however will live on and continue creating, trying to do better next time.
If the earth is seen as sacred, just what does that mean? It is a new planetary and religious way of thinking. Our aim is to affect our own behaviour. As David Spangler has said:
What we really want is to relate to ourselves, to each other, and to the world as a whole as if we all have ultimate value apart from utilitarian considerations. If something is sacred, it is assumed to have value beyond its form, usefulness, duration, and products. It is valuable; it is precious. It is worthy of respect and honor, love and compassion; it is worth entering into communion with. Its very being is its only justification; it needs no other.
We honour and value all that is sacred and liberate the spirit within us that has set us at odds with the rest of the natural world as its slaveowner. The sacred manifests when there is a widespread sharing of kindness. The sacred will not pick and choose what it shall love. It is love freely and unconditionally given. That is what we must do to every element of Nature’s kinunity—and then it will return it to us.
Creating God in our own Image
In our imaginations we have created a God in our own sacred image. We conceive God as giving Himself freely and totally to His creation though it supposedly is not sacred itself. We have projected on to our imaginary sacred being what we should be ourselves, and our concept of a sacred being does what we should do ourselves. Pious people of old, saw it as a way of reminding us of how we should be, but then it assumed a power of its own and directed us in the wrong direction, that of superiority, as lesser versions of God—as Lord of the Flies. We must begin to be gods by living like our image of God. To value the sacredness of the world and act as though we mean it, we should be like the God we have been taught to worship.
The idea of the sacredness of the world brings to us our sense of duty to the needs of ecology and the environment. It shifts our way of thinking from the mechanical one of classical physics to the ecological one of biology. It focuses our attention on life. It inspires us to translate our concern into practical strategies to preserve the biosphere. In practice it requires us to eschew self-indulgence.
The Goddess inspires us to think of the kinunity of the earth and to explore an “eco-theology.” Such a kinunity will give us new insights into the meaning of the spirituality that our previous self-indulgent approach prevented. Sacredness inspires us to act towards each other and the environment to serve and nourish the common welfare of all life through compassion and cooperation.
Attempting to emulate native people when we do not have the culture and background that they had can be nothing but posing. We cannot try to revive witchcraft or Druidism or classical Pagan religion in the hope that it will be the answer. Admittedly, Neo-paganism was partly inspired by the witchcraft theories of anthropologist Margaret Murray. British civil servant, Gerald Gardner, in a book called “Witchcraft Today,” set out to create a popular, sanitized, magic-based religion, in the 1940s and 1950s, from Masonic ritual, Aleister Crowley, Asian and European magical traditions titivated with a bit of nudity. But, the sacredness of the earth cannot simply be adopted as a sentimentality, whether pseudo or genuine, for times past when we related with the spirits of trees and springs. Our situation is new and different. We are on the verge of self destruction and our salvation depends upon our recognizing that it is life itself that is sacred.
We must experience natural holiness in our thoughts, in our words, in our deeds, in our lives, in our very creativity. We are beginning inchoate, but must take shape quickly or we shall fail. We might have to—shall have to—change in unexpected and radical ways. Revering the Goddess cannot just be a slogan mouthed for mental peace. We have to cease our necrophilous ways and seek biophilous ways of living. The Goddess gives us the choice of attending the funeral of our old necrophily or our own funeral.
Modern Revelation
The Goddess wants us to look at ourselves anew. What is human destiny to be? Are we to be a selfish and deluded parasite that polluted the earth with our own excrement until we died ignorant of what we did? Or are we to be the start of a new stage of complexity that might be an organism of the stars—the fulfilment of the Goddess through evolving her consciousness? Is humanity to have no purpose beyond itself? Are we to be motivated by no higher purpose than mindless expansion and moneygrubbing? Reverence of the Goddess suggests our purpose. We are her saviours. By saving her, we too are saved!
Believe you have a purpose. Spend your life discovering what it is and fulfilling it. No true purpose will offend the earth directly or indirectly.
Reverence of the Goddess expands our vision of human purpose and activity beyond the personal and even the selfishly human into that of the whole of the earth, and even beyond. We ought never to offend the Goddess, if only for selfish reasons because she can hurt us more than we can hurt her. We can add too much carbon dioxide to the air but she might kill us all off in return.
The Goddess is our modern revelation. Revering her is not simply copying ancient Goddess forms of religion. We are neoPagans, not Pagans. We are no longer secure in the thought that the Goddess will succour us. First, we have a duty to our mother. We must assist her too. By doing so we help ourselves. By neglecting her, we destroy ourselves.
Ecological Limits
Humanity has to begin to see itself as part of the world, indeed inseparable from it. People are not above the world in some special level between the mundane and the divine. They are entirely mundane, and must start to realise it. Instead of thinking they are demi-gods, they must start to act suitably in the world, and that means sometimes not acting. It ought to be plain that it is time not to act when acting means an irrecoverable destruction of life. That is our situation now.
Humanity has spread from being a purely local animal picking fruit and nuts in small groups, to hunting, gardening, farming, travelling by horse, by motor car, by aeroplane, by spaceship, and now exists in such vast numbers that we are a plague on the world, anyway. Surely, it is obvious that such expansion must damage the environment, and threaten our very existence, unless it is done carefully and caringly. It has not been.
Moreover, the expansion has not been just spatial, humans have expanded in their effect on time. The consequences of human activity are lasting longer. We are now in a position to effect things directly in a myriad years’ time, by generating radioactive elements in nuclear reactors that will remain deadly for tens of thousands of years. Unwitting people, ten thousand years hence, who know nothing about us, could come across our radioactive waste, release it from whatever confinement we have put it into, and poison a future world, all through our selfishness.
Humanity and its world are one. The past, present and future are one. No one who lacks this holographic continuity of things is really alive. Gods or even demi-gods ought to be able to see it. Our blindness is proof we are neither gods nor sons of God. We cannot begin to be until we comprehend and act properly.
Poverty is having to think only of surviving.
Humanity is reaching the limits of what the earth can sustain. Our experts, intelligent people, pronounce there is no limit, while dunces like us can see that there is, and we ask what the point is of arguing rather than making a shift to sustainability. There is a lot to lose if we do not.
Robert Goodland, who advises the World Bank, has summarized some of the most compelling evidence of ecological limits.
- The human economy today uses, directly or indirectly, about 40% of whatever terrestrial photosynthesis produces, or 25% if the oceans and other aquatic ecosystems are included. If the world’s population doubles every 35 years then we shall be consuming everything that the sun makes on earth in less than 100 years.
- Decreased productivity caused by soil erosion, salination, and desertification is not new, but the scale and rate of it is increasing. Soil erosion is serious in most of the world’s agricultural areas and is worsening as more marginal land is brought into production. Soil loss rates, generally ranging from 10 to 100 tons per hectare per year, exceed soil formation rates by at least tenfold. Today’s agricultural practices are leading to erosion, salination, or waterlogging of about 6 million hectares per year. Because of a shortage of fuel wood from fuel wood overharvesting (killing trees), crop residues and dung are being diverted from agriculture to fuel, intensifying land degradation, hunger, and poverty. 35 percent of the earth’s land is already degraded. Further degradation is largely irreversible as far as we are concerned, so we have exceeded the regenerative capacity of the earth’s soil.
- The scale of the human economy has grown so large that other species are having to make room. Wildlife habitat is taken for development or beef production. More than half of the world’s richest species habitat, tropical forest, has been destroyed in about 100 years. Species are dying faster than they have ever done, even in a mass extinction. The rate is more than 5,000 species extinct each year. This is 10,000 times as fast as mass extinction rates, and some estimates put the rate at 150,000 species per year!
Besides these, only humans, of all the earth’s species, produce spoilage that cannot easily be reused somewhere else in the ecosystem. Our resources are being rapidly transformed into useless spoilage, some of which is obvious to the naked eye, in waste dumps, but most remains unseen, tiny particles that are daily spewed out in vast numbers into the earth’s air, water and soil. Most of this spoilage will not be recycled in Nature in a human timescale. Industry does not want it, and Nature has not evolved ways of handling it. The volume of spoilage is too large for Nature to reassimilate. Some of it—toxic metals and stable unnatural compounds—cannot be processed by the cells at all. With our inventiveness, we ought to be able to come up with a better way to reduce our waste than burying it, burning it, or flushing it out to sea, and expecting overworked Nature to deal with it.
The ultimate consequences are impossible to foretell. The complexity of ecosystems is so great that we do not know the tolerance levels for any of the thousands of kinds of molecular spoilage. How can we know how they will interact with each other? It may take a long time for the consequences to appear. The effects of today’s pollution will not become evident until tomorrow.
Changing the World
Everything you do not buy is a gift to the world.
Our environmental problems exist for everyone, whether politically leftwing or politically rightwing. The degradation of our environment will harm everyone irrespective of their political leanings. But the conservation of wealth is not compatible with the conservation of Nature, so the Right disregards these problems, seeing more trouble in the leftwing agitators that appear at trade and environment conferences. It seems they would rather see the world end than lose their riches. Yet most of us in advanced countries, though showing concern, identify with the rich. As Donella H Meadows sees it, we think low-flow lavatories and high-mileage cars are sufficient to ease our consciences because they do not challenge our lifestyles.
It is our lifestyles that are at fault!
The world cannot cope with our greedy lifestyles. One or the other will yield. We must yield—for the benefit of the planet and our own children. We must reduce population by limiting our own families and by insisting on policies to encourage small families. The system of production and distribution based on untrammelled acquisition and personal greed has to be changed. This is what is hardest. People are praised who can think of a novelty that will become fashionable and make a lot of money out of fancied needs. Much of modern production sold to us in TV imagery in advertisements and films is simply unnecessary and wasteful. A mobile phone has become the essential piece of kit in the modern age, but it is intrusive, unnecessary and possibly harmful. Who cares? Everyone wants one and it makes others rich. That is what our society is about!
Volume of production is an infantile measure of success. Getting richer is not getting better. Acquiring wealth rarely satisfies—there are few middle class people who do not want more. The wealthy world professes to be Christian—they follow a god who advocated poverty as conducive to spirituality. The first transnational corporation was the church! Christian churches are immensely wealthy and value the support of wealthy patrons, many of whom, directly ot indirectly, are sticking giant metallic knives into the earth and stirring them around. No wonder even the earth itself is complaining.
We should take our cues from unspoiled societies where people lived in equity with Nature. No one is saying we have to return to the stone age. We now have the technology and experience to live comfortably and well without hurting the planet, as we are doing. Rather than treasuring machines like cars, playstations and TVs—dead things—we must value life, including our own communities, our homes, our parks and gardens. We should be furious that governments constantly threaten the green belts of our cities yielding to every demand to concede them. The young must be taught to treasure land, not to exploit it.
We must buy our food locally as much as possible. Fuel taxation is a perfect way of preventing the waste of a limited resource and increasing the cost of unnecessarily moving things—yet people complain about it! In Europe with the recent trouble about BSE, we discovered that the French and Germans are exporting beef to the UK and the UK is exporting beef to France and Germany, and so on in endless pointless loops! How does the British cow differ from the German and the French to necessitate this utterly foolish waste of fuel, swapping cows that few people, if any, could tell apart by taste?
Adequacy Study Convenes (ASKs)
Your life belongs to the whole kinunity, and as long as you live it, consider it a privilege to do whatever you can. Rejoice in life for its own sake. Life is no weak candle. It is a bright torch that you hold for a moment to illuminate the world. You must make it burn as brightly as possible so that future generations can see by it.Adapted from George Bernard Shaw
We must discover the pleasures that come from learning to live with the products of a simpler life. We can perhaps still rescue the planet by simplifying—uncluttering—our lives. The time and energy released will free us for the satisfaction of serving and building society. The desire for unnecessary possessions fetters human creativity, and if we are not creative, we might as well be sheep.
Approach your local college to form Adequacy Study Convenes (ASKs), then recruit sympathetic friends to join. You might be surprised how many people will be interested. The aim is to gather and pool ideas for living in a simpler way—a way that is adequate for our enjoyment but saves the earth and saves us unnecessary expense. The idea is to show that we can live just as well but cheaper, and live more fulfilling lives while exploiting the planet less. We can take actions which, as much as possible, mimic the patterns that were there before us—the patterns by which the natural world operates. The lessons should not be just didactic but should have the nature of a workshop, with a facilitator whose job is not to be an expert, but to keep the discussion going. The facilitator will lead the participants through the course covering broad areas and approaches, the class themselves volunteering possibilities. To initiate a topic the facilitator might introduce experts with different skills and experiences to stimulate ideas.
The end of the course should not be the end! Participants should form Town Adequacy Study Convenes (TASKs) meeting in each other’s homes in their respective towns or localities. The convene can appoint or elect a facilitator who will be “expert” only in managing the group so that all are heard and the conversation stays lively and on topic. By managing the process themselves, participants practice democracy, equality, respect for others, and excitement about the exchange of ideas. The ideal group size is a coven of five to twenty, and for each theme chosen, three to six meetings should be sufficient.
People are attracted both to the idea of simplicity and of kinunity. They want to slow down and live another way. The availability of manufactures has numbed us to the joys of creating simple things for ourselves. Striving for appearances has dulled our sense of the pleasures of creativity and self-reliance. People who learn to create things for themselves are less likely to find satisfaction in the products of industrial society. The feeling of being creative and self-reliant fulfils a need that cannot be satisfied through the acquisition of mass-produced products.
People are often happy to meet weekly to explore their hazy notions of adequacy and how it relates to planetary damage and our own future. They can talk about the ecology of simple living and the global aspects of cutting back. To stimulate discussion, they can exchanged speakers with other Adequacy Convenes. The idea is not just to hold a study group but to be a support group too. Books and articles can be exchanged. Problems of busy lives can be taken to the meetings to discuss and try to resolve. They can teach each other and learn new ideas. Local campaigns can be organized.
Study Convenes bring people together to talk, to feel part of a community, and to practice acceptance of diversity, equality, democracy, and connectedness. Participants should share a little of their lives, their experiences, and the real problems and issues they face in trying to cut down on waste, haste and redundancy in the way they live. A good group will form a sense of community, and ideally when a member feels unhappy in a group they should be able to join another one in the same locality or start a new one, but inter-group rivalry is not the point—it is practical action. Adequacy Study Convenes focus on self-realization and social transformation by encouraging participants to blossom as individuals and to bring about change in society. They can become effective pressure groups in a locality, but should never forget the basic slogan: We shall not offend the Earth directly or indirectly.
ASK Tips
Anyone considering forming an Adequacy Study Convene might wish to consider the following tips from the Study Circles Resource Center. The communications skills used and honed in the study circle movement are pertinent in most situations.
- Maintain an open mind. You do not lose face by realising your early judgements were wrong. You gain wisdom. Explore ideas that you have rejected or failed to consider in the past.
- Strive to understand the position of those who disagree with you. Your own knowledge is not complete until you understand other people’s points of view and why they feel the way they do. Respect people who disagree with you unless their views disdain the basic principle given above. They have reasons for their beliefs, and you should be willing to hear them. If you can make a good case for those you disagree with, then you can claim to understand their position. This comprehension and empathy will make you better at advocating your own position.
- Value your own experience and opinions. Everyone in the group, including you, has unique knowledge and experience. Variety of contribution makes the discussion interesting for everyone. Don’t feel pressured to speak, but realize that failing to speak means robbing the group of your wisdom.
Everyone must be part of developing the solutions to the problem of excessive consumption. The emphasis of each convene is on our responsibility to work for the common good of the kinunity of Nature. Here are some ASK conclusions that could be considered by your own group.
- Work at home or move closer to work. Commuting accounts for more than a third of all car travel.
- Do not discard everything. Try to renovate or reuse them. It can be a useful and waste-saving hobby. If you do have to discard, give someone else the option of using them. Give them to a charity shop, sell them in a car boot sale or give old furniture to a community furniture project or second hand dealer. Reuse paper bags, envelopes. Recycle whatever can be recycled.
- Install low-flow showerheads. With less water to heat, you’ll save water and energy.
- Buy in bulk, and use reusable containers to save wasteful packaging.
- Use compact long life bulbs, which use far less electricity. Use motion-sensing switches to turn them off when the room is empty.
- Plant deciduous trees to provide valuable leaf litter and to shelter your house from the prevailing cold winds or from the sun. Do not chose trees that are too big for your plot, though. Fruit trees are great.
- Carpool and combine trips. Plan your shopping trips and other trips out for necessities. Get things together instead of in several trips, and take it in turns with a friend or neighbour. It might be slightly less convenient but saves multiple journeys, and you might make friends with your neighbour.
- Do not gripe or protest about the price of fuel. Make sure your engines are efficient instead.
- Bike, walk, and use public transport.
- Install a solar water heater to cut heating bills even in cloudy climates.
- Check energy efficiency ratings. You could save an eighth of your household energy needs by eliminating wasted power.
- Use non-toxic cleaners. Borax, vinegar, baking soda, salt, and lemon juice are a few of the many natural alternatives.
- Do not live in a house bigger than you need.
- Store rainwater in a rain butt. Use it on your garden.
- Make compost, even if you are not a gardener, it will improve the soil for the next occupants.
- Grow edible plants in your garden. Eat them instead of buying from the supermarket. Scared of bugs and slugs? Soak your vegetables for half an hour in a bowl of water with a handful of salt. The salt and the soaking in water will kill any slugs, worms and most insects. If you are really squemish, do not look in the wash water, just throw it down the drain. Then rinse with clean water a couple of times.
- Go veggy, or at least cut down on meat and dairy product consumption. Meat, eggs, and dairy products require more land, water, and other resources to produce than they return in food value.
- Insulate walls and ceilings. Local authorities and government agencies will often subsidize bringing older houses up to current standards.
- Fix leaky pipes. Even small ones can waste thousands of gallons of water a year, and most can be easily repaired by replacing worn parts.
- Buy your food from local growers.
- Install low-flush toilets and drop from six gallons per flush to one and a half. It will save water as well as money if your water is metered.
- Such simple things as taking the bus to work instead of using a car, of seeking permission to work at home, and reparing small items rather than dumping them can be considered.
