Adelphiasophism
Visible Queen or Invisible King?
Abstract
Christians say: Our God made the whole universe.
Adelphiasophists say: Your god is imaginery, but our god is the whole universe.
© 1998 The Adelphiasophists and AskWhy! Publications. Freely distribute as long as it is unaltered and properly attributed
Contents Updated: Thursday, November 22, 2001
The Duality of God
If there is a material world called Nature and one of its products, humanity, conceives of a God that is superior to Nature and its creator, then we are in a tangle. This tangle has confused most of the ancients and most modern Christians, as well as some modern skeptics. H G Wells, writing in 1917 in “God the Invisible King,” thought he could see a distinction between the Being of Nature and the God of the heart, the former being the Creator God, maker of the Natural world, and the latter being the human conception of God. Wells must have written this in despair at the world, because it is plainly nonsense, and it is surprising to find such a man as Wells writing it.
He thought the distinction he had drawn would resolve many theological problems. Thus 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.
There is and can be no distinction in type between the God of Nature and the God of the Heart, because both are figments of a product of Nature. The God of the Heart is easy for us to self-identify with, because he is our unconscious selves anyway. Nature, that same wicked Nature of the Gnostic sects, is our only God. Plainly Nature gave birth to humanity, and Christians have to conceive of something giving birth to Nature, to get their own back, so they invent God, a supernatural man!
From the earliest ages people found no difficulty in the idea of something essential to life and personality, a soul or a spirit, existing apart from the body and continuing after the destruction of the body, remaining a person and an individual. From this it is a small step to the thought of a person existing independently of any existing or pre-existing body—Gods! Thus the Christian God exists devoid of body—superior to and independent of matter—but existing solely as personality for all time. The supreme mystery that Christians tell us God is is really the most simple chain of connected thoughts. Yet it is wrong, if the personality is a function of the body. In millennia of speculation on this, no theologian has been able to bring forward convincing proof that the personality can exist in its own right.
Somewhere in the dawning of humanity God had a beginning, an awakening, and as humanity grows, He grows. As we learn, He learns. As we improve our social relations, lo! God does the same. This is no more than saying that God is the collective mind and purpose of the human race. God is a mental summary of human endeavour.
It might comfort Wells to believe in a God of the Heart, but that God is a fiction and can be the same as the god of Nature if I, or anyone else, want it to be. To imagine some subtle distinction between two alternative figments is idiocy. It is like saying that an elf is different from a fairy. Doubtless it is, in my imagination, but the difference is hardly significant. We cannot go wrong by taking the only infinite thing we know as being the only deity their is. Nature conceived us and brought us into the world. If she is wicked for doing it, then it must be because we are wicked. In general, we have no reason for thinking that Nature is at all evil, except that what happens in Nature does not always suit us. It is time we, and intelligent people like Wells, woke up to the simple truth that we had better begin to get along with Nature or we shall die. Nature will not die, but we shall. Who will be God’s steward of Nature then? The lemmings?
Life and Death
Nature is neither good or evil. It is indifferent to the judgements of humanity. If it gives all the pain and conflict of life, it gives also the joy of the sunshine, the delight and hope of youth, the pleasures. If it has evolved myriads of parasites, it has also moulded the beautiful contours of a young man or woman, it has given us flowers—and worms! And in it, as part of it, taking its fruits, kicking at it pricks, subject to the final oblivion of death, do we all live, as everything lives, except that we alone can name our emotions as being glad, angry, sorry, revengeful, hopeful, weary, disgusted, forgetful, lustful, happy, excited, bored, in pain.
Among them is fear, and one type of fear is that of death. It is our hubris and egotism. We want to be gods because we can name our emotions, and make simple things. We invent a big man as the ultimate god and say we want to be like him and live forever. We are happy to be his slaves to earn this reward. But slaves to god we are not, and will never be because the Goddess reclaims us when we die. It is her that we rejoin, but our personality dies with us. If we cannot make a useful impression on the world in life, then we shall never get another chance because death is just that.
Imagine what perfect bliss in a perfect world would mean. Nothing troublesome can happen because it would spoil the perfection. So no thought is needed. No judgment is called for, no inhibition, no disturbance of the instinctive flow of perfect reactions. It is a challengeless life. It is a boring life, or rather it is not because boredom would spoil the perfection and so would have to be prevented along with all other mental challenges. We would have to be unconscious lest anything should spoil the perfection. Consciousness evolved to overcome the problems of an imperfect world. It is superfluous in the perfect world, just as sexual organs are for immortal beings, so we could not distract ourselves with pleasurable activities either. The truth of the matter is that a perfect world would be a dead world. If we leave imperfection when we die, to enter a perfect world, then there is no afterlife because life and perfection are incompatible. Let us therefore celebrate death. It has allowed us once to have lived.
Life is a continual need for adaptation to the changing circumstances. This is the struggle we all face and is the driving force of evolution. Our awareness of the disharmony between what we desire and what is, causes us distress. The ultimate disharmony, we are led to believe, is death, and that distresses us even more. Yet some people are so disturbed by disharmony in life that they deliberately seek death. They are considered as insane, and so they are in that no one is born so that they should take their own lives, but they are not in recognizing what sane people do not, that death is the final relief from life’s burdens, and therefore should be welcomed without anxiety.
Religion makes us concerned about death so that priests can sell their bogus salves to the “problem” it is supposed to be. The elixir of life they offer is indeed called salvation, and is a medicine easily taken in Christianity—the patient simply has to believe in Jesus, and nothing more. God then rewards them with immortality at His breast. This cure is no cure. It is not surprising that it is rarely presented in this, the proper way. People are led to believe that the future life is like the life we lead now except free of all distress. We meet our dead spouses and friends and relatives and have a reunion party. It is an impossible conception and would be worse than hell, in practice. When we die we rest in peace—the peace of utter bliss with nothing to disturb us whether distressful or not. We simply cease to be, and that is our relief from coping with life for a few years and doing our bit to prolong the species and improve the world we live in.
Only the Buddhists can see anything like this. For them, life is a continual cycle of punishment for being imperfect. When we reach perfection we no longer have to be born into a new life but reach Nirvana, which is death! Buddhism is wrong to surmise that life is a punishment, and that there is more than one. We have one chance only to get it right—and we can, however terrible things might be for us as individuals. Many brave people do it already.
What we have to do is cease to be pre-occupied with ourselves and turn our attention to the rest of Nature. What we do for ourselves will rarely, if ever, satisfy us, but what we do for the world beyond us can be hugely satisfying to others and beneficial to the world. Truly religious piety and devotion is being just self-centred enough to allow us to fulfil the proper aim of religion of doing what benefits everything else. Religion is escaping from a self-centred life, losing one’s self enough to concentrate on the needs of other people, creatures and things.
The Christian Vale of Woe is simply a metaphor for the challenges we must face up to in life, but this metaphor gives no suggestion of the relief possible in the pleasure we have undertaking the challenge. Those who have lived completely and selflessly will welcome death as readily as a tired worker will sit down for a well-earned rest. Death is not conquered, but what is conquered is fear of it. First it is overcome by giving one’s life an undying purpose, and then by realizing that immortality is achieved during life, not after it.
Ultimately the remedy of distress in life is self-sacrifice for the better good. It is true of most religions but the concept is wrapped in supernatural mud and confusion. It is the simple need of thinking animals for a purpose. Nature has provided it deep in our psyche. Our purpose is to help her! The wise Solomon, in biblical mythology is said to have written (with appropriate changes):
Go thy way, eat thy bread with joy, and drink thy wine with a merry heart, for the Goddess accepteth thy works. Let thy garments be always white, and lack for nothing essential. Live joyfully with the wife whom thou lovest all the days of the life of thy vanity, which she hath given thee under the sun, all the days of thy vanity for that is thy portion in this life, and in thy labour which thou takest under the sun. Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do in her interest, do it with thy might, for there is no work, nor device, nor knowledge, nor wisdom, in the grave, whither thou goest.
The God of Fear
The Hebrew Yehouah was a God of Fear. He became the Christian Trinity and the Moslem Allah. The missionary would gladly smash some Polynesian idol of shark’s teeth, oyster shells and mother-of-pearl. Yet, the Christian Trinity is no different. God the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost is just a conceptual idol in which the Father is the shark, the Son is the oyster shell, and the Ghost is the mother-of-pearl. And most early Christians before the creeds established the doctrine of the Trinity, denied that Yehouah was God. Christ was a rebel against Yehouah and a rescuer of humanity from him, just as Prometheus was a rebel against Zeus.
These beliefs survived for a thousand years throughout Christendom. They were held by a great multitude of persecuted sects, from the Albigenses to the eastern Paulicians. The Catholic church prohibited the circulation of the “Old Testament” among laymen because of the polemics of the Cathars against the Hebrew God. This petty god of men whose natural hatred made Him in their own image depicted Him as murderous and vengeful. Despite his supposed foresight, he did not like the men he made and drowned them all but a handful. Similarly He incinerated Sodom and Gomorrah. He tells his children to murder everyone in the land they invade, even the animals. Brutal and disgusting men like to have a suitable role model in their God.
Many Christians are afraid. They dare not abandon their foolish observances. They dare not question things. They fear nakedness, fear sex, fear pleasure, fear discovery, fear blasphemy. The loud mouthed and foul minded bigot, with his indignant jowlly face, his wild, dramatic gestures, his bellowings and threatenings, his bogus credentials and incomprehension of love reaps a harvest of fear that gives seed for the next harvest! He denounces the efforts of those who attempt to resolve problems, while pronouncing for God in his delusion that he is a prophet, or even a messiah.
Most of those who possess and repeat the Christian creeds have continued into adulthood what they were taught as uncomprehending children, so that they now scarcely understand the nature of the religion to which they profess, and which they defend without thought. The Council of Nicaea, which forcibly crystallised the controversies of two centuries and formulated the creed upon which all the existing Christian churches are based, was one of the most disastrous and one of the least venerable of all religious gatherings.
Deans and canons, divines and church dignitaries, men intelligent and enquiring and religiously disposed, all lying like worn out carpets, pant under a load of obsolete theological responsibility, like overladen camels desperately seeking the way through the needle’s eye to God. Such is Christian apologetics. Christians are dishonest about their holy book. They have adopted compromises, they have qualified it with modifying footnotes essentially repudiating it. They have decided that plain statements are metaphors and have undercut, transposed, and inverted the most vital points of the vulgarly accepted beliefs.
Within most of the Christian communions one may believe anything or nothing, provided only that one does not call too public an attention to one’s eccentricity. The late Rev Charles Voyse preached against the divinity of Christ, unhindered in his own church. Only when he published his sermons and caused an outcry beyond the limits of his congregation, was he indicted and deprived.
Alone with the Evangelist
Evangelists hawk God for a profit. They are greedy for the triumph of acquiescence. They tally converts to please God and be rewarded. They are using God for their own purposes. They are exploiting Him, and hope He will not notice. They say prayers to Him and sing His praises, hoping that He will appreciate their sycophancy.
A source of patriarchal converts is that we are alone to face the world. God then becomes our buddy to help us out of isolation. Yet human beings are not isolated at all. they are the most gregarious animals that ever lived. They live in groups of millions in monstrous cities. The delusion of isolation drives people into the arms of the figmentary god, when devotion to the Goddess might have stopped the huge overpopulation we experience.
The deluded Christian stands alone in fact because his buddy Jesus is merely himself. His delusion is that God or His son gives him standards, moral strength and an impulse to goodness. These might be, and often are, social standards whether right or wrong, or they might be standards invented in the delusion which will often be wrong, and even murderously so. Either way, the Christian exudes immodesty and self-righteousness, which brook no argument because the ideas were sent by God himself. He has not given himself or got away from himself, and has no one to whom he can give himself except those with a similar delusion. His exaltation is self-centred and the only obligation he feels is to convert as many people as possible into believing the same delusion. His devotion is the selfish belief that his delusion means personal salvation. Though he thinks he has God standing with him, he has no source of strength beyond his own amiable sentiments. His prayer is masturbation. He is not God’s slave but God is his. Wells repeatedly denies he is a Christian but he has a God the equal of the eastern potentate whom the self-abasing Herbert George wants to flagellate him. Perhaps he is not a masturbator but he is a masochist. Some are satisfied by either.
American evangelicals tell us what Isaiah, Ezekiel and Obadiah thought about Omar Bin Laden. The Jewish prophets did not like him at all. Jews will say it is understandable. The evangelicals meanwhile tell us that the conditions and events of the war against the Taliban prove that God is on our side, forgetting that it was not just the FBI and CIA that had fallen asleep before 11 Septemebr 2001, but this God who is on our side too. Well, He has woken up and now, for the evangelicals, He is now doing His bit. Why, though, since He is the same God that created the universe in a few days, does He not just stop it all from happening? Have the evangelical Christians not been praying enough, or loud enough? No need to be churlish, our evangelicals will think, after all He is winning the war for us now—with a little help from modern technology. And will we see the 5000 people who were pulverized in the twin towers resurrected? Why not? They were innocent, were they not? When God sees His way to letting some innocent Moslems be killed in retribution, then justice is done. No evangelical outcry is loud enough to be heard.
These Christians are convinced that God can be invoked by ritual, by days of national prayer or special observances, but failure to attend church on Sundays is annoying God, so that he has decided to remind us He is there. So, cause and effect is a sham. It is God who is deciding in advance what will happen, and if we serve Him well enough, then He will help us win our wars, but otherwise He will let Satan rule! So, as long as we pray often and go to communion often, we can do just as we please because God will be on our side. Can God really have an appetite for unnatural praise and adoration? Does He clamour for the attention of children? Such ideas may be helpful for some timid people, who without it would be unable to leave the house, but for most, it leads to a good degree of thoughtless but smug recklessness that is dangerous, not just to them but us all. Christians are so smug that they cannot realize that others are even more deluded, and therefore even more reckless, than they are.
No deity guides our feet. No amount of prayers will save us from our own foolishness. Does anyone leave their infant children to the trust of God, on the faith of a prayer, while they go to the midnight mass, or the local bar? Even Christians are not so deluded, and if they are, they do not do it because their faith in the law is stronger than their faith in God. Cherish no delusions. God will not clothe us as finely as the lilies in the field, if we refuse to help ourselves.
Truth and Duty
Wells says that agnostics and atheists, at root, worship an anonymous God. They say everything that a religious writer would say except that their god is not named. Wells seems to think it is a sort of dishonesty, but despite his interest in science, he seems not to consider that Nature might have had something to do with our make up, and that something is the expression and need of us to love and cherish her.
The splendour of Nature’s ring of truth has been lost for millennia in the muddy pool of patriarchal obfuscation and lies. Patriarchal religion has utterly polluted the water, but the jewel still lies their waiting to be recovered. It is our challenge to sift through the mud and sediment, washing away the lies and confusion of dogmatic patriarchal religion until we retrieve the jewel, and then we can polish it clean and see it glorious once more.
However great Wells is, he cannot divorce himself from the patriarchal conception of God, though he tries to strip it of its mythological fancies. Yet mythology or no mythology, the conception of a buddy god is wrong and absurd. It might do no harm as a metaphor for deep seated psychological needs or drives, but the personifying of it and foisting of it on to others is control, not religion. In Christianity, the believer has had a psychological experience called encountering Jesus. Evidently, it has a mixed outcome. Some become more moral and concerned for others while the rest become crooks, secure, it seems that Jesus saves, so they can behave any way they like, and even use religion as a cloak for their dishonesty. A more positive experience can be had without the Jesus encounter, and that is to consciously recognize our duty to Nature. Occam the monk told us not to multiply entities, and so the first we can dispose of is Jesus, and then we can get right to the real point of living.
Joseph McCabe, who was a Catholic priest, wrote that some of the apathetic masses say, “Is there such a thing as a duty to improve the earth? What is the meaning or purpose of life? Or has it a purpose?” McCabe answers that there is no God-sent purpose, and that we are free to decide our own purposes in life. Yet “the most elementary sense of order will teach us that this choice must be social, not merely individual.” McCabe was another clever man, who could teach us a lot about the patriarchal religions that we never knew, but he could not see that society is made up of individuals.
Moreover, as Wells pointed out, people seem to come back to the same sort of moral, indeed altruistic, code of self-sacrifice for the welfare of others. Why do they not think it might be innate? We are animals that have evolved by the processes that Nature admits, and permits inherited qualities. McCabe weasels that he does not mean “an austere demand of self-sacrifice from the individual, but an adjustment—as genial and generous as possible—of individual variations for common good.” He is trying to water down the demand for self-sacrifice, accepting that not everyone will do it, but concludes:
The revolt which burns in so much of the abler literature of our time is an unselfish revolt, or non-selfish revolt. It is an outcome of that larger spirit which conceives the self to be a part of the general social organism, and it is therefore neither egoistic nor altruistic. …the glow which chiefly illumines it is the glow of the great vision of a happier earth. It speaks of the claims of truth and justice, and assails untruth and injustice…it urges all to co-operate in the restriction of suffering and the creation of happiness.
The old dream of a co-operative effort to improve life… shines above all the mists of the day… Its foundations are the fundamental and unchanging impulses of our nature.
Wells accuses McCabe of serving a master he denies, but McCabe knows better than Wells, from considerable experience, that Christianity is a sham, and he writes to that precise purpose. Nevertheless, these feelings that we have a duty to improve the world do not have to be given to us supernaturally, and Wells ought to know it. Dr Chalmers Mitchell says:
I assert as a biological fact that the moral law is as real and as external to man as the starry vault… It is the work of the blood and tears of long generations of men. It is not in man, inborn or innate, but is enshrined in his traditions, in his customs, in his literature and his religion.
Whether it is innate or merely a long tradition, Mitchell can see it is there. It does not seem absurd to hypothesize that Nature has a common good, and with the evolution of intelligence, one animal has come to express it in tradition precisely because it is innate. Nor does it necessarily overcome stronger needs, any more than a maternal instinct will prevent a starving predator from eating her brood. But it is nevertheless there. Only humans have shown a positive glee in destroying Nature, and we have to ask to what extent the patriarchal religions which disdain the world have caused it.
Professor Gilbert Murray said that philosophy had gone astray…
…through not sufficiently realising its dependence on the human mind as a natural biological product. For it is very important in this matter to realise that the so-called belief is not really an intellectual judgment so much as a craving of the whole nature.
It might be argued that it is immaterial whether it is a God or a Goddess who is considered the origin of these ideas, so long as the ideas stick and people take to their duty as a consequence. But it does matter. One of the fundamental ideas we have to recapture from the deceit of patriarchy is the distinction of truth and falsehood. People might turn to a right course of action for the wrong reasons, but they will be lucky if the reasons do not influence their actions. If my reason is that a god whispered in my ear, then the god might whisper agaion, but this time with a wrong course of action. The Goddess is not supernatural becasue she is Nature itself. Supernatural is an adjective that simply means fantasy, and allows fantastic things. We have to rid our thoughts of it to get at Nature.
Using our Abilities
The pursuit of the new dispensation of the Goddess is the pursuit of Adelphiasophism, the exploration of Nature as she is and as she has been—science and history—developing our creativity in all its forms, learning how to think clearly, appreciating the interconnectedness of Nature, so that we do not inadvertantly damage some part of her, accepting that all life has a role, and so learning how to control it, not to destroy it.
No concerned act can be altogether without significance, no power so humble that it may not be used for the Goddess, no life too weak or damaged that it cannot offer something to her. To look upon the Goddess with compassion and put her need in our hearts will fill us with the desire to serve her, to preserve and conserve her. Devotion to Nature has its own reward of giving us repose and beauty when we need it, but requires us to conserve her for others. Thus we have two massive sources of pleasure from her, in rest and in work. Why despair and pull up the roots of our life to end it all when life gives us a shock? Why be complacent or apathetic and leave our life as it is, aimless or selfish? We are not here to serve abstract gods but to serve the real, living material Goddess who is suffering at our hands in this tiny region of her domain.
The duty of those who serve her must vary with the abilities they possess and the positions they hold, but all have certain fundamental duties. We must reject Christian lies, so-called God’s Truth, and be utterly truthful with ourselves. We must aim to be as healthy as we can be and as skilful, well educated and knowledgeable as our abilities permit. We must guard against selfishness, a difficult duty because it is natural for us to be selfish, but unnatural for us to be obsessively selfish. We must therefore be selfish enough to be well prepared and fit for our tasks but not to indulge ourselves in some sort of selfish gluttony, seen all too often in the grab-all world of the patriarchs. The so-called deadly sins are not really sins to the patriarchal god, sin to him being rejection of Him. These are sins of mortals, the sins of selfish gluttony that distract us from attaending to the Goddess’s needs. They are inevitable in some degree being natural, and do not require self-flagellation to ameliorate them, but they must be thought of as needing control, like a housetrained dog.
The preserver of the Goddess must keep their minds wide and receptive to good ideas and their motives simultaneously honourable. The Goddess provides for us all, but in a restricted space, like the world, people can and do take more than their share, then dole it out to others at a profit. Though this is easy, it is dishonourable in any just world. That it is so widespread in the Christian world has its own lesson.
A Goddess believer with administrative gifts should be in the public administration, as certainly as breathing and eating. Many occupations already belong to the Goddess but are usurped by human corporations for private greed—research, teaching, creative art, cultivation, construction, maintenance. Such people only need a change in the spirit of their work, a refreshed energy, a clearer understanding, a new zeal, a completer disregard of gains and praises and promotion. At present, their service is warped by mercenary and commercial considerations. Their ultimate outcome is destruction of the Goddess for gain and so they are incompatible with loving her and preserving her. These base motives have to be rejected. If someone is by nature an investigator then they enjoy research and ought not to be more motivated by the idea of receiving shares in a quarry or an oilwell. The Goddess has given us abilities that might help her, but should the investigator decide that only the shares were the real motivation, then gardening might be better employment.
The trouble becomes more marked and more difficult in the case of a man who is a manufacturer or a trader, the financier of business enterprise or the proprietor of great estates. Manufactured goods are needed by many in the world, but they should be made to satisfy real need, not need manufactured by marketing or other psychological tricks, and they should not be manufactures solely to make a profit. There has to be a continouos decision of what is necessary and what can be supplied without denuding resources or destroying environments.
No one has any right to take from Nature directly or indirectly whatever they feel like taking. People do have a duty to preserve Nature for the next generation just as it was, or prefereably better than it was. When people wilfully ignore these rules for personal gain, then society has a right to punish them for it and to demand appropriate recompense. When the world is openly and confessedly dedicated to the Goddess, the law court will exist only to adjust the differing views about how best the Goddess should be served. Aspects of Nature will have rights in the courts that people can bring against others on their behalf.
Everyone should be loyal to the Goddess and her needs and no one else. Scoundrels hide behind oaths of loyalty while honest people that blow the whistle are charged and convicted under them. Christians were supposed to swear no oaths, but every law court demands that witnesses swear on the very book that forbids it—supposedly God’s word.
Sin and Damnation
Life is a system of disharmonies, capable of no perfect way, no perfect employment, no perfect sexual life, no perfect happiness, no perfect conduct, no perfection in organic life, and therefore no perfect human. What is Sin? The Goddess knows no sin. Humanity could destroy the planet and all life on it, and the Goddess would not notice or care. The Goddess is not concerned about any aspect of her product. Nature is the whole, and the whole has to be considered. She is indifferent to any part of it, including humanity. It is up to us to show that we deserve a place in Nature. That is our rule of life. So, we who venerate the Goddess say she must be preserved, conserved and served by human beings. To destroy her locally is a sin—we say—because we have no right to destroy anything she has made. We have a right to control, that is all.
If Nature is divine then loving is divine. The Goddess is not concerned with sexual morality. Sexual activity is natural, but so is having children, and those who indulge in sexual activity have a duty to care for its outcome. The Goddess does not discriminate between man and woman.
What is damnation? The religious explanation is that the problems of life are caused by evil, either a primordial evil spirit or punishment of an act of disobedience before which the world was harmonious. The world is therefore evil in all patriarchal religions. The attraction of Christ’s glory, victory over the sorrows of life, and conquest of the fear of death were not sufficient for the Christian crook bearers to win the hapless soul. To give believers an added incentive, the after life was potentially infinitely worse, if the victim failed at the judgement.
There is no damnation, other than what we bring upon ourselves, or rather upon our descendants. Salvation is not ours but the Goddess’s and those who depend upon her in this bywater of the universe. For us damnation is not to realize that damnation is here. Satisfaction with how things are is damnation.
Let us express all that we want to express in our own way, alone or grouped with our friends. Let us sing in choirs if we feel like it. Let us walk in procession or demonstration, if it suits us. Let us work in quality circles, if they help the Goddess. Let us form covens or churches, if we gain strength by it. But let us remember that the Goddess wants us to help her, and that is our purpose. She is not there to do more for us than she does, which is everything. Ask not what the Goddess can do for you, ask what you can do for her.
So, let us pray, if we want to, but realize that it will bring us natural internal strength, not supernatural strength from an otherworldly being. Let us make shrines to the Goddess, not to give her presents as if she were a greedy child but to celebrate her wonder and beauty together, and thereby strengthen our mutual regard for her. Let us paint pictures celebrating her and write poems too. Let us write plays about her, and, yes, let her be personified in them, so long as we remember it is poetic licence. Let us discover the faults of ancient religious thinking and the the means whereby Nature presents herself to us, so that we can improve our relationship with her, and secure the future of our children. Let us educate our children about her, and set up work groups to solve our problems without disturbing her.
Finding the Goddess
Finding the Goddess is the beginning of service. Not service in the sense of ritual service to gain divine favours, but service to show that we can help the Goddess practically, and in so doing make the world better. It is not an escape from life but an engagement in life to some useful purpose. We must accept our responsibility and do our duty. If we have been wise and diligent then we can, in later years, see the product of our labours. The garden will be prolific and yet beautiful. If we fail it might be bare and ugly or beautiful, perhaps, but not prolific. Out aim must be beauty with variety at all levels.
For those who believe in Christ, consider Spinoza who thought that Christ was the supreme wisdom manifested in all things, and particularly in the human mind, for us. Christ is thus the ultimate knowledge of Nature, through which we can appreciate our place and our role within her. Christ is rational intuition, an instinct to do what is right for the Goddess, his mother, but only when confirmed in fact, meaning in his mother’s reality. Christ crucified is true wisdom crucified in the name of a supposed superior wisdom, the fantasies of the propagators of the patriarchal god. Christ crucified is Prometheus Lost. Adelphiasophism is Prometheus Regained.
God is a figment, and the Goddess has already given us, through evolution, the means to meet problems. The goddess is generous, not jealous—the antithesis of invented god who “will have none other gods but Me.” A cry to the goddess is not answered by any spirit on angel’s wings but by the support and sympathy of her own kinunity which surrounds us all. By faith in God we disbelieved and denied the Goddess. Never more shall we return to those who gather under the cross. No true god offers us a picture of torture to worship. We shall venerate what encompasses us, what made us and what will consume us—the Goddess Nature. What we have to do is use what we have for the good of the Goddess and her kinunity. That is our purpose in life, and once we have realized it, our own problems fade. There are more important things to do than to worry about our immediate selves. Will the world be all right for the next generation?
