Abstract

Unless all existence is a medium of Revelation, no Revelation is possible.

Archbishop Temple

© 1998 The Adelphiasophists and AskWhy! Publications. Freely distribute as long as it is unaltered and properly attributed
Contents Updated: Sunday, December 05, 1999; Sunday, 3 July 2011

What is Spirituality?

What is spirituality? It is a word often used and rarely understood. For most people, it is synonym for religion. The bishops often tell us that the problem of today is our lack of spirituality. They mean we are not religious enough.

The word “spirit” is a word hijacked by the world’s supernatural religions to mean “something (undefined in practice) supernatural.” It comes from the Latin “spiritus,” through the “pneuma” of the “New Testament” from the “ruach” of the Jewish scriptures. All of them mean “breath,” the breath of life, and so came to be identified with the principle of life—supposedly the supernatural soul. The only principle of life in the real world is Nature, the womb of life.

Spirituality is sensed when we sense the breath-taking wonder and beauty of the kinunity of life in Nature. This is the only true spirituality, though anyone who aspires to enhance natural spirituality can justifiably claim to be a spiritual person. All of the connotations we have from the patriarchal religions are false and should be forgotten.

Robert Graves identified spirituality with the “Baraka” of the Moslems, a sense of blessedness that attaches itself to things through association with life over time. We sense it also in Nature even where the life is not necessarily human. Old buildings and objects often have it. Perhaps it is the reason for the English ideal of an old country cottage as the ideal home—small, higgledy-piggledy, of irregular angle but warm with the “Baraka” of many generations of people that have lived there. In the same way, a child used to playing with a bunch of rags and a shoebox will reject the fancy modern doll given as a present by an aunt—it has no Baraka, though it looks a wonderful object.

Mass produced objects, even with mass produced differences, have no character or life in them until they become so old and rare as to be antiques in a later age. Graves realized that science was not to blame for this because, like everything else today, it was subject to the Great God, Mammon, which exploits science for the benefit of the Archons of the modern world—the international financiers and transnational corporations that can cock a snook even at governments.

To Xanadu via Cavafy

On setting off to go to Xanadu,
Ardently pray the voyage will be long,
That joy not grief will escort you,
And sages rich in knowledge be your friends.

Caste off the angry fates that wish you ill,
They come with you—you bear them in your soul;
Nor with impatience rush to reach the end…
Though winter winds chase over desert sands,
Though autumn leaves flutter along the quay,
Though days grow short and age kisses your brow

…For Xanadu is ever far away…

And yet the vessel drops you there at last,
The journey ends. You have arrived
With riches that you earned en route,
And now you know just why you came…

But tarry not, say, “Farewell”, Xanadu,
There’s yet a longer journey facing you.

The Meaning of the Spiritual

Mark Vernon is a journalist with an interesting website about science, religion and human sociabilility, which has in it a test called the “spiritual intelligence test”, bizarrely called the SQ test, not the SIQ test, leaving you wondering where the “intelligence”, the “I”, went!

IQ is the abbreviation for intelligence quotient, because it is the mental age divided by the actual age, and so shows whether anyone is ahead or behind the average in mental or intellectual development. It was meant as an educational aid, for testing people as they developed, and so becomes a fixed value in adults simply showing whether they are above or below average intelligence. The SQ or SIQ test is not a quotient, and so there is no need for the Q at all, and it seems to be meant simply to draw attention to the supposed parallel with IQ.

When you have done the test, you discover that it is really a test of humility, the scores of 0-100 apparently being on a scale from humble to overweening arrogance. My own score, answered as honestly as possible, which meant several answers could not be given because none of the three choices were adequate, was 45. Answering them all in what I thought was an obsessively scientific way gave me a score of 52, and answering in the way I thought religious believers would answer gave me a score of 72. Doubtless, it is all meant as a bit of fun, and not seriously, but such bits of fun have a way of being taken seriously by half the population, probably the half with IQs below 100.

Whether that is so or not, it is true that a large number of people think that spiritual is a meaningful word, and Mark Vernon seems to be among them. It is a word that everyone wants to use, largely to show their anti-reductionist credentials, but few can agree upon when it comes to discussing meaning. A definition from a dictionary has it that spiritual means pertaining to the human spirit as opposed to the material or physical. So, it seems to be equivalent to imaginary, for what is not material or physical other than thoughts in the mind? It is a certain bet that most religious people would not count spiritual as meaning imaginary. No, religious people, think spiritual things are somehow real, even though they are not physical or material. In other words what is spiritual is somehow supernatural. Spirituality, to the believer, is supernaturality. Those who claim not to be religious but nevertheless believe that spiritual things are real in some such supernatural way are secretly religious.

There is a feeling, often described as awe, not meaning pure fear as it once meant, but a frightening sense of wonder, that people sometimes get and often when they see something entirely wonderful in nature, such as a stunning vista or spectacle, or a wonderful event, such as the birth of a child, a ferocious storm, and so on. The same feeling can come about unexpectedly, when it is called mystical, and is attributed, for no sound reason, as signifying the nearness of God. The feeling is utterly natural, and most people have had it in its milder form. According to surveys, even about a third of people have had the mystical experience itself.

There is absolutely no reason why God or spirituality should be associated with this feeling. It merits attention, certainly, but is much more likely to be the sense of unity suddenly felt of ourselves with the world we live in. Usually, we think purely selfishly. Self is a characteristic which has evolved to help us survive. If we did not have it, we would be much more altruistic if simply because we would realize how unimportant each of us individually is in the vast scheme of things. Self makes us seem more important than anything else, and therefore worth preserving. That is what spirituality is. It is a moment in which the sense of self dissolves leaving us knowing how wonderful the totality of Nature is. It is related in a sense to schizophrenia, when the self breaks down pathologically leaving us unable to even function as ourselves!

In a temporary, or better still, if it is possibile, in a controlled, way it is a marvellous feeling that makes us appreciate God in the purely Einsteinian sense of the wonder of Nature. We are truly humbled before this purely natural interpretation of the divine. The opposite is to put yourself, or your beliefs, which are simply part of yourself, before it. Spirituality, then is the sense humans have of kinunity. The whole world is kin. That being so, the spiritual person is the one who does least to harm the world we live in. It is the basis of Adelphiasophism. To harm it is to harm ourselves.

Spirituality

Thomas Berry, who is the author of the United Nations’ World Charter for Nature, is a priest who thinks Christianity is compatible with veneration of Nature and the natural. He is admittedly more honest about the problems of Christianity in this than many others:

It’s not bad people who are ruining the earth. It’s good people, and when I talk about good people, I’m including the total religious, humanistic tradition of the Western World!

Thomas Berry

Christianity, he notes, is focused on redemption, so, most of Christianity today is alien to the earth process. Being a Christian has to do with the “Christ reality” and this is thought to have nothing to do with the earth, but he still thinks traditional Christian attitudes offer “promise for healing the earth.”

In a theocentric and self-centric world, what is left out is the natural or biological world, the background against which everything takes place, but seen as spiritually irrelevant. He thinks the anti-earth bias of Christianity stems from the Black Death when people thought God had abandoned or even cursed the world. It seems to be an attempt to make out it was a late development in Christianity, from a particular and peculiar set of circumstances, and not therefore fundamental. It is however fundamental, and is the very reason why Christianity was not trusted for 300 years by the Romans. Christianity was based on the idea of the world being transient and not having long to last.

Christians have tried to make a universal morality out of the instructions of a leader who thought the world was about to end for anyone who was not righteous. Right conduct is not therefore commended by Jesus to his converts for its own sake or even because it was the wish of God, as he doubtless believed, but to get the reward of acceptance into God’s kingdom, or perhaps avoiding hell fire for some.

The central tenets of the ethics of Jesus were:

1. Believe in the coming kingdom that will be open only to those that love this particular God.
2. Repent, be baptised and remain righteous, for by doing so you show that you love God.
3. Be pure of heart, so that there will be no temptation into unrighteousness that might mean exclusion from God’s kingdom.
4. Love your fellow Jew. The idea of turning the other cheek is to prevent escalation of incidents between Jews, so that they would not fight among themselves. It did not include non-Jews.
5. Be humble, the practice of the Essenes recommended to Jesus’s followers again to keep them from getting vaunted ideas that might cause dissent.

Belief cannot be said to be morally wrong in iself, but but to hold a belief or beliefs on no basis at all or on some basis other than truth or likelihood is morally wrong. Christianity urges people just to belief—to have faith. That is morally wrong. From this Christian preaching, millions have expunged proper elements of doubt from their minds for fear of seeming weak before God, and have conditioned themselves through a form of Couéism.

We are creatures of earth, and our bonds to the earth are a much more direct experience of the divine than any disembodied system of belief. Our beliefs are part of the problem. The history of ideas has left Westerners with an anti-Nature and anti-body bias.

Berry explains that, in addition to the often anti-earth attitudes we have inherited from the past, Christian traditions offer positive models. He considers various compromises, but nowhere does he address the point that Christianity fundamentally disdains the earth. It is an eschatological religion. It looks forward to the Judgement Day when the Good will live forever while the wicked get boiled in sulphur. Yet, because S Paul said that everything was in Christ, Berry wants us to believe that Nature is a cosmic person—namely Christ.

The spiritual is often thought of as that which is beyond the range of common perception. It is where we cannot use our normal senses. If this is what it is, it is like the patriarchal hidden God. It too is hidden from our senses. That means that, as far as we are concerned, it does not exist. It might exist in truth but, being beyond our senses means we can never know about it.

A better idea might be that the spiritual is the realm of the mysterious, of beliefs and experiences at the edge of our understanding. This ties it in fully with the Adelphiasophist idea of the Goddess. Nature is partly known, partly beyond our knowledge as yet and perhaps mostly never ever likely to be within our knowledge.

Rosemary Radford Ruether also sees the work of ecojustice and of spirituality as linked. In her book, “Gaia & God: An Ecofeminist Theology of Earth Healing,” Ruether explores the relationship between the living planet, earth, and our Western religious traditions.

Gaia is the Greek earth goddess, and a name adopted by James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis for the earth in their thesis that the entire planet is a living system behaving as a unified organism. The Jewish and Christian male monotheistic God is a destructive concept that rationalizes alienation from and neglect of the earth, but Gaia, as an immanent divinity, is the all-nurturing earth mother goddess.

Replacing a transcendent male deity with a female one does not answer the “god-problem,” Reuther, rather obviously, says, telling us what we do need:

A healed relation to each other and to the earth calls for a new consciousness, a new symbolic culture and spirituality. We need to transform our inner psyches and the way we symbolize the interrelations of men and women, humans and earth, humans and the divine, the divine and the earth.

Gaia and God is a sweeping ecofeminist theology that argues for healing relationships between men and women, classes and nations, and humans and the earth. What we need is a book on how to do it. It will have to shelve Christianity first. If human beings have an innate, biologically-based connexion to Nature, then the nonsensical disregard of the natural world by otherworldliness must be properly seen as suicidal.

The sociobiologist, E O Wilson, writes that humans have an innate connexion to the natural world, and our continued divorce from it has led to the loss of not only “a vast intellectual legacy born of intimacy” with Nature but also our very sanity. It seems stupid that such a hypothesis needs stating. How can any creature of Nature not have an innate biologically-based connexion with Nature? It cannot, and Wilson’s hypothesis is not actually so simplistic. Wilson’s “biophilia” hypothesis declares our affinity for the natural world as a biological need, integral to our development as individuals and as a species. It is unnatural for us to be divorced from Nature and live in spaceship-like homes in concrete cities. So, “biophilia” is not merely an innate connexion—that is obvious—it is also the spiritual “need” for it.

Modern males seem to have have an innate affinity for golf courses. Human males evidently prefer a landscape with grassy parklands, intermittent trees, lakes and streams, high points offering vistas, and enough cover not be seen. Anthropologists think this reflects an inborn affinity for the grasslands of East Africa where humans differentiated from other apes. Golf courses simulate that environment. The point though is that any natural creature will love its natural environment, and humans are no different. It is an example of biophilia.

Humanity’s dependence on the physical world is plain in our dependence on Nature for the tools of survival—everything from clothing to fossil fuel—but is there also a deeper, less obvious role that Nature plays in our lives? In “Kinship to Mastery: Biophilia in Human Evolution and Development,” Stephen R Kellert posits that our abilities to emotionally bond, to create, imagine, or even simply recognize our existence as purposeful all stem from our relationships with the world around us. Our physical, emotional, and spiritual well-being depends on the natural world. The environment’s degradation could therefore have more disastrous effects than we realize, and we might not even be able to live in a spaceship wiorld as sane creatures.

Kellert makes a good case for natural settings as critical to our mental and physical well being. “The Biophilia Hypothesis,” edited by Kellert and Wilson, brings together the views of some of the most creative scientists of our time, each attempting to amplify and refine the concept of biophilia. But the book says little about biophobia though it is the present danger we face. Today’s scientists offer a variety of perspectives on people’s preference for trees that are climbable, fears of snakes and spiders as opposed to a lack of fear of guns, cars, synthetic food and nuclear energy. The Adelphiasophist thesis is that the absence of biophilia is necrophilia, which manifests itself in an obsession with mechanical things and the synthetic as opposed to the natural. These synthetic and mechanical objects of love are a major cause of our acceptance of the exploitation of Nature’s resources.

The earth, with its fragile living skin, is more than just a resource. The awe inspired by Nature is the true source of the feeling of the spiritual. It is simply amazing, from the hesitant motion of the smallest bacterium to the churning of the magma that moves continents. How a mere construct of the human imagination can be thought greter is a problem for psychiatrists, but as long as it is, there is little hope for the true divinity in our lives.

Christianity fought for centuries to suppress the natural religions of Europe, and finished up leaving us with the self-centred, other-worldly religion we have today. Any attempt to urge the importance of venerating Nature is condemned by Christians as Pagan or even Satanic. As Robert Gilman says, the tradition of S Francis, who could sing to Brother Sun and Sister Moon, is forgotten or denied.

To reclaim “spirituality,” we must remove its centuries-old supernatural veil, and refute the concomitant falseness of a division between spirit and body. “spiritus” means “breath,” without which nothing lives. Breath and therefore spirit mean life. When someone dies, the spirit departs and so does the breath. By calling breath spirit and pretending it is something supernatural, patriarchal religons have led us into necrophilia—a love of death, or rather a supposed life after death.

Spirit is no feeble ghost that leaves us at death. It is the link that unites us with our children and the trees and beasts. It is Nature’s kinunity, her thread of life that joins us all and makes us draw breath in turn. Appreciating this is what makes us have spiritual experiences, the sense of wonder at it all. Mescaline, acid or sainthood are not needed to experience it. Simply the openness to experience how wonderful it is. Nature, the Goddess, the living cosmos which we are privileged to sense on her behalf. Must we destroy it out of hubris?

People have been tied not to experiences of the divine, or the awesome wonder of creation, but to a way of thinking characterized by a yearning to escape “ordinary” reality for some promise of paradise. What we really need is a spiritual practice which brings us into a greater intimacy with Nature.

I am personally skeptical about many aspects of revealed religion, but I am sure of the awe and reverence that the meticulously balanced Nature of the global environment elicits in me.

Carl Sagan

Religions have a social form and a moral imperative. Most people think religion is its outer form, its traditions, rituals and practices. The moral imperative of religion is its insistence on such as respect for life, compassion, contentment, forgiveness and peace among its followers. It is these moral attitudes required of religion that people often think of as spiritual.

Communism will not be considered as a “spiritual” movement by most people, but Marxism-Leninism, with its radical view of equality and sharing, springs directly out of the Judæo-Christian social tradition, though both parent and child usually deny it. Marxism-Leninism was striving towards a remade humanity that would be concerned only about the good of the whole, that would have transcended selfishness in favour of altrusim.

Many would think that was a Christian objective, but Christianity has been so desperate to be all things to all men that it has sloughed off skin after skin until it now remains so bald of virtue that it teaches the spiritual value of poverty while condoning the most outrageous greed. Many Christians are poseurs who seek to follow their religion’s social forms while satisfying each other of their right to belong within their own petty sect. Some proselytize on this same basis of a localized morality of loving God, proved by their adherence to their form of worship, and each other. They bind to their religion’s material and social form while frowning on others, and conflict is inevitable. Morality ceases to be universal, loses its vitality and religion again divides human beings into warring groups. History abounds with it, leading to violence, misery, and destruction of human lives.

Nature-Centered Spirituality

Grazers are not the enemy of the grass just as wolves are not the enemy of caribou. No predator seeks to eliminate its source of food. Only modern humans are enemies of their resources.

Wilbur Wood

When they kill a thousand year old tree they also kill the environment beneath it, and that can’t be put back by the smartest person on Earth. So when I die, best I go back where I came from, back in the ground. As I rots I push up new vegetation for animals to eat, and that way I replenish, just like everything else.

Ken Cooper, Indian

If Americans do not get back to true Native Americans spirituality—not religion, spirituality—the world is doomed. We are destroying the world, not only politically and socially, but as religions. We have these written religions, and walk those words on paper, but we are destroying the world in the process. The Indians walked their spirituality in daily life—they lived it in ceremonies and in everything they did.

Ken Cooper, Indian

Native American religious traditions express a relationship to nature that is very positive—it is a Nature-Centered Spirituality, found in religious traditions worldwide.

Spirituality is that personal experience people sometimes have and believe to be religious but which is independent of religious institutions or theology. It is an awe attributed to a glimpse of the face of God but which is really a glimpse of the wonder of Nature and our place in it. When, in a state of extended spirituality or mysticism, people imagine a dialogue with God, they are really experiencing the awareness of the Goddess within themselves.

Just as a caterpillar eats the leaves of a specific plant, so that its body essentially is that plant, yet it can see the rest of the tree before it, so we humans can experience Nature beyond ourselves and within ourselves.

By a sad quirk of history people have been misled to believe that all such experiences are mystical or spiritual experiences of an imaginery God rather than the expression of Nature within us. Some Christians have become or are gradually becoming aware of this great error but are unable to correct it because they are too dependent on their illusion of God. Instead they try to deify Nature as an embodiment of God and say that God is “immanent” in Nature.

Why continue and extend the error? God depends upon Nature. He is an invention of one of Nature’s creatures. Adelphiasophists say: “Forget the illusion and look at the reality!”

Science, Spirituality and Psi

What is it about scientific “truths” that entitles us to consider them as true? One thing is the overall consistency of a large and complex body of scientific knowledge. An illustration is that when a well-corroborated theory implies that a phenomenon will never occur, it will, indeed, not happen. The scientist can say with confidence that no engine will run without the input of energy.

The problem is that the history of science reveals “laws” that appeared at one time to be universally obeyed but which later were found to have exceptions. All of chemistry appeared to confirm the law that elements could not be transmuted, while the physics of the past seemed to imply that space and time were absolute. The moral to be drawn is that no matter how coherent a scientific system may be, there is no guarantee that facts that are inconsistent with it will not emerge in the future.

Some critics of science, hoping to be destructive, like Christian Creationists, say that what is not true is false, and denigrate science for doing its job of testing the limits of knowledge. Of course, what is not true, is not necessarily false. In the real world, truth has bounds. Newtonian mechanics are true in the world at the speed at which we live. There is no need for even Concord pilots to make adjustments of time for relativistic effects, even though they must happen. They are negligible even at supersonic speed. Relativistic equations are true at both normal speeds and speeds approaching light’s speed, but it is a waste of effort to apply them when the difference they make to ordiary Newtonian calculations is minute. So, here the critic can say with strict correctness that Newtonian mechanics is false and Einsteinian mechanics is true. But the difference is too small to measure. Is then Newton really wrong at all? He formulated his laws of mechanics under certain conditions. Scientific truths are bounded by limits. So Newton’s laws are “approximations” to the truth. Scientists speak of degrees of approximation, but approximation means nearness, not wrongness. That is often what people cannot understand.

Does science makes progress and approach the truth over the course of time? Kuhn says that science does not move towards anything such as truth, but simply evolves, while Shimony uses the analogy of deciphering of a coded text and the problem of understanding nature to argue that science could not progress without there being some unambiguous truth that this progress was being made towards. That is the Adelphiasophist view.

Critics ask, if a society continually makes progress, must there be some unique perfect society that is the limit of this progress, or if we have an ascending sequence of integers must there be some integer that is the limit of that sequence? It is these so-called analogies that are really at fault, not Shimony’s original one. A sequence of numbers is ascending but how is that progressing? In evaluating the regularity of the number sequence, mathematicians might be enabling mathematics to progress but the progression of a sequence of numbers is a different use of the word “to progress.” It is merely a sequence with no implication of improvement.

In the case of a society, there is improvement but it is judged by comparison with the past not because there is any such thing as a “true” society. Not that the legislators of the society do not necessarily have in their own heads an ideal that the aimed to bring about in reality. Whatever they thought of was an ideal not real.

In science, our view is that there is something really in the world and we are part of it. Shimony’s analogy is about as good a one as it is possible to get. Unlike the society or the sequence of numbers, science has to be matched against what is there in the world—the underlying code has to relate to reality. The code might ultimately be undecipherable, but just as mathematicians can arrive at immensely difficult proofs once the discoveries of mathematical relationships have been made that were needed as its elements, so science can get closer to the truth of our existence. If we do not get there, we have still found out a large number of true relationships that have helped us in our understanding.

So, science is an endeavour to construct reality—something independent of the scientist that underlies the outcome of such endeavours. The objection is to this is that reality is too big to be seen in its entirety, and all we can ever get is an aspect of it. Yet, if I stand on a mountain, I see things that have an existence independent of myself, even though what it is possible for me to see depends on where I stand.

There is no point in speculating about where the boundaries of science are. When we meet them, science will not be able to progress and then we shall have to begin hypothesising that we have reached the limits. The methods of science, such as making experiment rather then theory the ultimate arbiter of the truth, leave less room for personal opinion to determine what is correct than is the case in some other disciplines.

Is there a basis for us to understand, within the framework of conventional science, phenomena such as telepathy and psychokinesis that involve direct contact at a distance? Brian Josephson of cambridge University thinks there is.

While the non-local correlations found in Einstein, Podolsky and Rosen (EPR-type) systems might provide a scientifically valid basis for such direct contact, particularly for the case of telepathy which has many features that parallel those of EPR-type correlations, calculations using the formal apparatus of quantum theory suggest that such connections will be purely random and unusable.

The method of science demands reproducibility and universality by replacing strict determinism by “statistical determinism.” This yields quantum mechanics. But other strategies can approximate universal determinism in different cases. The method favoured by life renounces universal knowledge for specialised and purposeful adaptations to the situations of life. Thus, people learn the language of their society, not language in general.

The approximation of life specifies meaning as opposed to the statisticss of science. Meaning seeks the achievement of goals. Josephson says averaging transforms the meaningful into the meaningless. There is no meaning of a word averaged over all languages. The perception and understanding of living organisms cannot be formally specified like quantum measurement theory. Not all investigable phenomena are defined according to quantum measurement theory. Quantum formalism does not apply in any obvious way to natural phenomena like life, and applying quantum mechanics to natural situations cannot be justified.

From the different perceptual and interpretative processes characteristic of life compared with those of science, living organisms can possess knowledge that can be more detailed than the knowledge specified by quantum theory. Available quantum distributions for the creature are focused on its specific goals. Such focused behaviour in living organisms is typified by the activities of a tightrope walker, or of a darts player. Statistically, the tightrope walker would be in the river and the darts player would have a random distribution of darts throughout his environment, including the spectators’ heads!

Efficient focusing arises naturally in time through random learning during the developmental process. In relation to psi functioning, the relevant probability distributions are also focused in relation to goals, in a way that may become more effective over time as development through learning takes place.

We respect Josephson for his discoveries in physics, but what does all of this mean in practice? It sounds as though he might be saying something, but we are not sure. Until he can formulate a hypothesis that can be tested from these speculations, we have to conclude that it is New Age guff.

There are plenty of people today, mainly New Agers, who think something meaningless is profound. In connexion with ancient mysticism, we can read from the pen of an enthusiast for it, Arthur Waite, “the less sense any passage has in itself, the more important it becomes.”

People like Dee Berry, who was a Green Co-ordinator, mean well but take empty nostrums seriously. She knows that spirit means breath and therefore is a synonym for life but prefers to call it “an energy” that is “always there though we are not aware of it.” She is probably speaking of kinunity but cannot analyse the concept correctly, so calls it energy.

Yet, it seems churlish to criticise her for this fad because she is spot on when she says:

In giving our spirit over to patriarchal powers, we also projected our dark side onto “others,” thereby justifying our violent and aggressive behaviors. Without our spiritual grounding, we were easily manipulated by those who claimed to have access to a higher authority.

The best that can be said of New Age nonsense is that it has grains of truth, but is mainly childish wish fulfilment, and self-delusion. Write “Spirit will empower us, because spirit is inner power,” and somehow it must be so. Certainly there is psychological conviction to be drawn upon in this way, but it is only metaphorically “energy” or “power.” Whether such expressions are meant metaphorically or literally, is anyone’s guess. New Agers seem to believe it just as the Clappies do—they are essentially the same. Believers.

The “healing powers of the spirit, that allow us to heal ourselves and our planet, reconnect our lives and our communities” simply will not. What will do it is a lot of conviction, a lot of organization and a lot of self-sacrifice. Somewhere among it is the power of the psyche, that will also be needed but spirituality is psychological magic not literal magic, whatever they try to persuade themselves, and it will be achieved by direct action, if necessary, to stop trees from being chopped and mountains from being ’dozed. A sense of kinunity does not heal of itself, but it can help us heal ourselves, and the world. It still requires effort. Dee Berry says, “With spirit will come humility to honor that which we do not understand,” and in this too she is surely right.

And she is right to point out dangers, but dangers can be overemphasised when we are trying to encourage uncertain people to take hesitant steps to a better world. She emphasises the need for understanding and particularly understanding that to relish life is to accept death.

Science and Religion

How do the scientific and religious approaches to discovering “Truth” relate? Some say they are mutually exclusive, some say complimentary and some say they are overlapping.

Religion came on to the scene first and so long ago that we can only guess at how it arose. However that might have been, religion came to be a way of explaining what was puzzling in the world. It therefore was a form of primitive science. One can deduce from this that religion and science are trying to do the same job. Why then do they seem to be incompatible or in conflict?

It is simple. Religions have tried to fossilize ancient explanations on the grounds that they must be correct because they were revealed by God. For unsophisticated societies, an explanation only needed to be adequate and authoritative. Whatever priests and medicine men decided they claimed had been revealed to them by God. The punters were quite happy about the explanation and went away until it was contradicted by experience, when the priests would come up with an alternative explanation or an excuse. Today science makes progress in the same sort of way, refining its explanations or coming up with better ones as the need arises. Science can therefore be seen to be modern religion.

Religion itself is not modern. What is fossilized is extremely ancient and the only reasons it survives in this fossilized way are (1) that powerful people called priests claim they have knowledge that scientists do not have, and (2) people have been fooled into believing that they can get supernatural privileges by attending to the welfare of the priests. The conflict between science and religion has arisen in short because the purveyors of religion refuse to let go of their perks in society and their acolyties are so scared they might be right that they will not risk evicting them. Thus the two views are not exclusive at root but have become exclusive because of the preachers and priests.

An example of religious fossilization is the creation stories in Genesis. There are two of them that are themselves inconsistent, and neither is compatible with what science has discovered without the help of revelation. It is sad that most of the Christian followers of the priesthood are so ignorant of the scriptures that they do not even know that Genesis “has” two separate creation accounts.

It is quite impossible for anyone to engage in dialogue when one of the sides is willfully ignorant, yet that is what Christianity is. A similar problem arises when Christians make reference to supernatural entities. Science can find no evidence for the supernatural. Scientific materialist explanations preclude supernatural explanations involving invisible, immaterial beings like angels and God.

Some religious people have tried to maintain a position for religion by claiming it asks questions about different things from science—both have their place and there should be no conflict. Science asks questions about the natural world, whereas religion asks questions about God and about such things as evil, life after death and reincarnation. They also say the two use different methods of inquiry. Science uses hypothetico-deduction, experimentation and analytical reasoning, whereas religion claims divine revelation and subsequent interpretation guided by supernatural means.

This is a way of trying to sidestep scientific discoveries. There is no evidence for anything supernatural and there is no evidence for supernatural revelation. Both are illusions perpetuated by those who stand to gain by having a lot of gullible people filling their collection boxes or making donations to them in memory of dead spouses. In a law-abiding world, it would be declared fraudulent, but because it comes with a long testimonial, it is accepted by everyone.

To rediscover a proper religion based in reality, people must abandon the old priestly confidence tricks and return to the spirituality of Nature where it all began. The new nature-centred religion that emerges will approach questions about the natural world and about the divine in compatible ways. The divine will be seen as the awesome wonder of Nature itself, revealed to us by our own efforts using the tools that the Goddess has provided for us. Religion and science will then pose the same fundamental questions about reality, and use the same methods to try to answer them.

If people feel they are missing something mysterious that supernatural religions gave them then they are not looking at the world. They have been drugged with supernatural soma and, just as some youths get hooked on video games and some adults on gambling, they have become hooked on a surrogate reality in their heads. They must examine their own perceptions and realize that they can continue to eat junk in a den of addicts of the supernatural or they can come out and breathe the freah air of the real Natural world with real, not imaginary, wonders.

Welcome Back Christianity!

Can one believe something that is untrue? Well, Christians do, but they would say it is true, as far as they are concerned. And since proving negatives is never a fruitful task, we have to just leave them to it. What though if someone uses a justification for their belief that is accepted as false? Can it still be believed?

Many of our planetary myths and legends draw our attention to the 26,000 year zodiacal cycle of our solar system’s orbit around the Galaxy centre. We are now in the last days of our 26,000 year orbit, coming out of a long dark age that the Hindu’s call the ’Kali Juga’. The famous Mayan calendar and calendric system of the Great Pyramid mark the year 2012 (on our calendar) as the end of the grand 26,000 year cycle.

The writer of this tells us that the explosion in knowledge in the last hundred years is proof of this. But in truth the solar system orbits the galaxy a thousand times slower than this worthy thinks. If he really was waiting for the completion of this latest cycle, he might have to wait a long time. Mind you, a cycle can start anywhere you choose, so from where he started, it is conveniently about to end—and this man wants to persuade others that it matters.

There are barmier people among the NeoPagan community than among the Christians, and people turning to paganism ought to take care. Our Pagan guru tells us that 144 is the harmonic value of light—quite meaningless nonsense, and since he is refering to the biblical book of revelation, it is more likely to be 12 squared, or an Israel of Israels.

Anyway, our man goes on to tell us that the end of this galactic cycle is when the Gods of Light will return, fulfilling many ancient prophecies and explaining alien sightings, abductions and UFOs. If they land and offer us wonderful technologies, they are just offering us beads like colonialists to the natives. We must refuse and reply with the ancient vibrations prescribed of old!

Welcome back Christianity!

Wicce

Wicce (Witchcraft) is a Neo-Pagan religion that takes its inspiration from pre-Christian and prehistoric earth religions. “Craft,” which now means a manual skill, in Anglo-Saxon used to mean “knowledge “ or “wisdom.” Of course, at that time much knowledge was the knowledge of skills, of how to do things, whence our reduced meaning of “craft” today. Its original meaning still shines through in our adjective, now slightly pejorative, “crafty.”

Witchcraft was a particular kind of knowledge or wisdom. Indeed though a witch already had magical powers in Saxon times, witchcraft might have meant originally nothing more than the Greek word, “economy,” the knowledge of household or village management, and the practicer of witchcraft was the head of the Pagan house or village.

Wicce refutes the supposed authority given by the Hebrew God to humans to steward the earth. We have no God given right to exploit it for our own gain. If we exploit the earth, it is because we have unwisely chosen to do it, and the earth will have her revenge.

Wicce is adoration of Nature and its web of interrelations nowadays called ecology. This web is not merely metaphorical. It is a sort of umbilical cord that links the whole of creation and gives rise to the feeling of spirituality that pervades Nature. Spirituality does not mean that tenuous creatures called “spirits” exist in the world, or the spaces between, but that everyone can sense a feeling of unity with Nature (“kinunity”) in certain circumstances and moods. It is an experience of mysticism.

Wicce personifies the living principles of Nature and the whole of Nature herself as a Goddess because the world is seen as a womb, a procreative thing. And, because the Goddess pervades everything, she resides within us as well as outside. By using what today are recognized as psychological techniques involving drumming, prayer, chanting, spells, wands, candles, chiaroscuro effects, incense, meditation and imagination, witches will draw upon their psychological powers and those of their subjects to effect cures and changes. This practice is called “magick” (usually spelled in this old-fashioned way to distinguish it from stage illusions).

Until Christianity came along, women were the keepers of traditional spiritual wisdom, midwives and organizers of fertility festivals. Christianity denigrated the skill of witches at these psychological arts and witches finished up with a bad name, though it has to be admitted that people were scared of these powers anyway, which is why the original witches had their authority. In superstitious times, the witch’s powers were seen as supernatural when they were perfectly natural, and quite modern skills. But the Catholic Church said they were the power of the devil.

From the 15th to the 17th century, witches in Europe were persecuted, and today many children’s stories continue to denigrate women, having a witch as a villain. Feminist Margo Adler says these witches were women ’at the edge of social change,’ and over 300 years, the Church burned so many of them at the stake that it amounted to a holocaust of women. Scholars think that 200,000 witches were killed, and the true figure could have been much higher, though the millions often cited is an exaggeration that forgets the lower population of Europe in those times. Trier in Germany, on the banks of Moselle River near the border with France and Luxembourg, was a centre of witch burning. Christians complain when the Church is shown as it was in history—wicked, patriarchal, misogynist—yet it took the Church fully 200 hundred years of terror and death to transform the image of paganism into devil worship, and folk culture into heresy. Women have genuine grievances with the Church.

Wiccans never had anything to do with the devil, an alien concept introduced by the Church from Judaism, and which Judaism got from the Persian religion. The old Northen European religions had a Horned god, and the Church pointed to him and said, “There’s the Devil!” Whence the traditional portrayal of the devil as a man with horns.

Wiccans respect the right of everyone to worship in their own way. They do not feel that Wicca is the only way—it is their way. If Wicce is returning today, perhaps it should return as it was originally—the proper management of everyday things in a Natural way. The modern witch would be those who best defend natural farming, crafts and natural reverence, as the used to.

Adelphiasophist admire much about Wicca but reject all gods as superfluous elaborations of the original worship of the Great Mother. Gods are inventions of the human mind. The Great Mother is Nature itself.

Earth People

The Adelphiasophist, the earth mother, the witch, the carer—each is easily recognized by her empathy, her understanding and her identity with the Goddess—the manifestation and the powers of Nature. (I use the feminine gender, not because men cannot feel the same way but because the qualities are quintessentially female. Understand those men who are able too.) She therefore understands you and sympathizes with you. Merely speak to her and the look in her eyes touches the weakness in your being and adds her strength in its support. Her face tells you she feels it, for she will looked tired, drained, careworn, but undaunted. She knows that the Goddess is cruel as well as kind, and is able to weigh the two opposites in the balance. She is not just listening to you but is comprehending you, probing you, searching you, healing you. And all she is doing is hearing you. She needs no magical instruments to restore your confidence and self-belief, but she will use acts and symbols because they help you in focusing your attention and interpreting your subconscious thoughts, thus solving problems, overcoming blocks and stimulating creativity. She heals your soul, meaning your psyche, not some supernatural spirit but the multifarious facets that interact to constitute your personality—You!—and your place in the cosmos. Her power is not simply “love” as Christians pretend, though it can be called that in shorthand. It is the love of caring and kindness, not lust or merely possession; it is warmth, a diffuse identity or relationship, a kinunity—”all for one and one for all,” as Dumas put it gallantly; or to be all one must be absorbed in all. The sense of “hurt someone, some thing, and you hurt me.” She feels it. You know. Her self is your self, is the self of the whole of Nature—Not just the whole of humanity but the whole of Nature! Learn it!

Native Indian Nature Spirituality

John Mohawk, Professor of Indian Studies at the State University of New York, and a Seneca Indian himself says in “Resurgence,” attention to Nature is a spiritual seeking for North American Indians. The world-view that Indian people live by is spiritual. Our attention to the creation is our spiritual seeking of it.

Nature informs us and it is our obligation to read Nature as you would a book, to feel Nature as you would a poem, to touch Nature as you would yourself, to be a part of that and step into its cycles as much as you can.

To get in step and be in harmony with Nature, not only her time and space but her biology, is our task. Get out of touch with that which synchronizes life for us and human life would end.

Celebrating the reality of the creation builds the human spirit. When we think about the beauty of Nature, it stirs our spirit to want to enhance that beauty, to celebrate it.

The Western God is an anthropomorphic being, and male at that, who presides over some kind of kingdom somewhere. In the native tradition the Creator is not a person, but might be time, space, energy and all of those—it is everything there is. It could be our dream. It is because we don’t know what it is that we ought to be humble about it. And we ought to be humble because we are the tiniest little speck, and the universe is infinite.

In the Western tradition God gave humans authority over Nature as a wild thing to be tamed. People fear Nature and try to subdue it, and people who are afraid of Nature have much more difficulty defending it than people who are not. Negative emotions give you cause to enact violence on Nature.

Now you don’t derive ritual out of anxiety, you derive ritual out of experiences. If you have a positive experience, then you celebrate it. My culture’s ceremonies came out of things that happened, some of it a long, long time ago, and we’re still celebrating it.

We celebrate harvest at the place of cultivating food in the garden to join in physical and spiritual unity with the creation. Raising food brings you to a daily experience of seeing life grow, and that’s important. It as an opportunity to celebrate the wonder of life.

Our Indian ceremonies begin with an acknowledgment and greeting to the creation. We thank God for the food on the table, but then who can forget to thank the birds and the trees and the waters and air and earth?

Western relationships to the animal world are not poetic enough. We Indians saw animals as people who live under the forest canopy but differ from us only in running on four legs. If you think of them as anything less, they become disposable. If animals are less precious than us, then they get even less precious, until they’re not precious at all. We Indians also thought of ourselves as animals. That’s why we called ourselves turtles and wolves and bears and deer. We should learn from animals how to live here.

The natural world is our bible. It does not have chapters and verses but instead has animals, trees and fish, and sunsets and sounds, anger and calm, silence and mystery.

Chief Seattle’s Speech in 1854:

Chief Seattle is not Bill Gates, but was the Indian Chief that gave his name to the city of Seattle. He died in 1866. Correspondent Alan Chippendale reports that this speech is bogus, having been composed by a dramatist for an ABC TV drama in 1971. If true, it is a shame about the myth, but the sentiments are no less valid, so we’ll thank the screenwriter—plainly an Adelphiasophist—for their poetic imagination and hope people will continue to immortalise these words.

How To Be A Pagan—Susan Moonshadow

And here, from somewhere on the web but I’ve lost the reference, Susan Moonshadow tells us how to become a Pagan.

• Start by learning who you are.
• Then study ecosystems and your place in them.
• Move on to mythologies and how they explore the relationships of people to each other and Nature.
• Be well versed in history and current events.
• Reuse and recycle and reduce your general consumption.
• View the earth as a living Goddess who will still be alive when you are dead.
• Otherwise ignore gods and concentrate on learning about people.
• Better yet, listen to people and what they have to say.
• Plant a tree; and a garden every year and watch it grow.
• Follow the seasonal changes with deliberation.
• Take up star gazing.
• Take up moon phase watching.
• Don’t stare at the sun.
• Pick up litter.
• Make up your own list. You are just as much a creature of the Goddess as I am.

Evangelize! Australian Witches

An interesting article on witchcraft by Australian witches (Church of Wicca Australia) tells us that:

there are no Wiccan missionaries, evangelists or witnesses, as Wiccan philosophy holds that no one religion is right for everybody, and that all faiths (Christian, Buddhist, Hindu, etc) have their place for those who are truly seeking that Spiritual Oneness with deity no matter what form, name or title, that the Goddess and God may be given. Wicca is not anti-Christian, it is simply non-Christian.

Traditionally this has been true, Pagan religions being tolerant organisations. But Adelphiasophists now think that is naïvety in respect of the worldwide patriarchal religions. Pagans remained tolerant while the Christians cut off their legs after 325 AD (though groups of Pagan worshippers were often more direct in their actions in the face of Christian vandalism than their religious leaders).

We are now at another great turning point in history and it might be the last one for humanity. Believers in the spirituality of Nature cannot stand by in tolerant smugness while Christians continue to pervert natural spirituality, deflect justice and prevent action. They owe it to the Goddess and the web of life on the planet not to be pious about this. Christianity has had 2000 years and they have been 2000 years of continuous strife and planetary destruction. Wiccans as well as other NeoPagans and those of no relgion at all must join in the refutation of Christian spirituality. A spirituality that is purely other worldly and purely selfishly concerned with some imaginary saving cannot be concerned with the world whatever the Matthew Foxs of this world say.

Tolerate those who are tolerant, Australian Witches, but evangelize against those who would see you extinct and the rest of life too!

Natural Spirituality

Thomas Moore, the author of “Care of the Soul, The Re-enchantment of Everyday Life” and “The Soul of Sex,” argues in “Resurgence” that the “dominance of the scientific mythology” must be challenged to safeguard and nurture both the natural world that is our environment and our spiritual lives. This scientific mythology:

…with much superiority and authority shrinks our approach to Nature in a culture obsessed with gathering information. Studying Nature is not our only option. We can also meditate upon it and find there a solid basis for spiritual sensitivity.

Moore is a man who talks a lot of good sense but, as those extracts show, joins in the fashion for denigrating the most successful tool the Goddess has given us for discovering about her. Like many people of his ilk he writes it in a spirit of woolly sentimentality that mimics the pious sentimentality that Christians take to be spirituality.

He seems to call science a mythology to abuse it, as if a mythology is something false. But mythologies are rarely false except in the sense that they are not stories from history. Their truth is in what they mean, not in their correspondence with true facts. Christians do not think their stories about Jesus are mythological, but they are. Some parts of the story might be true history but no one knows which parts. Nevertheless the stories mean something to Christians, if nothing more than that they bond rigidly together into their sects on the basis of which parts of the story they take to mean what and why.

Modern day mythology is otherwise given only to children as fairy stories. They serve the purpose of myths for children in helping them to appreciate moral values. How does science fit into this? It does not because science is not a mythology and anyone who pretends it is, is simply being silly or smug.

Challenging science will safeguard Nature in some way, Moore thinks. He therefore identifies science as the danger to Nature. It is not. Like many people, Moore wants to shoot the messenger. The danger to Nature is the ravaging it gets at the hands of big business. No one can gainsay that big business has the resources to pay for scientists to help them do the exploiting and to help them defend it before the public but that does not make the science bad. The trouble with Moore’s stand is that we need science and scientists on our side, and, in all honesty, most scientists are more aware of the fragility of Nature than the general public, because of the nature of their jobs.

Moore seems envious of the “superiority and authority” of science, apparently not willing to recognize that it has those qualities because it works! Science is a systematic way of finding out about the Goddess. It is part of Nature’s spirituality not apart from it. Any scientist or mathematician that has had an insight into the world has had a spiritual insight and they will tell you so. They will describe it in spiritual terms. It is not unlikely that the preparation and work that scientists do in trying to understand Nature gives them a greater chance of experiencing a spiritual awakening to the awe of Nature than do poets or musicians, though Adelphiasophists are the last people to denigrate any of these creative ways of experiencing Nature’s spirituality.

Of course, it is not the only option. Who said it was? A musician is not necessarily a poet and might have to hire a lyricist for their opera. They are good at different things. The scientist is good at finding out how Nature works and how her aspects interact. Why is that a sin in Moore’s new bible?

Moore’s new bible is the gospel of Nature’s spirituality, which he declares is a compelling reason for honouring the natural world, or rather the latter is a “prime source” of our spirituality. Adelphiasophists are more bold, or more extreme, but for us there is no qualification. All spirituality is natural. What else could it be? Abstract spirituality is a projection of natural spirituality. There is not any mysterious supernatural spirituality that manifests itself in ways natural and unnatural. Appreciation of Nature does not trigger off some sort of abstract spirituality.

Spirituality is the welling up within us of an awareness of the vast interrelations of Nature (“kinunity”), some of which we can see beyond us. It comes to us as a psychological gasp, a sudden shock at the sheer amazement of it. It might be a fleeting realization or it might be extended, when it is often called a mystical experience. It is because this feeling is subjective and psychological that it has been rendered abstract by those trying to explain it, some innocently and many with due regard to their own interests. Regrettably, the process has divorced it from its source and left it in the hands of rogues and mountebanks who pretend it is supernatural.

Moore, to his credit, accepts this, writing:

This Nature-rooted brand of spirituality has the advantage of not creating a dualistic way of life where body is opposed to mind and matter separated from spirit.

Immediately though he declares that what is between the material and the mental is in the domain of the soul, thus re-introducing the supernatural pig-in-a-poke so loved of churchmen and other confidence tricksters.

These people have always posed spiritual matters in such abstract terms as to set them opposed to the mundane. This abstract approach to the spiritual is confusing and frustrating. For example, the implication that death is not the end of the personality, leaves us with a perpetual mystery. Something is supposed to be on the other side of the Styx but no one can cross the river to look, and return. We are left with an unanswerable question that simply disappears if no one can return because they are dead! They have ceased to be! Crossing the river is the final act. Accept death as the end, as Nature shows us it is. Abstract spirituality leaves us with a Nature with unanswerable questions however much we might study it.

Those who benefit from this confusion are the priests of this world, the executives of the various God businesses. What are their practical blessings, since their supernatural ones are sheer fraud? The bloody conflicts that destroy the lives and livelihoods of people are all too often religious or have a significant religious aspect. The Christian Serbs have just terrorized the Moslem Kosovars. The orthodox church leaders of the Serbs kept quiet throughout and only after Nato troops had entered the province did they call for the resignation of the Serbian dictator. Similar wars have been fought recently in Ireland, in Kashmir, in the Near East. Spirituality is not a religious belief and wars are not fought over spiritual experiences. But, religious convictions seem so self-evidently correct to their adherents that they cannot be self-critical and reflective. If they were, they might experience a spiritual truth.

Abstract spirituality is anti-Nature. Even when the natural world is accepted not as evil but as divinely created, abstract spirituality is “above” the ordinary and the natural, and into the supernatural. More commonly the natural world is seen as an obstacle to spirituality, or even a prison for the soul—supposedly the supernatural spiritual body. The world and the flesh are the realm of the devil. Saints are detached from the world, and, as Moore points out, Christianity teaches “Set your mind on things that are above, not on things that are on Earth.” (“Col”. 3:1) and “You are from below, I am from above; you are of this world, I am not of this world” (“John: ”8:23). It is hardly surprising that Christian spirituality devalues the natural world.

Regaining an appreciation of Nature as spirituality will enhance our moral understanding and bring us to defend Nature’s own children against abuse, even when they are other human beings. Abstract spirituality imposes negative and fearful imperatives for morality. Nature has positive imperatives for morality. Christians have to be good for fear of hell fire. It does not work. Few of them take it seriously. Why not then try some practical reasons for adopting ethical ways of behaving. If the earth is sacred, then we should not harm it or anything that belongs to it! It is simple and practical and we know that if we ignore it then the Goddess will hit us back.

So, there is a very realistic hard edge to Nature spirituality. It is not wishy-washy wishful thinking or namby-pamby pious posturing. If we do not begin to sense it more clearly, then our tenure of the planet is likely to pass quite soon.

Take your spiritual cues from Nature’s evident beauty, discoverable secrets and deep mysteries. Don’t spend a lifetime looking for “the man who wasn’t there,” but hone all your senses and emotions to experience the spirituality that is there.

Resurrecting the World Soul

Carolyne Pion is another writer who takes up the fashion for slagging off science. She says we identify “Science and and Man as good, and Nature and Woman as bad.” Now the identification of Nature and Woman is indisputable but why is Science identified with Man? Presumably because men have claimed it, but that does not mean it is theirs.

Science is plainly meant to oppose Nature, but is that true? And, however women might feel, is it correct to oppose Man and Woman? Nature encompasses both Men and Women, so it has to be an error to posit them as opposites. Within Nature they are complementary, and, although the female sex was the primary sex, now both are necessary, unless we determine to make even reproduction synthetic. Our aim of a matriarchal society is not the opposite of a patriarchal society, even if that has to be an initial phase, but is an equal society in which the feminine is properly respected and the absurd macho masculine that patriarchy has bred is buried for good.

What of the question of Science and Nature. To oppose them is like opposing navigation with the oceans. Like must be opposed with like, but science is a way of investigating Nature just as navigation is a way of crossing the oceans. Nature, the natural world, is opposed by the synthetic, urban, technological world that we have built for ourselves in the last 300 years. We have been able to do it by using the scientific method to give us the technology, but that still does not make science bad, nor even technology. Science is not the villain abusing Nature, it is our economic system based on greed that is the culprit. It is just as well because it gives us some hope, rarefied as it might be. We can change our social system but we cannot disinvent the discovery of the scientific method. If that should be necessary, nature will do it herself by returning us to the stone age, or, more likely, sending us the way of the passenger pigeon. So, look eco-Feminists, follow the Adelphiasophist way, not the ignorant fashion for battering science.

Carolyn Pion observes that we have built our civilization on the oppression of Nature, and consequently on the oppression of women. The hatred of Nature and the hatred of women are irrevocably linked. True, so what do we find? She tells us that love is what keeps the universe together. We are all made of the same substance as formed at the big bang, so we all love each other!

Aren’t we hearing here some sort of pseudo-scientific re-hash of Christianity and the Creation by Yehouah, the Judaeo-Christian God of love? She goes on to say, “We were baptized in fire.” It looks a bit suspicious. She carries on citing somebody called Swimme, who sounds as though he needs to, because given half a chance we should push him under the primal soup of love that he rants about.

Christians and pseudo-Christians, besotted with their idea that God is pure love, cannot see the truth in front of their nose. There’s a passage in the forty-fifth Book of Isaiah that says:

I am the Lord and there is none else. I create light and make darkness. I create good and evil.

(Isaiah 45:6-7)

Good and Ill.

It is quite impossible to have good without ill, they are obverse and reverse, yin and yang, light and dark, as the Jewish author of “Isaiah” obviously knew, as did the founders of Judaism, the Persians. They are inseparable and to imagine a world without ill is a childish dream. With the Goddess, the world that we know and experience daily, wonderful and awesome as it is, you have to have the whole Culpepper—good and ill. The very point of our existence is our personal choice of these!

Let us be honest. Women are not all-loving and all-caring and Nature certainly isn’t. The various aspects of the Great Mother that became the various Goddesses of the patriarchs were not even all-loving. Why should Nature, “red in tooth and claw, “ as it is, even if it is not the whole story, be considered loving? If a funnel web bites us, do we love it because it chose us to bite? Should we be overcome with rhapsody if we get measles or leprosy, because we are home to lots of little microbes? Should we be delighted that the slugs and snails that come out at night to consume our crops of beans are being fed by us? All this talk of universal love is nothing to do with the Goddess and everything to do with the sentimental construction that people call Jesus—love incarnate.

Pion, quoting Swimme, says that gravity is loving! The reason is it is a force of allurement! Galaxies have a passion for each other and without it the universe would break apart. So, next time you trip and injure yourself, it is only because of love, and next time something falls on your head, how lucky you are to be so loved. And looking on the cosmic scale that Pion and Swimme do, what sort of love causes galaxies and worlds to blow asunder when their love for each other makes them collide with indescribable force? Isn’t that breaking things apart?

This is pseudo-Christian, New Age claptrap. It has nothing to do with the Goddess and everything to do with the way Christians have given us the habit of defining words just as they suit us. We speak of the “attraction” of love, so gravity, which “attracts” things must be love. Puerile!

Yet Pion has many interesting things to say. It is a pity that, like many women, she has the right intuition but picks on the wrong villains. She blames science but exonerates Christianity. Indeed she repeatedly quotes obscure Christian mystics as if they stood for the mainstream of this noxious belief system. Never mind that the god of love has been invoked by one side or the other or, even more often, by both sides in the bloodiest two millennia history has ever seen. It is immaterial. Quote Julian of Norwich, worthy woman that she was, that we were loved since before the beginning of time. She quotes Plato approvingly because Christians, who had no philosophy of their own, found Platonic philosophy amenable. She even tells us that our own choice of the name of the Goddess, Sophia, or Wisdom, worked “with her male consort, God, to create the universe.” Well, that is what some patriarchs say but our Sophia had no need of a consort, and anyway, she was not the consort of the Hebrew God, according to the Jews, but a personification of Torah.

Sophia is divine knowledge. What are we supposed to know about? About some absentee landlord of a God or about the Goddess Nature? All we can know about is Nature, and even this absentee God is part of Nature because he exists only in human heads. No one has been able to prove otherwise, yet few people deny that the cosmos exists. How do we find out about Nature? Science is by far the most effective method we have so far discovered, and since science exists in the natural world, it is a gift of the Goddess. Pion even starts to admire scientists, now mentioning James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis with approval—but they are “”whole brained,” not like the rest. The truth is that she is stuck with the uncomfortable fact that much of the momentum toward Nature spirituality that she approves was created by scientists like Lovelock and Margulis. Her arguments would have much more force if she dropped her childish prejudice.

Who Can Know the Mountain?

Pagans, as believers in natural religion, cannot accept that truth is fixed forever. To illustrate its permanence, truth has been likened to a mountain: though it is one pile of rock, it looks different to every different observer, it looks different at different times of the day and at different times of the year and it looks different from different approaches.

Who knows, perhaps there is truth in this analogy of the pile of rock, but for Adelphiasophists, all we experience are our different views of it. No one more than Sophists would like to know the ultimate truth but, just as no one can know the mountain, no one “can” know the ultimate truth. Only the aspects of the mountain can be known and equally only the aspects of truth can be known. Just as someone can walk a mountain for a lifetime and still be surprised by its mystery or beauty, even more so can truth yield up surprises to those convinced they had had it all revealed to them.

Christians begin with their own personal fiction of what the mountain is, and excitedly tell everyone else they should see it. Their mountain is in their heads and because they are sure that their image of it is the real mountain, they are not interested in looking at it in life. Even when they feel obliged to look, they declare that theirs is better. We point to the mountain at sunset and say, “Look it is red.” They disdainfully reply, “It is grey, but “mine” is rainbow coloured!” Their false image of the truth blinds them to what is real and ready to be enjoyed in life. They only want to know about an after life.

That is the depth of their ignorance. Even if there is something eternal in truth that the mountain represents, it is pure folly to ignore what we see in favour of a fantastic and wholly arbitrary fiction purporting to be profound. As humans move, as they evolve, so the truth evolves too. But we are not gods and never will be, so we can never know Truth itself. Pagans recognize this with humility and bow before Nature. Christians think they are gods and try to enslave her.

The analogy of the mountain illustrates that truth is knowledge. We can have real natural knowledge of the mountain or we can believe we understand what the mountain is in essence. Real knowledge is living knowledge but supernatural knowledge is only “belief”—imaginary knowledge. We can declare something to be true or false in relation to our belief or in relation to living knowledge. One is arbitrary and supernatural, the other is certain and natural and can be experience by us all.

Spirituality in Business?

Excuse us while we chuckle up our sleeve. Corinne McLaughlin, Executive Director of The Center for Visionary Leadership, promotes spiritual values in the workplace to increase productivity and profitability. Consulting firms using “spiritual” approaches are doing a booming business.

Business people want their spirituality to be more than just faith and belief—they want it to be practical and applied, so they want to take it to work! The bottom line can be strengthened—”doing well by doing good”.

What is spirituality at work? Definitions tend to be what you would expect—trite! It’s embodying personal values of honesty, integrity, and good quality work, values that most people would regard as prerequisites for any successful trader and nothing to do with spirituality. The same is true of “treating employees in a responsible, caring way.”

Then again it is holding religious study groups or using prayer, meditation, or intuitive guidance at work—God is taken on as a business partner CEO, a dangerous practice because it can only exclude workers who are not interested in this religion or this bogus spirituality. Finally, it is being socially responsible in its effect on the environment, again worthy but something that in being claimed as spiritual proves that corporate man otherwise couldn’t care a monkeys’ about the environment. Note that they claim it effects the “bottom line” which is entirely the point, if true.

How can true spirituality serve greed? And why this interest in spirituality at work? McLaughlin says greater demands on workers left them too tired and stressed to be creative, but globalization of markets demands more creativity from employees. Why then isn’t sprituality at work simply taking on more employees to get better quality work from them? Too expensive—the global market will have to put up with more worker exploitation, not less, it seems.

All this time at work also leaves less time for pious Christians to worship so they’ve decided to worship at work, after all it is where they spend their lives nowadays. “Professionals,” too busy to go to church decide to eat spiritual food for lunch rather than hamburgers. Spiritual study groups at lunchtime, called “Higher Power Lunches” have replaced the previous corporate fad for “power lunches”

Of course, the Christian circuit in the USA is usually abreast of any corporate bandwagon going and “Marketplace Ministries” of Dallas places freelance chaplains in corporations nationwide. “Fellowship of Companies for Christ International,” in Atlanta has 1500 members who promote “the importance and practice of prayer in company decisions” and a few of the practices that any decent company should not need God’s invited help to do.

James Ritscher, who works for the “Spirit in Business Association,” assures us that spirituality is an individual matter, not anything to do with “an external organization,” by which he means a church. Beyond this Ritscher gets trivial, though he prefers to call it “subtle.” He means there is not much to choose between a conventional nasty capitalist business and one run “spiritually.”

People are clearer, in a spiritual workplace. They are there of their own choosing and they are masters of their own destiny. They are less likely to think that they are victims. They are more able to work with those situations in constructive ways, when they get angry or their ego gets bruised. To make this true he has to paint a cartoon of a non-spiritual organisation as full of dissension, anger and frustration. If this is true, he is not saying anything about spirituality but merely using the word as a description of calm and successful businesses compared with bad ones.

The reason why a spiritual business can handle problems without tension is threefold:

• The organization as a whole has a commitment to deal with and resolve such problems;
• The individual employees have greater self-mastery and higher self-respect, and thus will not allow themselves to be imposed upon.
• The organization as a whole has a vision, one that the employees are attracted to. Employees feel ownership and commitment to a common purpose.

What, though, is spiritual about these?

How would you go about creating an organization, or a department, that is spiritual? His answer is that there is no formula! “You decide where you want to go and go there.” This deciding where you want to go is the way to develop a spiritual business! And it does not have to be “overburdened with trappings of spirituality,” because “the qualities that develop a spiritual organization are quite ordinary”. There is no need to recite them, they are so ordinary—the things that appear in a million management books, but that will always sell again with a new angle. This one is spirituality. Ha!

Christian spirituality is not the only form practiced. Almost every type you care to mention is practiced in some corporation. Even intuition is promoted, a talent that one might have thought businessmen considered essential to their success and indeed, according to a study at Harvard Business School, business owners credit 80% of their success to acting on their intuition.

Some companies with progressive CEOs actually try to put a nature spirituality into practice. The Coalition of Environmentally Responsible Economies, which promotes a code of corporate conduct to protect the environment, includes major companies such as General Motors, Bank of America, Bethlehem Steel, ITT, and Coca-Cola. Some use only natural ingredients and allow employees time of for appropriate charitable work. Others have returned to normal ethical practices under the banner of corporate spirituality, proving that they had previously departed from them, as if we had not noticed.

All are policies we would loudly cheer if it were not that they were just another corporate fad or ploy. Corporate bosses are never unresponsive to the latest statistics and 95% of Americans reject the idea that a corporation’s only purpose is to make money. 39% of US investors say they check on business practices, values, and ethics before investing. 75% of consumers will switch to brands associated with a good cause if price and quality are equal. Most important of all, the Domini 400 Social Index, a portfolio of socially responsible stocks, has outperformed the S&P 500 since May 1990. These are sound “bottom line” reasons for adopting an ethical approach, if not “spirituality,” at work. Otherwise, spirituality in business is the ultimate in corporate cynicism.

Nevertheless, Ritscher has a quite a keen perception of the meaning of spirituality:

Spirituality is an experience of depth in life—living life with heart rather than just superficially. Spirituality is an experience that there is something more to life than just our narrow, ego-oriented view of it.

Though, many people will take the experience of spirituality in this definition as being a sign of God’s work, it implies nothing supernatural at all. “Spirit has to do with action and productivity. If people are not enthusiastic about their work, the work will suffer.” Wowee! It is a shame that Ritscher descends into such banalities—don’t rush to buy the book—but his definition of spirituality is a good one. Start from there, keep to the natural and see where it leads. It will lead to the wonder and awe of the Goddess, Nature, and teach us to treasure Her.

The Adelphiasophism of Dr Boeree

Professor C George Boeree has an interesting website on the internet in which he speaks a great deal of sense from the viewpoint of a psychology professor, much of it effectively Adelphiasophist praxis, though he did not know it. Originally called “Thoughts on the Spirituality of Atheism”, it is repeated here with his permission.

I am an atheist. This may not seem to particularly qualify me to talk about spiritual matters. I believe it does, and uniquely… I see atheism as a sort of minimalist spiritual perspective, one that has stripped away so much of what we usually think of as spiritual—the supernatural—that the essence of spirituality can be seen more clearly.

People will ask me, “Don’t you believe in God?” No, I don’t. “Jesus? Buddha?” I believe that both were men of great charisma and insight—but neither was a god. “Don’t you believe in anything?” Of course I do…

I believe in two things above all—Nature and love. Nature is all-powerful. Love is how I understand the good. It might have been nice to believe in God, often defined as all-powerful and good, but combining the two like that has always posed too much of a contradiction for my poor mind to believe in.

It’s the old problem of evil. If he’s all-powerful and all-loving, why does he then permit evil? If you want to get specific, why does he allow innocent children to suffer—and they do suffer, don’t they? Me, I have nature—which I hold in great esteem, but which is clearly not loving—and love—which is good but clearly not all-powerful.

“What about an afterlife?” No, I don’t believe in that either. “You mean you think we just die and that’s it?” Yes, that’s right. “So how can you stand to live?” Life is enough. It has to be—it’s all there is. “But then what’s the meaning of life?” The meaning of life is in the living of it.

Our lives are such small things. Sometimes we think we need something grand to make them worthwhile—like eternal life in paradise, or great success, or intense experiences. Or we feel we need a grand philosophy or religion to give our lives meaning. But that’s just not true.

It’s the little happinesses of life that give it meaning. Some laughter, some conversation, good food and a little sex, satisfaction at a job well done, a walk on the beach, making a difference, even if its a small difference, seeing your children become happy, healthy, productive adults, washing your car, a game of cards, a good movie, a beer… God—if you’ll pardon the expression—is in the details.

“So just lay back and enjoy life—sounds pretty hedonistic!” Perhaps, if your idea of hedonism includes doing your best and loving others. “Then what’s the difference between an ordinary life and meaningful life?” Attitude!

The world is so incredibly rich, so incredibly complex, that it can overwhelm us. We retreat from the richness of life and love into the semi-conscious state of the workaday world. We retreat into roles and rituals and habits and defensiveness and alcohol and television… We sleep-walk through life, and miss the good stuff.

And life is hard. Very hard for many people. Nature is what it is, does what it does, whether we enjoy it or not. And people, while capable of love, often don’t show it. So we close our eyes and hearts to protect ourselves. Perhaps we even grow a thick layer of callus over our innermost selves. But if we close our eyes and hearts, again we miss the good stuff.

This is why we need to face our problems instead of hiding from them, accept anxiety and sadness and even pain as inevitable parts of life, rather than pretending that we can only be happy when life is perfect. If we shut down when unhappiness comes our way, we may not feel as much pain, but we are no longer open to the small, good things of life that make it meaningful.

“So we just have to buck up and deal?” In a way it does all come down to that. “You can’t do it alone—you need God’s help!” That would be nice—but that kind of help doesn’t seem forthcoming! “It seems like you are asking a lot of a people all by themselves.” But we aren’t all by ourselves.

We aren’t as alone as we think we are, each of us locked away in some soul-walnut. I believe that consciousness is only occasionally restricted to one person’s mind. Most of the time, it lies somewhere between us.

If you are playing pool with a friend, and you are really concentrating on the game, for a little while the two of you are actually sharing consciousness—he sees what you see and you see what he sees. When you make love with someone, you become lost in each other, lost in the passion of the moment, and share consciousness. When you raise your children, you pass on your values and dreams and quirks, and every now and then they will see the world through your eyes, and you through theirs. I’m not talking about ESP or psychic phenomena here. I’m just suggesting that we never lived in such separate egos in the first place. We all learn to believe we are isolated, but we aren’t.

That’s how love works. To love means to realize that you and the other person aren’t entirely separate, that his or her needs and feelings are yours. It is looking in someone’s eyes and seeing yourself. And that provides us with one more source of meaning!

“Okay. So you have some meaning in your life. But you don’t have ultimate meaning, do you?” No.

Ultimately, as far as nature is concerned, my poor atheist philosophy says it makes no difference if we shut out both good and bad or experience both good and bad fully—six of one, half a dozen of the other. Love or don’t love? It doesn’t matter to nature. But with open eyes and hearts we do find meaning, even if it isn’t glorified with the title of “ultimate”.

I have no desire to convert anyone to atheism. It seems rather absurd to try to convert someone to nothing! But I do think that, even if we put away our various and complex religious belief systems, the possibility for a fulfilling life remains. Perhaps the possibility is even enhanced.

George Boeree

Of course, Dr Boeree is wrong that his outlook is “nothing”, and there are excellent reasons why people should convert to it. Dr Boeree is speaking about Adelphiasophism, whence the title to this section. By Christian criteria, it might be atheism, but Christianity was atheism to believers in classical Paganism. Adelphiasophism rejects supernatural fancy, but does not reject the great chain of being that constitutes Nature, kinunity and human societies.

Service

For a spirituality of the Earth to be bold and robust, it must include action. And to act on behalf of something is to be of service.

I don’t know what your destiny will be, but one thing I do know; the only ones among you who will be truly happy will be those who have sought and found a way to serve.

Albert Schweitzer

I slept and dreamt that life was joy,
I woke and saw that life was service,
I acted and behold, service was joy.

Rabrindranath Tagore

Consciously or unconsciously, every one of us does render some service or other. If we cultivate the habit of doing this service deliberately, our desire for service will steadily grow stronger, and will make not only for our own happiness, but that of the world at large.

Mahatma Gandhi

Joanna Macy, a wonderful exemplar of true service, suggests three directions in which to look:

1. What is your dream for a better natural world, that you would do just for love? Do it!
2. What does it pain you to see in the natural world? If grief, sorrow, despair, hunger, terror touches you, pains you, then set out to relieve it. You too will be relieved.
3. What is at hand, that can be done in service to others right here and now? In Nature’s kinunity, all acts of service can have surprising effects, just as acts of recklessness can in the opposite sense.

Skeptical Resources—Internet infidels | Jesus Never Existed | Steven Carr’s Website | Christianism | Early Christian Writings | God is Imaginary | “Religion Detoxification” | Our Judaio-Christian Heritage | Archaeoastronomy | No Deity | No Beliefs | Evil Bible | Bible God | ex-Christians | Jesus Police | Islamic Faith Freedom | Atheist Experience | American Atheists | Jovial Atheist | Askwhy! books
Other Resources—Early Christian Docs | Resources for Study | Traditional Bible-History | Traditional Bible World History | Traditional Bible History | about.com biblical history | Apologetics web sites | Advent Ch Fathers | Orion center links | Wikipedia | Traditional Jewish History