Adelphiasophism
Wise Women’s Review of Reviews
Abstract
© 1998 The Adelphiasophists and AskWhy! Publications. Freely distribute as long as it is unaltered and properly attributed
Jonathan Clatworthy: Good God
In a review of “Good God: Green Theology and the Value of Creation” by Jonathan Clatworthy in “Ecotheology” magazine, January 2000, Stephen W Need tells us that the author classifies attitudes to God’s creation into three categories: optimistic, pessimistic and “who cares?” (well, neutral). Clatworthy, who founded “Ecotheology” as “Theology in Green,” puts his faith with the patriarchal God of heaven rather than the earth goddess and declares himself to be an optimist because God’s creation is necessarily “good.”
To judge from this review, Clatworthy is a typical happy-clappy, quite out of touch with the reality that he wants the rest of us to read correctly—in terms of trust, hope and love. With the earth possibly in terminal decline, trust, hope and love might be all we have left for dealing with the problem, but there are still many of us for whom trust, hope and love sound like surrender. We want something more positive than these trite qualities.
Clatworthy wants to convince us that God exists, presumably so that we can be sure this trinity of cures will be effective as soon as God realises what we are doing. His argument is the old and discredited argument from design. The law and order present in the world prove that there must be a designer and a lawgiver. Law and order, called by the Persians Arta which is often translated as truth, was the reason that Zoroaster founded the patriarchal genus of religions, so Clatworthy has not advanced far in 3000 years but he does not like Zoroastrianism, and seems not to know that his own religion evolved from it. Judaism and ultimately Christianity were derived from the older eschatological religion, Zoroastrianism, when the Persians drove west in the sixth century BC.
The reason why Zoroastrianism is awful is that it is dualist and Clatworthy informs us that dualist religions are pessimistic. The dualist religions envisage a struggle in the world between “good” and “evil” but despite the fellow called Satan, that the Christian Right in America think is a serious rival to God in the world, Christianity is apparently not dualistic. Nor, if Clatworthy’s argument distinguishes Christianity and Zoroastrianism on the basis of ultimate triumph, does he know that Zoroaster prophesied an ultimate triumph for Ormuzd and the Good Spirit in his cosmogony.
Anyway, the God who designed everything is “good” and His creation is “good” (just as Zoroaster thought). We can all therefore be confidant in this as a true fact—we can have faith! Furthermore, we also have a purpose in life. It is to enjoy ourselves!
Pious Christian liars may speak of trust but they know little of truth, a characteristic that the Persian religion valued as much as Christians do love but which is far more pragmatic. They have often sought to gull others and certainly succeed in gulling themselves, but when the fate of the world and humanity is at stake, it is time for honesty, not more pious lies. A review cannot do justice to the full work even when it is a sycophantic one, but when told we save the earth by being optimistic Christians, not pessimists like those of other religions, it sounds less like a prescription for saving the earth than a farrago of smug Christian propaganda intended to reassure eco-Thomases or even recruit environmentalists to the Christian cause.
Optimism is often coupled with the qualifier “baseless” and in cases like this we can see why. Christians will sing hymns while the lions eat them in their mythology and they want us all to praise God while the earth dies around us. Well, we will not! We will shout and yell until somebody takes notice, because singing hymns might soothe God but it will not save the world. The world will be saved by stopping those who are destroying it. We shall have to do it ourselves, whatever God might think.
Clatworthy doubtless has noble intentions, but he gives us the same tired Christian remedies that have failed repeatedly—hope, trust, love. The world edges nearer to destruction and Clatworthy tells us to remain optimistic—God is “good.” His works are “good.” Even mankind doubtless is “good” and will pull back, with God’s blessing, from the brink—nothing to worry about. God will ensure we are all right. And, if not, we shall go to heaven for not complaining, eh?
And what have we to complain about. Yes, there is wickedness in the world, but Christianity is not dualist, so it has been put there deliberately by God to try us. How do we tell whether wickedness is God’s “good” work or the work of some evil principle acting independently of God? Doubtless the answer is “faith.” Here is the usual Christian circularity: God is “good” so we can have faith and, if we have faith, we can be certain that God is “good.”
Well, for Adelphiasophists, it does not matter whether the greedy transnational corporation owners are the agents of the devil or sent by God to test us, all we can see is that they are ravaging the earth, destroying biodiversity and upsetting the climate. Whether they are devils or angels, they have to be stopped, and they will not be stopped by prayers or hymns.
Christian optimism suggests that if God is “good” and everything will be all right in the end, then we need do nothing. On the other hand, if Christian optimism is an evil sent by God to try us, a smugness unwarranted by the circumstances, then the correct outlook is the pessimistic one. Christianity therefore does not differ from Zoroastrianism, the dualistic and, by implication, mistaken viewpoint.
Pessimism is indeed the correct outlook for today. The Goddess is ailing. She might be mortally ill and surely will be if we do not act soon and comprehensively. This is pessimism. It is the cautious outlook, the intuitive attitude, the concerned posture. It moves people into action. Now is our last chance—shall we take it or shall we hope for and trust in the love of God to save us?
Optimism is useless for anything except our consciences. If our fears prove to be baseless, then our optimistic investment in inactivity or mere prayer did not matter. Otherwise our inactivity will be fatal. Pessimism drives action because it puts us in the last chance saloon rather than the Church of Saint Donothing. We have our imagination and can conceive of a world dead to all but simple lifeforms—a world cast back perhaps 500 million years. Faced with such a possibility, our instinct and intuition should be to be cautious, but smug optimism permits us to continue in our recklessness.
That is illustrated by Clatworthy’s fatuous statement that our purpose in life is to “enjoy ourselves.” We can be sure our purpose in life is not to be miserable, though Christian characterization of life as a Vale of Woe suggests otherwise, so at best Clatworthy’s conclusion is a platitude but at worst it endorses this absurd Christian do-nothing optimism. Perhaps the reviewer has missed out some qualifying clauses for no one should imagine that we are here to enjoy ourselves at any cost to other humans, other species or anything on earth. The selfish hedonism of the western world results in young people today committing suicide because they feel inadequate at failing to enjoy themselves enough! Modern living requires gross, unnecessary and destructive exploitation of the world. Why should we listen to a Christian Nero urging us to fiddle while Sophia dies of grievous bodily assault.
Christians might retort that Clatworthy is not urging a do-nothing optimism but a do-something optimism. Perhaps so, but our point is that engendering optimism is not the way to get results. Whatever actions are recommended to ensure the optimistic outcome, the very confidence that the outcome will be favourable (because God is “good”) guarantees a half-hearted implementation of them. We need action and the determination to pursue it until we have sure grounds that our pessimism is no longer warranted. That is the proper and the only safe way to safeguard the Goddess. That is our purpose in life, not hedonism.
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.
Robert Royal: Romantic Images
Celia Deane-Drummond tells us in another review in the same issue of “Ecotheology” that a man called Robert Royal has a mission to “burst the bubble of an overly romantic approach to the natural world, including common images of the world as sacred.” It sounds as though he means people like the Adelphiasophists, although anyone who thinks our attitude to the world is “overly romantic” immediately proves that he hasn’t a clue or is a smug apologist for the exploiters.
Needless to say Mr Royal is an average Christian of the orthodox persuasion. He is dazzled by mankind’s shear genius and the special place in the cosmos God has granted him. The world is not sacred but mankind is. We take the word sacred to mean “worthy of veneration.” Make up your own mind what you prefer to consider sacred.
That any human should want to write a book denying that the world is sacred is a sad reflexion of the state of humanity altogether, but is also an utter condemnation of any religion that could give such a view any nourishment. If the world that nurtures and sustains us is not worthy of reverence then what is? Silly question. Mr Royal and his fellow Christians will say only the invisible, uncomprehendable Father sitting on the other side of the stars. Will you accept $200 a week for life or take a chance on winning the lottery? Christians take the lottery. Adelphiasophists take the $200 dollars. One is pie in the sky, the other bread and butter on the plate. One is a father in distant parts promising riches but never sending mother a check. The other is mother daily keeping us happy, fed and educated. Only opportunists, ingrates and psychological axolotls choose the father.
Mr Royal is an apologist for a laissez-faire economics that would permit the continued free exploitation of the world’s resources, whether inorganic or organic. He insults us by declaring that we who regard the earth as so sacred that we personify her as a goddess should not call her Sophia. We say Christians should therefore not call Jesus a god when the gospels are plain that he was a Jewish criminal. We shall call our Goddess by whatever names we choose. We believe she is knowable, and that a great gift she has allowed us in the way we have evolved is the ability to know her. We get wisdom from her—she is Sophia.
Christians like Mr Royal on the other hand believe that God gave them a brain, but forbids them to use it. Eve, in the primeval garden, did so once, and the Loving Father got so annoyed about it that he cursed all humanity ever after, even though those of them who are His best followers have steadfastly refused to use their brains since. For their fortitude, they will be resurrected into an eternal life, if God is kind enough, without the brains that they never used, so that eternity will not seem so long.
Christians like Mr Royal think mankind is above Nature—a position granted him by God as the “crown of creation.” Sallie McFague advises us not to relate to other things in the world as subject-object but instead as subject-subject. If we understand her correctly, Adelphiasophists would agree but she is a Christian and would have to reject her Christianity to do so honestly. We see Nature as sacred—a Goddess—and realise that we are a part of the deity, as is everything else in creation. We are all equal in Her eyes, no better or worse than anything else that has evolved, and we necessarily see all other things as our equals—in subject-subject terms.
Nevertheless, we must not, in observing the world, project human fantasies like souls and teleology into it without foundation. Nature allows us to observe her for knowledge or pleasure but we are not above Her and have been granted no stewardship by Her. We have a “de facto” stewardship over the biosphere of the earth because of our power, and that is precisely what we want recognized and controlled. Accepting the world as sacred is the best way of doing it.
Sally McFague thinks Christians should “focus on healing the wounds of Nature,” virtually personifying Her as we do, but her Christianity stops her short. She cannot dispense with the Invisible Ineffable beyond the cosmos that answers our every prayer as long as they do not matter, but otherwise tells us it is good for the soul to suffer. Take the decisive step, Sallie!
Celia Deane-Drummond: Empathy
Celia Deane-Drummond wonders how we can empathize with organisms that are vital to the ecosystem but a threat to human life. Well, if we do not empathize with them we shall hate them and shall purge them as a plague from the face of the earth with our chlorinated waters and our suphuretted waters and perhaps with our ionizing radiations. Then they will no longer be a threat to human life. There will also be no human life to threaten because our premise was that these organisms were “vital to the ecosystem.” Without the organisms, the ecosystem died and with it so did humanity.
It is an excellent little moral story that illustrates perfectly what the human race is doing. Loving a microbe might be hard, but it is a love more worthwhile than loving something that does not exist except in the mind. Since both humans and these microbes have shared the earth together, they are compatible even if they are not directly symbiotic. If the microbe makes us ill occasionally, we must put up with it, contenting ourselves with alleviating the attack when it happens or treating the symptoms.
We might also be reminded that immunization is the proper way to control harmful bacteria not by swilling chlorine and suphur dioxide everywhere. Nowadays we get obscure symptoms because our immune systems are getting to feel redundant. The gallons of bleach we use keep the microbes from our immune systems, so we never build up proper resistance, the natural way. Instead formerly harmless bacteria become killers while we develop peculiar allergies from the boredom of our immune systems.
Adelphiasophists do not think filth is holy like Christians did formerly or ignore modern medical developments, like Christian Scientists. We lose no sleep over washing our hands when we have been gardening to wash off dirt and microbes. There are plenty more where they came from. Nor do we object to sterile areas in hospitals to protect the weak from opportunistic microbial attack. But we are happy that our children should eat their proverbial “peck of muck” in their lifetime because it will help them protect themselves naturally. We Adelphiasophists do empathize with organisms. We are one ourselves. Obsessive use of disinfectants and bleaches is helping to kill organisms in the ecosystem that are at least useful to us in developing a proper immune response to them. Killing them might well be killing us.
Sallie McFague brings us back to dualism which she sees as being caused by male attitudes to women. She seems to be confused by the usual Christian idea that the world is intrinsically “good,” at least as God would have it and so as it must ultimately be—presumably at the eschaton. There must then be a reason for evil in the world and according to the review, Sallie McFague blames men. Well, why not? They are pretty awful a lot of the time. It makes us feel better to slag men off, but she is apparently being serious.
The world is intrinsically pluralistic. It would be cringingly boring if there were no choice over anything. Any quality has two poles or ends or sides, perhaps more. They are often inseparable. The idea of a perfect world is precisely that—an idea, a dream. If “good” were to prevail, what would it be? Defining it requires a definition of its opposite, so it only exists in relation to bad, with a scale of values between. Of these poles, nothing is generally favoured. A saintly man might yet be eaten by a crocodile, despite his holiness, or get run over by a bus, or die of food poisoning. His holiness does not give him any natural favours, whatever benefits it might give him in human eyes.
The adage is that one man’s meat is another one’s poison. It fully illustrates the duality of Nature. Adelphiasophists, like all Goddess adorers, see Her as the goddess of death as well as birth, and revere Her no less for this. Death is an essential part of life. For Christians death is the ultimate evil, which is why their reward is eternal life. They want God to be purely “good” so that Christianity is not dualist, but their God makes no bones about it, stating boldly: “I create evil” (Isa 45:7). To believe that this duality is not fundamental in Nature is to believe a childish fantasy. Christians persist in it because they are too cowardly and self-centred to accept death.
The importance of recognizing and accepting the duality of Nature is that one can then see the importance of balance, and therefore that there are real goals that we can set ourselves to maintain the balance in the world. In the struggle between microbes and humans, it is foolish and self-defeating to try to eliminate harmful mircobes from the face of the earth. Let us instead find a proper balance that lets us live with them with no greater fear than that we might sometimes get ill.
What stops the Christian like Sallie McFague and Jonathan Clatworthy from limiting their belief in a “good” world, if they must retain the belief, to that of a “fair” world—a world in a “good” balance, giving a fair chance of survival together of divers organisms, “good” and “bad”? Adelphiasophists see the world as “good” in this sense, but the notion of the lion nuzzling up to the lamb in God’s heavenly world is a foolish dream that serves only to paint the real world as somehow “wicked” because in it lions, not to mention human people, eat lambs.
Ursula King: Teilhard de Chardin
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, according to a book by an admirer, Ursula King, saw “Christ in all things,” giving the author a neat title. Unfortunately T de Chardin was one of those French intellectuals that make kaleidoscopic patterns with words, hypnotizing us with their genius until we pause to consider what it all means. Often the answer is nothing, though, convinced that it must mean something, the admirers pretend they know, like everyone admiring the king’s garments, except the innocent child, in Andersen’s tale about the king’s new clothes.
Admittedly, Teilhard de Chardin might have had, as a motive for obscurity, his desire to hide his heretical views from the Catholic censors, but much of the modern world from art to politics has been influenced—with no excuse—by gobbledegook nonsense of form with no content. In the forefront of it, with their advantage of 2000 years of practice, are Christian theologians, regrettably many modern ones women with a feminist outlook seeking new analytical methods untainted by a patriarchal history. New and untainted does not mean better, whatever the history, and women would serve humanity better if they used their verbal skills to outdo the men at the arts and sciences that have proved successful despite the masculine hands that they were in. As it is, sincere and clever women will finish up sidelined, because they chose faddish and incomprehensible methods of expression.
Anyway, “Christ in all things” could be “anything in all things” and make as much or more sense. Beauty fits excellently for an Adelphiasophist. Money is better still for the chairman of a multinational corporation. Nature is simply expressing an identity. But Christ? It is nonsense. Christians and perhaps others think it means something because they imagine Christ to be a proxy for “goodness” or perhaps the Holy Ghost that they take to be everywhere like the æther was for the Victorians.
It is really an expression of the identity of the Father and the Son because God is in all things even though He is transcendental—another word that means nothing in reality but inasmuch as it means anything seems to contradict His being in all things in this universe since it implies He is outside it. But Christians have always insisted on and granted themselves the right to define things to suit them—that is so as to make their tortuous theology seem to make sense. So God is inside and outside, Father and Son, infinite and finite, omnipresent and personal, and so on. Despite all these many unreal advantages and others, He seems quite unable to reveal himself in any way that would convince sinners and skeptics to accept Him, despite His being “in all things.”
The only thing that is “in” all things is Nature, because Nature is all things. If Nature is all things by definition, then Nature encompasses any god that might exist. Once Nature is defined to be “all things,” it becomes pure dishonesty to then say that God is beyond or above Nature. The fact that the Christian God is not only beyond or above Nature but is simultaneously in Nature’s every leaf and grain of sand, a trick that even Yuri Geller cannot do, proves that Christian theologians are shysters.
Mother Goddesses have quite enough with the cosmos, without having to waste their time trying to find the outside of it. For Christians, that is the trouble—no mystery! Nature is self-evident, and so boring, not a bit like an Invisible Ineffable. Boring or not—and it is not boring—it is the truth. Invisible Ineffables simply do not exist. They are lies. Fictitious Fathers in unseen and unknown dimensions should not be worshipped as if they were real when real problems are far more pressing. Christianity cannot provide a suitable theology or praxis for saving the earth when the fundamental Christian belief is in the salvific action of a fictional being. The notion is false and misleading and the moral failure of society in the Christian era proves it. Indeed, in this sense Christianity has always been “evil” not “good.” Realization of this crucial truth will show that the human race is reaching maturity. Sadly, it looks as though it will die in childhood.
Teilhard de Chardin apparently was an optimist tempered by realism. His experience in the trenches in the first World War was what tempered his optimism, so he was not blindly optimistic, Sion Cowell explains to us, but, like Julian of Norwich, he knew “all things will be well.” This is a surprising conclusion for a man who spent the first World War in the trenches, unless he meant “all things will be well for me” because he emerged from the trenches with his brain and body intact. The millions of soldiers who finished up with a machine gun bullet, or dead or mutilated from a shell burst, or insane from shock can hardly have thought “all things will be well.” This sort of nonsense is like the self-made corporation boss who claims “hard work and common sense,” the qualities he believes he has in abundance, are all you need to succeed in business. Though, if the business hits the rocks, it is bad luck, poor workers, insensitive banks, or anything else external to the boss himself that are the causes.
Our Christian brothers and sisters monotonously assure us that “all things will be well” when the whole history of humanity suggests it is as likely to be false as true. History! Who cares about history? Have faith in God, sister. Don’t worry. Get happy! Treat yourself to a new car—get the latest model. The refrigerator is three years old—time for a newer one. Little Bobby is a laughing stock at school because he has last season’s football shirt or trainers. Oh, and buy us all a round of burgers while you’re out.
Ted Peters: Human Genome Project
A “good” Christian, Ted Peters comforts us in a book “funded by a small proportion of the funds of the Human Genome Project” that this project holds few dangers for humanity. Genetic discrimination will not mean greater inequality and unjustice but the opposite. Patenting genetic information is not the same as patenting grass or the air we breathe, as you might think, but offers no ethical problems and actually encourages research. Human cloning is no different from selecting or hybridizing plants or dogs.The threat of eugenics has been overstated. The only problem might be changing parts of the inherited genetic code.
Since Peters’ work has been funded for four years by the HGP, it is plain why he is saying these things, but what justification has he as a Christian? Every justification! The only important thing in life for a Christian, Peters declares, is God. God is absolute and permanent, Nature is transient and mutable, so it does not matter. People like Adelphiasophists are “theological naturalists” putting worship and preservation of Mother Nature above the sovereignty of God,” as Michael S Northcott summarises it.
Peters’ whole argument, a Christian argument, is totally surreal. The real and fruitful world that keeps us from extinction does not matter, while a phantasmagorical, figmentary father for immature personalities is all that is important! Can anyone wonder why Adelphiasophists are so vocal against Christianity? We are indeed naturalists, theological or otherwise. We hold this view precisely because Christians like Peters absolve themselves of culpability for the destruction of the environment because they worship God:
So long as humans worship God and God alone, they cannot be accused of “playing God” when they interfere with nature.
Northcott politely finds Peters’ stance “problematic.” Insane is the honest word to use. Northcott sees that Peters is justifying his paymasters, the corporations that will own the patents and will charge us for what is naturally our own. But Northcott is particularly amazed at the undisguised forthrightness with which Peters displays his Christian justification for it. He can see that it blows away all the Christian froth about ecological concern, in the purest Judaeo-Christian belief.
Northcott protests that ethics has “a naturalistic baseline, even if the ultimate baseline is the righteousness of God.” He cannot deny that Peters is right in Christian terms. Christians are indeed brought up to think that nothing is more important than God, so the “ultimate baseline” must be God not any “naturalistic baseline.” Northcott is left stuttering but has no adequate non-fudgy Christian answer. Despite the supposed kindness of Jesus and the saints in the natural world, ultimately it does not matter. Faith, not works, matters in Christianity.
Christians believe they only have to do their duty in serving time crossing the Vale of Woe as a sort of outward bound course for the soul. If they cross it successfully with their faith in the Absolute Indifferent intact then they go to the balmy place to dwell forever singing hymns in praise of God. How can we put our trust, hope and love for the welfare of the world into the hands of people whose motto is:
Bugger the world! Just love God. Heaven beckons.
