Abstract

Nuggets of Adelphiasophist Gold

This glory of discovery is the true ornament of mankind.

Francis Bacon “Cogitata et Visa”

© 1998 The Adelphiasophists and AskWhy! Publications. Freely distribute as long as it is unaltered and properly attributed
Contents Updated: Thursday, 16 September 2004
Tuesday, 30 January 2007

Negotiating the Vale of Tears

One of the benefits of some types of religion is that they help believers to be happy. For example, some types of Christianity persuade their adherents that they are saved with no effort on their own part, other than to accept a “potpourri” of superstitions described as wisdom, and restrictions on asking questions about it all. They tend to be types of fundamentalism in which complicated problems are described as clearly this and that, saved and damned, good and evil, the saved being the in-group of believers while the damned are everyone else.

The trouble with such simple unanalysed beliefs is that they fracture the world leading to conflict. Quite obviously all of the groups of believers cannot be right, yet there is no allowance in their flawed thinking for compromise. The reason is that the cure is self-criticism, but that is forbidden as showing a lack of faith and a concomitant loss of salvation, and so the cracks in society can only widen. Ultimately the happiness of these believers is doomed to be short lived. It is like relieving a toothache by injecting heroin. It might work but the cure is worse than the illness. What was an irritating pain becomes a life consuming horror. The innocent self-delusion of “post-mortem” salvation becomes the murder and mayhem of the living, including the believers. US fundamentalist Christians label Arabs as the hosts of the anti-Christ, happily bombing them from a safe haven 12,000 miles away, while fundamentalist Moslems happily abandon life in retaliation in what they too see as an Holy War.

A few decades ago, it was considered a pleasant trait to be “laid back”. Fundamentalism has driven it out, yet being “laid back” is a much more effective way of being happy than believing impossible and dangerous things. The Christian incarnated God preached two central qualities people needed to be saved—to love one another and to be poor. Modern Christians do not seem to notice that they ignore both of these central beliefs and still think they are saved. Yet these beliefs amount to being “laid back”, not letting other people’s faults get to you, and not being acquisitive—not coveting as the bible puts it. “Loving” others does not mean having to smother them in gifts and kisses, but treating them as you would wish to be treated yourself, as the bible explains, but which few Christians ever now seem to notice. It means thinking the best of people and not the worst as modern people do. It is being courteous, having good manners towards others, seeking not to offend them at all, least of all deliberately, and as a part of that acting tastefully yourself, whether by not scratching your piles or not telling vulgar jokes in public.

Coveting is the biggest source of unhappiness in the world today. Social surveyors undertaking mass observation have found that people in poor and non-acquisitive communties to be happier than people in the US where everyone is rich, or is by comparison, and the universal drive for happiness is reduced to those for money and power. “Blessed are the poor” does not mean “blessed is poverty”. It means blessed are those who are content with the least. Christ explained that the first were last and the last first in the queue for heaven. Blessed are those who do not take more than they need. Enough is sufficient. Why then demand more, especially at a time when few can be unaware that the resources of the world are over stretched and under threat. Now, much more than at the time of Christ “blessed are the poor” is true. Now it is a serious message.

Instead of absurdly welcoming the end of the world, as many Christians always have done, never more than now, they should be seeking to relieve the pressure on it. At one time, Christians were universally convinced that disease should not be treated because it was considered a punishment from God. Mostly, Christians got over that, but now they happily pray for an acceleration to the decay of the world, and its final destruction. Leading Protestant pastors pray for a nuclear conflagration, believing that they will have a grandstand seat in heaven. Crazy or what? Well they got over their resistance to treating disease, so perhaps they will get over their promotion of the apocalypse.

If the world is to be destroyed, as they say, then its maker will do it, whether we try to prevent it or not. And God must have far more powerful means at his disposal than having to depend upon humanity. It has always been the delusion of believers that God needs their help in external matters. Humans should do what they can do well to make the world better, and God has explained what it is. It is to love one another. If Christians will not do it, how can others be expected to? The destruction of the world, if it comes about by human agency, can only have been a triumph of God’s enemy Satan, who, Christians tell us, does his worst by infecting human beings with evil. So, evil done by human beings is satanic, and it is satanic whether a Christian presses the nuclear button or someone else.

It illustrates the fault with unquestioning belief. Believers who refuse to question their belief become the instruments of the Devil, while thinking they are doing nothing but God’s will. They are dupes of Satan and his human aids, but because they will not question, they can never know it. The followers of Christ become the agents of the anti-Christ. The outcome is not salvation and bliss for believers, but intolerable misery and suffering for everyone.

What Christians miss, and are encouraged in doing by their satanic pastors, is that seeking salvation “per se” is not the way to get it. Christ—God—was asked directly how to be saved and his advice was not merely to “have faith”. It was to love God and to love your neighbour, both amounting to the same thing, as he also explained because any slight to a human being was a slight on him as God (Mt 25:40). You would never believe from Christians today that God Himself said this, if they are right that Christ was God. But nor was that sufficient for salvation. The young wealthy man who had asked him this had both loved God and loved others, but he had not done it enough. He had loved himself more. To be saved, he had to give his wealth to the poor! The rich man will get happiness by giving away his wealth to relieve the misery of the poor. Rich men used to do it, but now that they are richer than men have ever been, it is done only for promotion and publicity. It is never a selfless desire to lift others out of their helplessness.

Salvation boils down to being “laid back”, and many other sayings of Christ confirm it. Being “laid back” is friendship and leisure, thinking the best of people and relieving the strain in the world’s resources by not wanting what is not needed, but instead taking it easy. Modern technology, though it has been energy and resource demanding has within itself the way out. Miniaturization, recycling instead of fresh exploitation, and making natural use of the sun are all accessible ways of cutting out much of the damage we have been doing, but constantly demanding more and more defeats the possibilities of cutting down. Contrary to the myth of gluttony and fine wines, the Epicureans advocated moderation in all things, and it works. Many people who have worried whether they could survive when they were pensioned off, are surprised to discover that they have nore disposible income than they ever had in their lives. The reason is that many of their expenses were expenses of working. Without them, they are much better off even on a lower income.

Would life then be boring? The question suggests the paradox that modern people are only happy being unhappy not having something they want, and therefore have an incentive to achieve. People think they must aspire to riches and celebrity or be nothing. But is simply demonstrates the restricted horizons they have, and the poor motivation society is offering through its mass media. For one thing is certain and that is that there are more things for people to do these days than there ever was. Why then need anyone be bored? Of course they need not be, they just think they only have a few choices, those that are made to seem particularly desirable, when there are millions. These limited desires are anything but being “laid back”.

Being “laid back” is initially doing what comes naturally, and then finding a purpose in life. When the planet is under attack from over use, there are so many things that can be done to help, combined with the Epicurean ideal, that no one should be ever bored. And having a purpose, or more than one, if you have time, is the source of true happiness as opposed to that pseudo happiness that celebrities seem to have. A happy life has a purpose, and it is the person that dies happy who achieves it. Not achieving a purpose is not failure, though, because all endeavour shows a way for someone else.

From the age of austerity brought on by overexploitation of the earth comes the age of creativity. Each of us can do something, and feel pleased that we are doing, as long as we are not offending the earth. Millions might take self sufficiency seriously when hitherto it has been a joke, a subject for light comedy. Community help gives immense satisfaction. Largely lost in the modern state, it seems it will have to return as the bureacracy and incompetence of governments destroy what we have, but out of it will come people determined to restore good governance, and kick out the opportunists and grifters we get at the moment, preferably with appropriate jail sentences.

Leisure gives us time for thinking and creativity, reason, wisdom and practical skill, so that we have the chance of improving the world for ourselves and our children. People might get satisfaction from painting, reading, writing, computer programming, writing a website, sport, carving, craft, DIY, and so on. Reading is particularly important, and with the internet there is so much available to read at no more cost than the computer and its connections. Why shouldn’t ordinary people discuss science and philosophy?

Read, enquire, debate and consider.

Philosophic essayist, A C Grayling

People who read and reflect are more likely to judge things with liberality and truth. It is the reflecting not the reading that people have tended not to do. Many people read, but what they read floats through their heads like musak in a mall. Thinking about what you have read is what is important, and the main feature of thinking is questioning. Wonder about the passage you have read, even if it begins with acknowledging that you did not get it. “What does that mean?” or “What is the author trying to say?” are legitimate initial questions. Try to answer your own questions. It might sound crazy, but that is what reflecting is, and it is how you learn. If you cannot offer yourself much of an answer, you will feel dissatisfied, and have a stimulus to find out. You will try to find out what others have thought about it. You get a variety of opinions. This is the way that, by degrees, you head towards the truth, for the truth is rarely served up on a plate, and never by ancient religions that claim to do it.

Much of this movement of creativity is under way. The pleasure in it should be the doing of it, not just the hope of being a great success. At any rate, it does not really matter what in particular people do, there is so much of it, but it ought not to be driven by greed, and many interesting pursuits cannot be because there is unlikely to be large profits in them. What they have is satisfaction. It is impossible for anyone these days to be bored.

The aim is a purposeful and harmonious life, so that one can do a bit then relax contented—be “laid back”. The harmony is with Nature and everything in it, and therefore with people, for they too are natural beings like yourself. We can be considerate to others, to animals, to the landscape, and the ancient elements that comprise the world, fire, air, water and earth. Once they get irretrievably polluted, humanity is at an end, and apocalyptic Christianity will have had its way, though not with God playing any part in it, only Satan’s little workers. Surely that thought ought to motivate anyone, and, if it does not, then think about your children and grandchildren. It will matter to them. Devotion to a purpose is deeply satisfying, and surely it must be more satisfying when it is valuable to everyone, and not just yourself.

We cannot expect a world without grief. That is unreasonable, and there are good grounds for thinking any such world is impossible. There must always be random tragedies, and random benefits—bad luck and good luck—but we must regard them as challenges. We have evolved to handle such things. We can try to find ways of overcoming the problem, or accept it. Your son is killed. If it is by an act of war, we can unwisely escalate the war and cause many more tragedies in revenge, or we can try to find out its cause and resolve it. If it is by an act of God, as the insurance companies used to say, like a lightning strike or an embolism, then we have to accept it. We do not have to believe in God, because God or no God, there was nothing we could have done about it.

Another aspect of happiness, fulfilled by seeking purpose in living, is responsibility. After a thousand years of Christian darkness, the pioneers of light in the Enlightenment taught that everything that happens could not be respectively commended or blamed on God and the Devil to explain it. God, according to the Jewish scriptures, gave us free will, then, according to the Christian scriptures, He took it away by threatening those who exercised it with eternal torture by burning. Enlightenment worthies, like Kant, urged people to be autonomous, to take their own decisions and seek to live life in their own way, rather than depending on obedience to supposed supernatural benefactors. People should live their lives according to their relationships with others in their lives, bearing in mind Nature and natural duties and obligations, but otherwise content that others are happy to do their own thing.

To imagine this life is not real, but an imaginary one is nothing less than lunacy, as Islamic suicide bombers prove. If someone believes in God, how can they show such disdain for the world they believe He made, and the creatures He put in it? It is another example of how satanic leaders can fool gullible believers into acting for God’s enemy, and against God’s own creation, without seeing any contradiction, without thinking they might never see heaven for doing this, but rather the opposite, they think destroying God’s creation He will send them straight to heaven. Of course, it does, but heaven is just being dead.

What God can punish someone who refuses to have anything to do with such a foolish and manipulable faith, yet lives an exemplary life? A good God doling out rewards would reward intrinsic goodness in people before a “goodness” adopted purely for expedience, in other words only because God will punish them otherwise. Enlightenment thinkers urged people to be good for its own sake, not because they feared God would eternally burn them if they were wicked. Those with a regard for others and a resolve not to take more than they need are the truly good, and have the reward of knowing they are not contaminating the earth like the covetous and greedy on it. They have satisfaction, fulfilment and happiness in life, and die contented. If God has more to offer after death, then they are the ones who deserve it.

This life is actually happening, and is the only one we are certain about. Christians say it is a vale of woe, a trial for the next altogether better world, but, if that is so, they are the ones who are failing the test with their selfish, do nothing belief in personal faith in God as a nostrum for their own selfish salvation. It is not what their God taught when he lived on earth, but no Christian wants to know. It threatens their faith! This is the life for creating happiness, not some imaginary one. If there are any rewards after death, they are rewards for what people have done here in this vale of tears to make life better for others—for loving them!

Learning from the Greeks

Hecuba: Aphrodite, you say, came with my son to Menelaus’s house. How laughable! … When you saw him, it was your own thought that became Aphrodite. Aphrodite is the name of every human folly.

This was written by Euripides (480-406 BC) in “Trojan Women” 2500 years ago, yet Christians think their visions mean something. The ancient Greeks already knew that religious experiences and beliefs were explained by psychology not mysticism or the supernatural. Why are so many people today so much more ignorant than these Greeks 2500 years ago? If there were an absolute good God, it is absurd to think He would appear in so many different forms to different people in the world, knowing through His omniscience that humanity would set the different appearances against each other with the murderous results we all know about. Every human being can experience joy and fear of Nature and be inclined to attribute them to good and evil spirits. But feeling the presence of good or evil spirits is a psychological phenomenon of human perception that has no objective evidence in its favour, and is unnecessary to explain the beauty or horror of the world. Xenophanes write, also around 2500 years ago:

There has never been and never will be a man who has certain knowledge about the gods… For even if he should happen to speak the truth, yet he himself does not know it, but all may have been their fancy.

Christians are not willing to note the good sense in this, and have been willing to believe unscrupulous and deranged people who claimed their own fancies were God-sent absolute truths.

A Modern Stoicism

Stoicism was a personal philosophy founded by Zeno around 300 BC, and which lasted as a practised philosophy for about 500 years, before Christians took much of it as the proper way to be. Stoical is still a well used adjective. Zeno was a Canaanite born in Cyprus, about the time of Alexander, so was familiar at first hand with Persian, Greek and Phœnician civilisations. But their founder was not for Stoics their main hero. That was Socrates whom they admired for a noble life and an even nobler death. Socrates was for long the Jesus Christ of the Stoics. For, like Christianity, Stoicism was not a complete philosophy but was an ethical system. Its main principle was being virtuous. This remained but the philosophy behind is was more personal than laid down by credo, and later Stoics were philosophically neo-Platonists, another world view that influenced Christians. Thus Zeno was thoroughly materialistic—not in the avaricious sense, but the philosophical—but Roman Stoics mainly followed Plato in believing in an immaterial soul.

Stoics did not believe in a personal God, as Christians do, meaning a god with a human personality that could be appealed to person to person, as it were. The Stoic God was masculine by convention only. Their God was the impersonal law of Nature, or rather, the force behind Nature that made it orderly and harmonious, and therefore comprehendable, and true in not being capricious.

Most scientists believe that there is some form of cosmic Order in the universe. However, to the nonscientist, the word God almost universally refers to the God of Miracles, and this is the source of miscommunication between scientists and nonscientists.

Michio Kaku, Hyperspace

In short, God was reason, truth and order, and consequently He could not change things wilfully, like the Christian God. You might say He was subject to His own rules unlike the Christian God, but more correctly, He was the rules. So, God made the world what it was but He did not answer prayer, and had no Will. He was what He was, just as the Jewish God said “I am that I am”, although that includes being capricious, imperious, brutal and murderous, Jews think, and a cuddly teddy bear, according to Christians.

Adelphiasophism accepts the same sort of god, but by convention a goddess, because Nature gives birth to things, she does not make them like the Christian masculine Demiurgos necessarily must. Today, we know much more about Natural laws than Zeno or any other Stoic did, and can integrate them more successfully into a belief system that demonstrably is true and works. Zeno was so certain that Zeno was a law that he would not accept chance at all as being beyond any law. He concluded that everything must be determined. Today, we can believe that both are true, because we know the behaviour of large numbers of particles, each propelled by chance, is statistically predictable, and we know on the other hand that non-linear complexity allows deterministic order to collapse into chaos. We can accept chance and we can accept free will, even if it is in a sense only a pseudo free will that is determined, but being sufficiently complex defies prediction.

Stoics believed everything was made of fire, as Heraclitus did under Persian influence. It is easy to see that they were right, if fire is considered to be their expression of what we moderns call energy. Everything condensed from fire, air first, then water and last earth, an intuitive understanding of states of matter, and the changes effected by falling temperature—the cooling of the flames bringing about condensation into gaseous, liquid and solid states. Ultimate, the end of the world would be a great conflagration, another Persian concept, when everything returned to fire, when the cycle began anew and the fire began to condense once more. Stoics saw this as going on endlessly, each time the world repeating its previous existences because they were necessarily as they were being determined. So all of us have existed countless times before in countless worlds.

It is reminiscent of the Big Bang, the expansion and cooling of the universe, forming all we know, ending in a contraction under gravity into a Big Crunch, with an endless repetition of the cycle. This was an idea held by many physicists until quite recently, but the evidence now is against any Big Crunch, so the universe will expand forever and simply die a heat death. But modern science is unsure, because there are peculiarities that are not explained such as missing matter and energy called dark matter and dark energy. Such serious deficiencies in the current cosmological hypothesis might indicate that it needs utterly revising. Maybe the Big Crunch will be reinstated, in which the intuition of the ancients, and the Stoics among them will look sound again.

Their notion that the world had existed a countless number of times gets close to the ideas put forward by modern physicists in the many worlds cosmological idea and the interpretations of quantum mechanics. The difference is that the determinism of the Stoics had them believing the endless repetition of the same world, whereas modern physics suggests countless different possible outcomes, so that every possible world can have happened in an infinite meta-time, or is happening in an infinite meta-space.

Stoics, like Christians, put humanity at the center of God’s attention in that the world was the center of the universe. Today, we know that it is not so. The earth is out on a limb of one of billions of galaxies, though detemined believers will try to argue it is necessarily so, despite arguing for centuries it was necessarily so that the earth was central—and burning the legs off people like Giordano Bruno because they were so certain. In a sense, though, humanity is the center of God’s attention because God is the model of the perfect man, and is a guide to how people should be in human communities—perfect like God. The very point of monotheism is that thre is only one model, only one way to be. Polytheism has divinities for different aspects of humanity and different types of them, love, healing, merchants, warriors, death, and so on. A god who is a type of man will be interested in the wellbeing of human beings to the exclusion of everything else. Stoics, like Christians, thought the Big Fella had made the universe for the benefit of all the little fellas. Naturally, women did not come into it except as another gift from the Big Fella to the little fellas.

Stoics had the notion, taken over by the Gnostics, that everyone had a spark of God in them. As fire was the primaeval element, God was a divine fire, and this divine fire was the “Animus Mundi”, the soul of the world. As Nature comprised everything that was, its soul was spread throughout it so that everyone had a spark of it. Again fire seems equated with energy and that with life, which corresponds pretty well with modern thinking in that life depends on a supply of energy. The spark of divine energy that was the soul, never died, and today we consider energy always to be conserved, though it does change in form and such changes are what drives life. So, reading a modern interpretation into an old belief means that the soul is not static but is a flow of energy—the flow of energy that animates things. Today, we know that the human body is constantly changing in its very substance, so that an old person has scarcely an atom proportionally in their body that was there when they were young. Equally, if the ancient idea of the soul is really the flow of energy that animates life, then it too is never the same. A flow is a constant change.

What this emphasizes is that life is dynamically connected with Nature. We are none of us static objects moving in a space filled with other objects that comprises Nature, but Nature is a continuous stream of material and energy moving according to underlying laws and principles. We are more closely integrated with Nature seen as a flow than we are as static beings, and that is a good reason why we should pay attention to not upsetting the smoothness and regularity of the flow. It is the sense in which the Stoics thought it essential that everyone should individually preserve the harmony of Nature. We cannot disrupt the laws of Nature, but we locally distort flows, and they are most likely to affect ourselves, because we are at the center of them! If Nature is a river, it will find its way to the sea, but we can certainly disrupt and divert the flow. We can make beneficial changes as well as damaging ones, though it is always a balance, and we can never be sure of what our changes might set in store. Flows are important, and the resolve to minimise disruption to natural flows, as we can see it now, was central to Stoic personal philosophy. It was the idea of virtue that embodied it. It was the determination to live a life in harmony with Nature, with an understandable regard to our own place in it.

Philosophically, determination is Will. The Judaeo-Christian notion of doing the Will of God is just the same but expressed in mystical rather than practical terms, and therefore more open to abuse. Moreover, doing someone else’s Will, even God’s is inferior to doing your own, as long as it is in harmony with Nature. The Stoic, Cleanthes (301-252 BC), a disciple of Zeno, explained that doing the Will of God is putting yourself in the position of a dog tied to a cart—it can only go where the driver of the cart makes it. The truly virtuous person goes the same way, but under their own Will—willingly—and that is superior. You can, of course, go elsewhere but that is likely to harm natural flows. It dams or diverts the stream storing up problems that come back a hundredfold. You might be lucky that they do not come back to you, but they come back down the line, with trouble for your children and descendents as well as for others.

You might not care, proving you are not virtuous. Pursuing wealth, hedonism, gluttony, and so on, and achieving them might be satisfying in some senses but what about the cost? Die prematurely of a swollen liver or a fatty heart, or be ruined or even murdered by an enemy and what has been ultimately achieved? The ancient idea was Nemesis who is the goddess of retribution for shameless wrongdoing or Hubris. Disregarding the flow or harmony of Nature is Hubris, and the goddess takes her revenge in the form of Nemesis. Even if she does not find you, you will be responsible for disasters down the line to your own kin and other innocents.

In contrast, the virtuous person was immune to all harm, the Stoic thought. Not that you cannot be harmed, but the Stoic is not distressed by it. Josephus said the Essenes laughed at their torturers, and so to did the witches of the late middle and early modern ages. They were Stoical. They practised virtue—righteousness—and so could endure anything. It is Stoicism in the modern sense. The simple life of going with the flow of Nature, living in ways that are compatible with Nature rather than trying to “beat”, “defeat” or “conquer” her, but aiming always to be reasonable and not over excited gives, in itself, great personal satisfaction, happiness and a sense of freedom. We might be clever enough to melt the poles and refrigerate the equator, but there is nothing harmonious about it, and we have seen already that doing such absurd things has led to Nemesis in the pollution of the air and global warming.

We might feel virtuous in our WASP work ethic, but we have to ask what it is all for. Are we working to live or living to work? There is nothing virtuous in working unnecessarily. The ancient hunter gatherers operating in non-marginal land could easily get all the food they needed in three hours work a day. What would have been the point of working longer? To pile up a load of roots, berries and carcases that they could not eat? It is no different now. Once we have earned enough, there is no point in working longer, and ultimately all that work is wasted on just spoiling the earth. Working hard when one has to farm difficult land with primitive equipment was noble, but it no longer is. The world would be better off if people in the advanced societies worked less and played more. Unnecessary work is not harmonious, and ought not to be done. Green campaigners rightly ask why political leaders and company executives have to meet face to face travelling thousands of miles by air to do it, when they can do it more effectively and less destructively by using modern communications.

It all highlights that other problem of the modern world, that people are forced to work in seeking work to get their marginal benefits from the state. Marginal benefits should be willingly given to anyone because they mean people need not work if they are willing to live at the margin. If they want to be musicians, artists, writers, and so on over many creative fields, then why stop them? They are happy to have a bare living to allow themselves to do what they chose, and surely that is to the benefit of society. Technology such as computerization, miniaturization and robotics mean there is less need for people to work because there is less manufacturing work to be done. Why then force people to jump through hoops. Let them be creative and cut down on the despoiling of the world. Society should be planning for the unemployed, because there will be more of them as technology advances. Leisure and creative activities are much more important now than work. Our aim should be to manage it in a non-coercive way, and a way that minimizes the impact on the environment. Creativity and leisure ought to be encouraged and facilitated with huge benefits for society and individuals. The emphasis should be on more for less.

Given the chance to do their own thing, people can be genuinely creative and will come up with original works and ideas. There must be ways of promoting the ideas and distributing the works, if people want them. A virtuous, creative life can be lived supported by the state but at a level that will not disrupt natural flows, but will permits an immense blossoming of creativity. No one need fear starvation, and people’s creative efforts will be directed at living the simple and harmonious life. It will be a virtuous circle!

The critic of such a Stoical type of worldview might say that Nature is not necessarily good, and that is reflected in the wish of many people to have more than their share, to be greedy and covetous instead of virtuous or righteous. There are always people who are selfish and self-indulgent. No doubt, it had some evolutionary advantage at one time, but now it is a maladaptation. The point of any world view is to demonstrate its benefits, and that ought not to be too difficult when the world is visibly suffering. People are free to chose, even in a world that is determined, as we have seen, because of complexity and chaos theories, so there is no getting away from social disapproval for greed and selfishness. The disapproval is valid, and should lead on to retraining. They must be taught that evolution is not necessarily up.

Human beings cannot expect to escape the mass culling that Nature will impose if human beings are not willing to limit their own intake and numbers. What is fittest is not always what is best, and the result is that the situation rapidly changes when overexploitation of resources leads to famine. Then what was fittest is least fit, and the ones who could manage on least survive while the rest starve. The first are last and the last first! Humanity might die out or evolve into being a type of tapeworm to survive. Who knows? But we have intelligence, and unless we use it, the outlook is bleak. Praying to imaginary divinities will get people nowhere in this crisis, but basing our outlook on reality and science can give us a chance. Otherwise we can look forward to a tapeworm existence such as we had in the Christian Dark Ages, or even extinction.

Psychological Interpretation

Aldous Huxley brackets religion with science as equally faulty psychological interpretations of the world. He believes art is superior to science, apparently because it is a feeling that is more internalized than science. Science depends on a mundane use of the senses and then logic to make observations, offer descriptions then hypotheses to explain them, followed by experiments, more observations and more descriptions of the results to test the hypotheses. Ultimately, science finds the world has underlying structures different from how it seems, structures that seem impossible to normal experience except that they explain normal experience astonishingly well. What emerges from apparently impossible discoveries actually describe the world we experience excellently!

Art, of course, when merely appreciated in a gallery, is observed and described similarly, but usually does not go below the appearance. To do so is either to analyse the media and the artistic techniques used, or to attempt to work out the psychology of the artist. Thus artistic interpretation, other than simply admiring the outcome as it is, is either a double psychological confusion, or it is little different and less practically useful than science.

Huxley doubtless meant the original artist when he wrote, not the art appreciator, supposing the artist’s creation is a purely internal thing. May be! But what art can be purely internal? Artists depend upon their own psychological view of the world, and might be fond of distorting or consciously re-interpreting it for artistic novelty. Such work might be beautiful or ghastly, but it is no more true than the image of Aphrodite Hecube spoke to Helen about in Euripides words.

The greater truth of science is that it is checked by other people and cannot be accepted unless it is true. Moreover, it is constantly tested in the applications it spawns. They could not work if science was false. Any untruth in it would also eventually cause a disastrous collapse in some field of science, and perhaps in all of it. This has happened. Done properly, science is self-correcting. Aldous Huxley was a clever hack desperate to distinguish himself from cleverer members of his family like Grandad Thomas and brother Julian, excellent scientists. He fancied himself a philosopher, and therefore, superior. He was certainly a gifted writer, and that ought to have been sufficient for him.

Only One God?

Any pious Christian, Moslem and Jew will agree on one thing—there is only one God! Yet before the Persians, who initiated the move to one God, everyone believed in many gods of different sexes and ages! Arguably, Christians believe in three gods of quite different types, but conflated as merely aspects of the oldest one in the Trinity. Why then do people believe ostensibly in only one God? It is simply that others in their peer group demand it. Belief is a fashion. It changes with time, even though believers claim God is constant. Believers can reconcile the God of earlier times with their current God fad simply by believing above all that everything, however impossible, is possible for God. So the god of the Jews in the Jewish scriptures can be the god of the Christian “New Testament”, though one is a paranoid tyrant fond of brutal and unjust murder, whereas the Christian God—supposedly the same “constant” God—is a God of love!

Christians can see no problem about this, yet they cannot accept the god of the Moslems, though the Moslems say He is the same God as that of the Jews and Christians. Naturally, therefore, Christians cannot accept that those who believed in pantheons of gods were right, even though many of the ancients saw them, like the Christian Trinity, as aspects of a Supreme Being. In fact, to imagine a single god able to appear in any form He chooses is closer to human experience in that gods are projections of ourselves, and any god external to ourselves must be Nature. If gods truly are some sort of supernatural species, then it makes far more sense that there should be many of them than that there should be one only, not for procreative reasons but for social ones. No intelligent life could live forever alone while remaining sane! Perhaps that is why transcendental super-beings seem only to appear to madmen.

A New Morality

The horror of the wars of the twentieth century moved intelligent people to think fundamental changes were needed either in human morality or human society. Those who thought morality should change looked to the failure of religions to produce suffiently moral people, or a sufficiency of moral people, to bring about a moral and thence a spiritual renewal. Those who thought the change had to be in society mainly thought Marxism was the right approach to better social relations. In a sense, the two are the same.

The trouble has been that the achieving of wealth and power corrupts, so that people can only think in terms of their own selfish aims. Wealth does not generally satisfy greed, but stimulates people to seek more wealth at whatever moral cost. Personal power is rarely used altruistically for good but is commonly used for the selfish and corrupt purpose of maintaining a person or class in perpetual superiority in society, irrespective of any good or merit. Appeals to morality rarely influence such people for good. They simply ignore them or pay them lip-service only. Their addiction to wealth and power is usually total.

What worries them is the alternative—the threat of revolution. Revolution has traditionally had to be the alternative because democracy is totally in the control of the ruling caste of the corporate owners, their executives, and professional politicians. Marx observed that no dominant social group will freely surrender its dominance—even when it has been decided democratically! Greedy and corrupt rulers are not willing to accept democratic rule when it means their own loss of power and privilege. If there is to be a new morality, it follows that those with a revolutionary attitude must bring it about, since the elite will oppose it tooth and nail. Unfortunately, the elite succeed, through their control of communications, in bamboozling enough people into thinking there is no alternative to the “status quo”.

The bamboozled are therefore also unwilling to take up a new moral position. They stick to the old values, wicked and demonstrably awful though they may be, because they permit them a certain present day comfort they are unwilling to risk. Such people are happy with a religion that makes no moral demands on them. Most Christians are happy to be sinners because God wants to help to save them in their struggle against evil, whereas an unwitting sin will send someone already good to hell, or so we learn in the Christian “New Testament”. The record of the religions of the patriarchal God of the Jews, Christians and Moslems is manifestly immoral and blood splattered, as even the Jewish scriptures confirm, but so too does Christian and Islamic history. Those who innocently come to these religions get contaminated and end up defending them in all their wickedness. They cannot be defended! The new morality must entail the abandonment of the patriarchal religions.

Twentieth century intellectuals have often called for a “new synthesis”, perhaps using the Hegelian description of progress modified by Marx. The dialectic requires a new synthesis to emerge from a previous thesis and antithesis, but if these involve earlier religious forms like the currently popular patriarchal ones then there is nothing new in them. They cannot be accepted at all! Despite their professed ethical codes, they have consistently, if not continually, presided over stupendously evil actions. The ethical code that could go into the mix is much more ancient, and one which these patriarchal religions pretend to endorse—the “Perpetual Philosophy”.

Even that has to be subject to the proven criteria of truth in the modern world—the scientific method. The nonsensical descriptions and explanations offered by orthodox religionists have to be rejectrd no less than the pseudoscientific babbling of New Agers. Christians doubtless think talk of “vibrations” and “energy” as used by fanciful New Age religionists are risible, but so too are the Christians’ use of “soul”, “spirit” and “God”. Language alienates unless it can be demonstrated to mean something. Nonsense has to be abandoned in favour of proven sense. Science offers it.

AS Delphians and the Universal Revolution

Now, it ought to be plain that, in the face of the control of the media by the greedy transnational owners and their placed men in governments, a mass change of opinion against the corrupt rulers is unlikely. So, even a democratic electoral victory is unlikely to happen in the short term. It is up to us to begin building the new morality from the ground up. Curiously, this is just the situation Jesus was in when he told parables about a mustard seed growing into a vast tree, and similar metaphorical tales he told. The message is one of building unity from small beginnings until an irrestible force of people emerges. People had to be recruited, converted perhaps, taught the basics and made evangelical. The situation is the same for us.

Given successive schools about Nature, science, politics and the necessity for change, the morality of self-sufficiency and mutual respect—instead of greed and professing to “love” those you obviously hate—can certainly be built. The new morality has to be a practical morality not an idealistic one, and is driven by our desire to leave a living world for our children, not the stinking spoil heap they will get otherwise! It is unnatural and unrealistic for people to love anyone other than a small group of people, usually family members and close friends, but there is no reason why we should not respect each other, especially when human beings all begin to pull in the same direction, and it is perfectly natural for people to want to preserve their own bloodline—people love their children and grandchildren because they contain in their genes what remains of themselves.

Respect is acted upon in living by the maxim, “Do unto others as you would be done by”. You do not have to love them, but it makes eminent sense not to harm others if you would rather they did not harm you, and indeed to help those who need it, in the expectation that they will return the favour. Behind it is a selfish desire that you will be well treated, but in turn you have to give a little of the same to others. It is the pragmatic way of living, not the idealistic one. It gets the reward of peace and security in this world, not the promise of peace and security in another world beyond death when the most profound peace is inevitable.

So, sound practical resons can be given for painstakingly digging the foundations of a new society, because they will not grow spontaneously in a short time. As the situation worsens, the economic and social position of people will help them realise that change is essential. We have to be ready to show them the proper significance of social and economic misfortunes contrary to the lies the media will put out. People will begin to see that preserving the environment is a necessity, whatever the politicians and corporate lawyers say in excuse. The meaning of the economics of greedy capitalism will make itself clear to more and more, but the prophets of the new morality have to draw the conclusions and lead the way forward.

The prophets are the Adelphiasophist Delphians, the teachers, thinkers and leaders of the movement. Everyone can aspire to be a saviour by helping the Goddess, but the Delphians are those who put their mental and analytical abilities to the service of us all through scientific analysis and building sound praxis. They are saviours of special vision, self-discipline and skills, capable of instructing us and leading us out of confusion. They eschew the religious need for belief in the supernatural, but study the development of Nature, and look to ways in which we can live symbiotically with Nature, not antagonistically with her.

Faith is needed still, but it is faith in the ability of us to live within Nature symbiotically, not faith in ghosts and spirits. Science has shown that nonlinear systems such as those involving feedback can be chaotic—so human social movements are unlikely to be predictable unambiguously. Our own expectations can change the outcome, but the free will we exert is similarly nonlinear, so our very expectations can be counter-productive, especially in the face of spoiling propaganda in the media. Faith is needed that we can get through this, and that the AS way is the right thing to do to save the world. It is the way of seeking the salvation of all life pn earth, not selfishly seeking a personal salvation as the Christian does, while letting the rest of the living world go to hell. If it does, then we shall follow!

A personal faith that is genuinely unselfish but from which we and our children get real benefit must surely be better than selfish and impossible fancy! These ideas are not new. Early in the twentieth century people like Julian Huxley and H G Wells were imagining a world outlook compatible with science but in the form of a new religion devoted to the universal commonwealth. Even earlier, Marx had noted the selfishness and greed that always seemed to accompany any social group achieving the state of dominant class. His prophecy that the manufacturing class of “wage slaves”, the workers in factories, would win the ultimate revolution and form a classless society was wrong. Like Jesus, who prophesied the kingdom of God in the lifetime of his disciples, Marx was a false prophet. Whether the greedy rulers were cleverer than Marx anticipated, or the working class were unable to unite as he had thought they would, the revolution did not come as he had imagined, and the ones that did come failed, whether immediately or after a time.

The victorious class that has emerged everywhere is the selfish, self-perpetuating managerial class foreseen by James Burnham (“The Magerial Revolution”). The point is that a working class victory could not have given a classless society anyway. The classless society has to be a society of the whole commonwealth—willingly because everyone knows there is no alternative—not just a part of it. People are beginning to see the threat we pose to ourselves. Now it is possible. The universal commonwealth, save only the small, if wealthy, class of corporate raptors at the summit of the social power pyramid, is all inclusive. The green revolution is the universal, the ultimate revolution whereby the human race saves the world from its own greed, the economic and moral revolutions experienced simultaneously.

Morality and Democracy in the Moneyed Meritocracy

The Adelphiasophist “weltanschauung” brings back into the struggle for revolutionary change a genuinely altruistic moral aspiration that traditional Christianity has lost, if other than a few outstanding Christians ever had it. The traditional Marxist outlook was that the change was inevitable in the longer run, though it needed a vanguard of dedicated revolutionaries to bring it into a reasonable timescale. Perhaps some of this vanguard had a sense of a new morality, or perhaps they were motivated merely by the old morality of greed and power grubbing, but there is no moral aspiration for the majority in a supposedly inevitable process. That is the trouble with a Christianity motivated by faith and nothing more:

What doth it profit, my brethren, though a man say he hath faith, and have not works? Can faith save him?

“James” 2:14

The Adelphasophists have their own good works, and their own vanguard in its Delphians, but every one of us can be motivated by the melding of selfishness and altruism in the most important works possible—making our environment whole again—a much longer and harder task than destroying it—and insisting that human needs are fulfilled symbiotically and not exploitatively. We aspire to a better world because it will be a more natural world, but yet managed on Nature’s behalf to ensure diversity and beauty. Our science and technology should be oriented to sustaining the world in a form that is most conducive to species diversity by extending inviolable spaces and wildernesses until we live in an inviolable world. A diverse world is a world more suitable to the human species. Thus there is an incentive for everyone to make a moral effort that will bear fruit in the historical process.

Those who will not, of course, are those with a vested interest in the “status quo”. The political right wing, which represents these interests maintain with Adam Smith that capitalism sustains a natural harmony of interests between capitalists, entrepreneurs, managers and workers, but the capitalists rarely live next door to their factories, quarries, waste heaps or workers these days. They do not suffer the experience of the immediate despoilation of their habitat that lesser mortals and other species have to endure. Even so, it is coming to them too.

While James Burnham was reanalysing Marx’s arguments, and coming to a different conclusion, president Rooseveldt was making the false prophecy that “there must be no place after the war for special privileges for either individuals or nations”. Now, in a new century, the people at the top of the main corporations in the US are neither satisfied with their own privileges nor the status of the nation itself, though it is the sole superpower, privileged by virtue of its own unchallenged solitary status and corporate greed of its leaders.

Any community of interests that there once might have been—simply that capital investment gave some workers an income—is now multiply lost in the destruction of environment and quality of life. Corporate bosses must know that ultimately the whole planet must succumb to the exploutation of its resources, loss of natural checks and balances, and pollution, but, if they do, they do not care. They will have enjoyed the best of all possible lives while they lived. They could not care less what happens when they die, or to whom it happens, and those who think they are Christians will die believing they will have a balmy place for eternity. Sad!

These super-managers talk of freedom, seeming to speak generally when they specifically mean their own freedom to do as they like. Burnham knew that freedom would be largely meaningless in the new plutocracy which would be a new form of totalitarianism, now called democratic dictatorship. Control of the media by privileged representatives of the “moneyed meritocracy” effectively persuades a block of the voting public to collude with their rulers. No doubt it has always been so, but, in the face of those who prophesied a new Christian morality after the war, Burnham foresaw a collapse of Christian and liberal thought and practice. The Christianity of modern Christians that identifies themselves with the corporate class, bears no relationship to that of the poor Galilean they profess to follow. They are as divorced from any genuine morality as their medieval Catholic forebears in the courts of Avignon. Their morals are whatever is convenient. Democracy cannot survive in an immoral society.

The extent to which humanity can respond to the serious challenge before it depends to what extent people get to understand what is really going on, and their willingness to abandon old morality in favour of new. Salavation is not private, it is collective. Our deity is not transcendental, she is real, and we depend on her wellbeing. Nature serves us with only one condition—that we accept our duty to offer her service in return. Holiness is not an abstration. It is fulfilling a sacred duty to the Goddess.

The Road to Fascism

Adelphiasophists surmise, along with others, that the natural state of human beings is to enjoy a feeling of oneness with Nature, a feeling of wholeness with the world, and a feeling of identity with their community, the extended family of kinunity. There was no alienation between the individual and the community people originally lived in, and that whole community saw itself as under the care of the Goddess Nature, so long as it treated her with respect.

This system gave primitive people, in the hunter-gatherer phase, a deep sense of security, though, to us, their lives seem precarious. In fact, hunter-gatherer existence is indeed secure, so long as people were not forced to live in marginal land, dessicated or frozen. Nature provided adequately, and there was no need or thought of anyone having to grab a surplus. Everyone had what they wanted and there could have been no contradiction between self-interest, community and Nature. The aim of the new morality is to heal the rift between these that arose when people turned to gardening and farming.

Initially these skills arose from gathering seeds and domesticating some of the hunted animals, giving even greater security, there being no longer the need to follow the herds or wander afar to gather seeds, berries and roots. The trouble set in by the exhausting of resources by over-population, over-usage, famine and disease. Society divided into classes in which the powerful or cunning took, as of right, a surplus of produce, leaving the others to make it up through extra effort, or to live in poverty. They justified their privilege through protection rackets—by claiming to be offering protection either from other people or from the machinations of spirits in Nature. Thus the warrior and priestly classes arose, and the people began to feel alienated from others and from the world itself.

The unity of the indiviual with others and with Nature should be the aim of modern world views or religions. It imposes a fundamental duty—to seek to save Nature, to preserve her in as diverse a form as posssible. Personal salvation, presented as it is, as a supernatural event, is worthless. Salvation comes through service, through duty, not through blind faith and the donation of tithes to rich parasites, or even poor ones! Our duty is Nature, and She provides, but can only do it while she is healthy. What can be wrong with that?

Without a useful and practical moral code humans have shown a strong inclination for artificial—unnatural—solutions. Unity is sought through the strong politician, or the strong state, or the strong Church. We get dictators and totalitarianism, we elect cynics and liars, then admire them for doing just as they like, with no regard to the principles of freedom, despite their electoral mantras. They punish us, and we enjoy it because it is necessary. They persuade us we have “sinned” and need correcting. Fascism puts its iron heel on us!

Jack o’Lantern Guides

Inevitably, there are people in the world whose aim is to distract others from seeking genuine solutions to human social dyslexia by luring them unwittingly back to the tired and multiply discredited ways of conventional religion. Whether these people are pseudo-orientalists, pseudo-scientists or Madame Ga-Ga and her ilk, they are easily recognized and should be ignored.

Strong religions cause social stagnation, poverty and misery. Europe under the popes, China and India are all continental sized examples. The Tibetan Dalai Lama is a current favourite of these tricksters, but Tibet under the Lamas was a horrific place for centuries, and a correspondent to these pages has confirmed that young monks, in her own experience, were forced to live in caves as anchorages, effectively starving until they died, often of TB. Much of Catholic South and Central America is still barbaric and illiterate, the popes vigorously opposing their own prelates on the ground who have formulated a theology of liberation. It will soon be needed in the USA, if the religious right continues to grow.

In thousands of years, religious ideas have generally forced people into ignorance and poverty, yet today’s gurus and prophets still speak in mumbo-meaningless words like “the kingdom of God”, “spiritual insight”, “soul”, “mystical thought”, “adepts”, and so on, to the limits of anyone sane’s boredom threshold. What is an “adept” adept at? The answer will be more of the same—“mystical insight”, “knowing the face of God”, or whatever, but rarely anything useful like purifying a polluted river, preventing epidemics, greening the desert, or even setting a broken limb. Yet every crypto-religious prophet or guru will claim it is our inappreciation of adepts, mystical inexperience, lack of spirituality or excessive sinfulness, or any other blather, that is our present day failure.

Whatever all this is, it is plainly enough true of modern humanity, but the question is whether human beings were ever any different. The main difference between us and humanity in pre-literate times is that then they took their dreams more seriously than we do now. They were less able to distinguish dreams and reality, but to conclude from that that we have lost some vital ability is fallacious reasoning. Dreams still offer us solutions to problems that are troubling us because they reflect the unconscious workings of the mind. They give us intuitive answers, and did the same for more primitive people who were unable thenmselves to consciously reason things out.

When Kekulé conceived of the benzene ring from a dream, it seems far-fetched to say his experience was mystical, and few would say it was. Yet, ultimately it is the practical reality behind shamanism. Mystical experience in the guru’s terms is described as “experiencing the numinous”, or some such mumbo-phrase. It seems to mean the same as “spiritual”, or, for some, God. but so far as any rational person can tell, it is a profound feeling of awe at the world!—at Nature!—not God, though religious conditioning makes many of those who experience it attribute it to God. These false leaders and the Jack o’Lantern guides, intent on taking us back into the slough of religious ignorance, must now be discarded. We can test our beliefs, and so there is no need to believe obfuscators and downright liars. We can believe what has been conclusively shown to be so.

The Common Good

The neurosis of alienation of modern people is undoubtedly characterized by a destructively obsessive selfishness. People no longer identify with the common good when they reach a powerful status. The powerless—the poor and meek, in gospel parlance—do identify together, realising the only power they have is communal, but let a poor man be raised to a position of authority, and his identification with his neighbours is the first of his principles to be abandoned.

The shyster gurus and prophets of spirituality and soul want us to recover some, apparently lost, “inner life”, because all we think about nowadays is the physical world we live in. For the false prophets, this is not progress. They have spent millennia persuading us there is another world, alternately inner and transcendent, that we have been missing, even though, to them, its is perfectly accessible with a lot of “faith” and a minimum of practice. They are naturally quite ready to show us how, for a fee! Human consciousness belies it, but people still too readily believe. Our evolurion has taken us further into awareness of the real world, and our fellow humans and other species within it, and we are now beginning to realise we are destroying the cocoon which keeps us living.

An escapist might like to meditate, pray, get drunk or take opium to avoid the issue. Escapists can find a suitable prophet to waste their thoughts and their energy. Those able to identify with the vast world of life outside themselves can devote themselves to being saviours—saviours of the real and material Goddess that succours us. The rich and wealthy cannot do it. Their own selfish interests are too compelling. The pre-Christian Essenes knew it. The Jesus of the gospels—an Essene too!—knew it. Absolute personal poverty was their prime virtue.

The selfishness of poor people is is served through them uniting to get the changes they desire. They were never sufficiently united to win the war, even though they won some battles, and the gospels seem to describe a battle won by an Essene leader called Jesus against the Romans, the USA of its time. The Church had to hide it, so it became a weird incident, that of the curing of the Gadarene madman!

Blessed are the poor, we read, because only they can be saved. In truth, only they can be saviours! Our possessions are baubles. Only the most wealthy can leave sufficient wealth to their children to make them powerful too. The most fortunate of the rest of us can leave a house, and perhaps a few dollars, enough to make our children obsessively selfish to have it, and to use it to support reactionary politicians pretending it is something to conserve. Meanwhile, they gleefully destroy what needs conserving so that they can add to their collection of dollar bills.

Baubles become shackles. The poor are constrained only by their poverty. Having enough sets them free, and we all get enough by sharing—by fellowship—by kinunity. The Essenes were no more impoverished than the medieval monks. It was simply that their personal possessions were minimal. Their wealth was communal, and they identified with the common good. The Christian Right cannot face it, but the “Acts of the Apostles” could not be clearer—the first Christians were communists! Marx noticed it and built on it. That is why Marxism is a secular heresy of Christianity, and, like all heresies, it has been purged because its essence is too true!

The Evolution of Outlook

The heretics who opposed the mumbo priests of Catholicism 800 years ago were no less mumbo priests themselves, though closer to the Essene founders of Christianity and so much more morally upright. They congregated in convents of about twelve people for the purposes of thanksgiving and education. Later the convents of the heretics became the covens of the witches. Twelve is an excellent number for a group of people learning. At the head is the teacher, the person already well versed in the subject being studoed, the Perfect of the Cathars, the adept of the gurus, the Delphian of the Adelphiasophists. Others might all be novices, or some might have some knowledge and experience. The aim is to bring everyone as close as possible to the level of the Delphian so that they can go out and coach others and the circle of saviours continually expands.

The Greeks had the notion of praxis. It was the use of practical skills but not ones merely learnt by trial and error, but skills informed by proven theory. Since Adelphiasophism bases itself on the scientific method, properly tested scientific theory should be the proper constituent of its praxis. Practice informs theory too and practical experience has to be taken into account as Adelphiasophism grows, but the danger of pseudo-scientific justification has to be avoided.

A failure of many movements ancient and modern, not least Christianity and Marxism, is that their proponents will not allow them to be wrong, will not allow them to fail. The original analyses of Christ and the early founders of Christianity, and Marx, Engels and Lenin for Marxism were fossilized and eventually could not be gainsaid. They were cited as absolute authority, irrespective of anything that falsified them. To avoid dogma, theory must yield to new hypotheses, but they should not be accepted willy-nilly lest theory degenerate into faddiness and the movement would spallate. Hypotheses have to pass proper tests that base them in the real world, to avoid the whims of supposed masters and gurus, and only be accepted when they conform with these tests.

Should the Adelphiasophists feel excitement or pride at their achievements? Just as asceticism has much to commend it, there is nothing wrong with emotions or emotional responses so long as the response is not maudlin or excessive so that it affects others. The Adelphoiasophist respects evcerything else in Nature, and remains concerned not to offend the earth. It makes them aware of their emotions and the results of them, especially in excess. “Everything in moderation” is an acceptable motto to the Adelphiasophist, so, with this as a condition, everyone can do what is natural to them. The supposed mystic, Alistair Crowley, had the motto, “Do as thou wilt”, and Aldous Huxley had the same. The latter-day witches added “but do no harm”. Adelphiasophism agrees with the witches! We cannot do as we like with no regard for the rest of the world.

The enlargement of consciousness for which many persons today are showing a need and a capacity may be the salvation of society.

J B Coates, Ten Modern Prophets

The Adelphiasophism of Aldous Huxley

Aldous Huxley thought worshipping one God only distorted the human personality because it suppresses too many aspects of it that a broader polythesistic worship guiltlessly permits. He quoted Pausanias:

All the gods ought to be given praise.

Huxley, unlike a Greek peasant, is unlikely to have accepted a pantheon of supernatural entities demanding praise, but the sensible view is that polytheism is healthier than monotheism, if gods must be praised at all. Huxley thought that because humans have minds, they should be allowed to think, as they have senses they should be allowed to be sensual, instincts should be allowed to be satisfied, passions should be yielded to from time to time, imagination, a feeling of beauty, a sense of awe, then humans should be allowed to create, enjoy beautiful forms, tremble before Nature and venerate it. Human beings are multifarious, inconsistent, self-contradictoty, and the Greeks accepted it all as natural, living multifariously, inconsistently and contradictorily. Polytheism gave divine approval to their acceptance of reality, and we can accept the same subject to the condition that it does not offend Nature.

Monotheism is the divine justification of autocracy and authoritarianism. Its aim is to suppress diversity of action and belief, and to propagate only what the autocrats want—whatever keeps the mass in order and the “status quo” unchallanged. When monostheism is at its most dominant, people become robots, and the higher arts and science, requiring creativity are smothered. So it was in the Dark Ages. Momoptheism is the natural ally of totalitarianism, but clerics and dictators do not willingly share the power that each wants to themselves, and nor can the disciples of each share their unquestioned devotion with the other.

The sensible dictator professes piety, while eliminating his clerical opponents. The sensible cleric has a similar attitude in the theocratic state to princes and generals. Pluralism is the natural enemy of all this, and why pluralism is superior to monotheism. It cannot prevent elitism, but it keeps it constantly in tension. Better still is to accept polytheism as simply reflecting the immense diversity of Nature. Knowing it is to appreciate immediately that to think God is a rock is to make Him a nonentity on the natural scale. To make Him the sun or a notional sun illuminating the sun is little better. Believers are two simple to see God as other than one dimensional. They reject Nature because it is far too complicated for simple minds.

Huxley in Brave New World shies at science, especially biology and the emerging science of psychology, but inspection shows it is the dictatorial rulers of the world who misuse science to achieve their own ends. Half a century after the fascist war, science is perhaps even less well regarded than it was in the thirties of the last century. But, as we have continually pleaded, science is neutral and scientists have a minimum of political power. They are the employees employed by corporations and governments. It is these who own science and scientists, and misuse and abuse them. Not that scientists cannot be rednecks like the odious Edwards Teller, but most have little choice in what they get paid to do, and cannot be held responsible for the way their bosses use their discoveries.

There is notthing intrinsically wrong with modifying genes. What is wrong is that greedy corporate bosses do not want to put up with strict safety regimes and exhaustive checks to ensure the genetic modifications cannot damage the environment. Similarly they are not willing to spend the money needed to reduce polluting emissions that will set off changes that will destroy half the world—but when they are dead, and they imagine, since many are Christians, they will be observing the problems they made for future generations from their grand-stand seats in heaven. Anything that costs money today and eats into their profits today, the greedy classes cannot abide, even when their grandchildren will suffer like everyone else. Protestors against science ought to protest against those who commission the projects with a view to getting rich from corporate patents of new technology. Huxley should have shown…

…the right as well as the wrong of science in relation to the development of social and economic forces and the conflict of social classes.

J B Coates, Ten Modern Prophets

The crypto-Christianity of most modern prophets is plain in that their solution to the economic and psychological problems of humanity is “love” or “non-violence” even though the absence of these qualities is symptomatic of the problem. It is like telling someone sick to get better. It is not that easy. Asking people to love anything or everything is an impossible favour, and asking people not to be violent when society glorifies it, cannot be any easier.

Psychological problems are rarely cured unless the problem is recognized and accepted, and the damage seen as its inevitable consequence. People will respond when they think their bad behaviour will come back to them like Nemesis. Violence to the environment is easily shown to have consequences for everyone in it. That is why the salvation of Nature is the salvation of humanity. The opposite—excessive self-indulgence, excessive obsession with gratifying personal senses and needs—“do what thou wilt” with no conditions—only exhausts and angers the goddess. Personal salvation in the church fashion is an example. Believers are obsessed with their own fears of death, and obsessively pursue what they think is a God-favoured relief from them. Selfish salvation is the opposite of what the world needs, yet the prophets will not cease advocating it while their grateful converts reward them with dollar bills by the million.

Sexuality

Sexual restriction really amounts to sexual prohibition. When contraceptives are forbidden,people have to have uneconomically large families or do without sex all together. When marriage is forever, its failure causes guilt and sexual repression for fear of offending God. When the servants of the Chruch are already considered married to Christ, those who are genuinely pious subject themselves to agonies of temptation.

The psychological effects of sexual self-denial is plain. When the vows of chastity are not utterly abandoned in a glut of self-indulgence, the outlet is cruelty and sadism. Few Catholics can be a unaware of the Sisters of Mercy, or whatever they called themselves, who tortured and humuiated them in primary school. These nuns were notorious, and many of the Jesuit and Dominican monks who taught in secondary schools were no better. Their self-righteous punishment of fractious children mixed up with their perverted enjoyment of sexual pleasure, and the children ended up with purple stripes across bare buttocks. Sometimes worse. In a society largely conditioned by sexual proscriptions, this sadism goes further, manifesting in violence to minorities, militarism and the glorification of supposed righteous war. Suppression of one’s natural sexual inclinations in the religious perversion called Christianity is more important to God, it seems, than is killing witches, wogs, gooks, commies, Arabs, or any category of humanity defined by our Christian leaders as sub-human, heretical, Satanic or otherwise disposable to them.

The answer is to show the meaning of sexual love and attraction in Nature, how it works to provide the circumstances for procreation. Of course, civilised society cannot allow abandoned children to scavenge for a living in the streets, so the results of sexual activity have to be controlled. Adelphiasophism accepts that besides personal discipline and contraception, abortion is a legitimate way to save waifs from starving on our streets as they do in Christian Brazil and non-Christian India. The death of an embryo before it is conscious is better than letting conscious human children starve slowly and in squalor.

The rightness of sexual expression cannot have anything to do with marriage, an artificial imposition of the Church, part of its dominating policy of sexual restriction. Whether people have sexual relations before marriage or adulterously during it cannot be considered wicked except that it suits the power of the clerics. An adulterous sexual relationship might be seen as deceitful or disloyal to a partner unaware of it, but that is the separate question of their mutual trust. Today many people eschew marriage and either place their reliance on mutual trust or agree that sexual adventures are acceptable to each other. Both forms of relationship work reasonably well within the modern understanding that people are as likely to grow apart as they are likely to grow together, especially when relationships are formed at an early age, so that lifetime relationships are less common being unforced.

The stumbling block we all have to face is that the ordinary people, even intelligent ones, are subverted into supporting the ideals of the corporate class by their absolute control of the media of propaganda. The Marxists called this the hegemony of the capitalists class, coercion being rarely used, it being unnecessary when the majority could be persuaded that the mores of the ruling class were right. Religion was the first use of this principle. Huxley complained that you could not preserve people from collective madness or suicide when they persisted in paying divine honours to ideals that were mainly properties of their own personalities—they were worshipping themselves. You cannot help people who persist in the behaviour that is the cause of their plight, it is true, but their plight is their weakness. The dire consequences to everyone of continuous damage to our world is getting more and more obvious. The worry is that by the time there is a sufficiently united movement for change, it will be too late through hysteresis, but the evidence is daily getting more compelling. Fires, hurricanes, droughts, floods, extremes of weather point more and more aggressively to global heating. Yet our Christian leaders prefer to kill Moslems as the latest of the evil empires they create through their monopolistic and monocular foreign policies. The urgency of the situation should impel us all to campaign more vigorously. Let us do it! If we leave it too late we might all die, but we shall die trying while the Christians will die praying.

As for the gurus, many think that yogic practices, especially meditation is valuable in making adepts. Supposedly, through essentially solitary practices like yoga and meditation, people can be freed of the personality—“the bondage of ego”—that keeps everyone, er… solitary! Freedom from the ego means cravings and desires evaporate and, Lo! the yogi also gets filled with God, thus becoming good. Not that many such people have emerged to change the world. Perhaps they cannot be expected to because they spend so much time meditating and standing on their heads. It is not surprising that not many people have time for yoga but those that do set up institutions like those set up by Christian evangelicals—as siphons for the spare dollars of the gullible.

n the excluded fields, the old confidence tricks were still the proper approach. Religion was defined as the field of morality, despite its history of utter immorality and even depravity. Similar arguments have attracted vast sums of money to bribe the avaricious from weak-kneed millionaires deperate to impress God whom they think admires lucre as much as they do. To judge by the churches, He does too! The brother of Aldous Huxley, the biologist and science populariser, Julian Huxley, wanted a synthesis of religion and science, and, at the end of the century, the man who, even more famously, had the same role, Stephen Jay Gould, in what must have been a bout of moral malaise, wrote that science and religion had their own ““magisteria””—precincts of application. Gould bizarrely left morality to the Christians, but Huxley had a more sensible idea—to devise a proper religion first, then synthesise it with science. The synthesis would be easy because any proper religion would have to be founded on science in the first place. Huxley’s “developed religion” would have to advance a right relationship between the individual and the community, thus enriching everyone’s personality and sociability. It would rid people of their sense of helplessness and alienation by giving them a place and a purpose in a community intent on achieving generally agreed objectives. No one would be neglected. Everyone would be found a role valued however small. The objective for Huxley was human betterment, and so it remains, but in Adelphiasophism, it is literally a better, cleaner, safer, more diverse, and richer world for all cratures not just humans. A world in which all higher vertebrates were extinct except for human beings being kept alive by machines would be, not only a form of death, but a form of hell. Our aim is to make the world into a Garden of Eden.

It would be a religion of life, based on a sense of reverence for life, and a faith in the infinite capacity of life for enrichment and development.

J B Coates

His grandfather, Thomas H Huxley, had argued:

The universe is blind, irrational, cruel, immoral, and it is man’s proud duty to fight against its character and tendency.

It is plain that Huxley meant good by this but it is dangerous to talk of fighting Nature, and the cause of our troubles today. Christianity, with its egotistical God-given authority over Nature, its anthropocentric world view, and its absurd identity of Nature with an evil that loving Christian soldiers will burn and batter into submission is the source of the metaphor Huxley uses despite himself. In these Christian terms, Huxley sees the universe as the enemy. Christians believe that eyes and limbs that allow them to sin should be torn out or off. They are sitting on the branch of a tall tree that they were told to cut down as evil, and so are vigorously sawing it off at the trunk. Having crashed to earth with the branch, they are confident they will wake up a few moments later on a branch of an even better tree.

Attacking Nature as cruel, irrational, immoral and so on is foolish. Nature cannot be these things because they all require intent. Human beings can be considered to do things intentionally and so might be guilty of certain serious crimes, but when there is no intent, there can be no guilt. At worst, the crime then is negligence. These crimes and even negligence require consciousness or awareness of what is happening and why.

Nature is neutral in its actions—just as God seems to be, as the Asian tsunami shows—but human beings know what they are doing. A wave will drown anything in its path, and a flow of lava will burn anything in its path. Nature did not chose to do it. Christians who tied their enemies to wooden posts and burned them slowly from their feet up knew precisely what they were doing. If their God is almighty and has intent, as they claim, then He is responsible for both Nature’s actions and humanity’s within it. Huxley is right that God is nothing but a projection of humanity’s illusions, and the most serious of them is the illusion that Nature is our enemy. Our duty is the opposite of that proclaimed by Huxley and the Christian prophets. If Nature is damaged too much, then we shall die out more surely than the dinosaurs did. Birds surived but no human will.

At present the human race is a malignant tumour on the face of the earth. It is a self-destructive parasite that will kill its host and thereby kill itself. Unlike “blind” and “irrational” Nature, we know and understan what we are doing, and can decide to do something different. We can chose not to be a cancer or parasite on Nature, but instead join her in symbiosis, a partnership to our mutual benefit.. Our metaphor should not be of fighting Nature but of saving her. Humanity should be the saviours and protectors of our Goddess within whose womb we can live securely. There is simply no room anymore for the obvious selfishness that has moved us to illusions of personal salvation. Our salvation is that of our children and children’s children, and must come from altruism. We save ourselves only by saving others.

Gurus like R Niebuhr flog the old religious route to social progress, declaiming against “the corruption of the human heart”. Human beings cannot overcome their basic instincts. Effectively they are maladapted to the situation they are now in, and so respond wrongly. Their response is the fearful, xenophobic response of the small band of hominids that first emerged from africa to spread over the world—they were suspicious, aggressive towards strangers and unaware or indifferent to the fear they generated in other apes and species.

When large numbers of people are packed into little space as they are in modern cities, the primitive response is manifestly dangerous. The answer, so say the gurus, is the regeneration of the heart based on “spiritual insight” and “religious experience”. Doubtless the gurus have a new definition of “religious” and, like everyone else, take “spiritual” to mean whatever they please, but plain ordinary readers cannot disinguish “religion” from what they always knew religion to be—in the west, Christianity.

Yet Christianity in practice, throughout history has embodied every worst aspect of the primitive response! “Spiritual this” and “religious that” cannot serve to replace ancient instincts. They have to be pointed out rationally to people with their consequences, and then people can decide what to do. It is not sufficient, though, to leave it as a neutral decision. Given no credible way of effecting an alternative, no one would bother. The greedy rich cannot be provided with any incentive to bother because all their alternatives mean a loss of their wealth and power. But most people can be convinced of a superior good, one that is attainable by mutual endeavour and a determination not to be distracted by old illusions. The latter is all that the gurus who call for a renaissance of religion are advocating.

People need a purpose sure enough, and one that is not trivial or fantastic. Life after death seems an excellent purpose and reward for trying, but it is simply a confidence trick that people can never complain about when they are swindled—they are then dead and cannot complain about anything. Life! Not afterlife! Life provides its own life after death—that is what life is! When life ends for any life-form, like the dodo or humanity, then that species has neither a life nor an afterlife. We secure the afterlife of the human race and the remaining species in the world by preserving Nature. Salvation is conservation! Personal salvation is self-delusion.

If we are to believe the gurus that religion is the answer to social problems, then its failure over the whole of historical experience needs explaining, or religion cannot be what we have always understood it to be, and Julian Huxley is correct. The new religion has to be an expresion of people’s hopes based on science and accompanied by a political movement. Political means that which concerns people, and religions have always been political, but religious leaders—the shepherds—have always stood in their own or the ruling interest not that of the sheep—the people who practice it. Adelphiasophism is the new religion for those who want to call their world view a religion. It is what the early religions were—the boding together of the people in thanksgiving for the benefits of Nature. It rejects the failed patriarchal religions, their evangelists, prophets and gurus.

Admittedly Christianity always was a political religion despite the lies pators and clergy tell. Its political nature is seen nowhere better than in the Great Society, the USA, where TV evangelists back the rich man’s party, the Republicans, and Republican politicians make meretricious displays of piety. From Constantine until today, Christianity has politically supported and been supported by the ruling classes or castes and their theologians—today’s neo-cons and Straussists. A realistic and effective religion must be political, but it must not sell itself to the highest bidder as Christianity did, despite the pleas of the Christian God—or is it the Son of God? No rich man could get to heaven! Their incarnated God owned nothing and recommended His disciples to be the same. And so they were. The Christian holy scriptures tell us these things quite clearly. To get the Roman emperors on their side, the popes hastily pointed oput that God could do the impossible, and was happy to show off by doing it regularly for rich believers, despite His earlier warnings to them. Rich men were therefore all right!

Christianity was never able to recover, even though many individual Christians took their God literally, living in anchorages, monasteries and convents vowed personally to poverty. But they had no political power, and even though some, like S Francis tried, they had no way of correcting the corrupt Church leadership. Quite the opposite, the monastic orders were themselves rich and corrupt within a few generations of the lifetimes of their saintly founders.

Today in the USA, political corruptions is almost as transparent as it can be, but millions of American Christians cannot see it, because the corruption justifies their own un-Christian lifestyles, where here, “un-Christian” means un-Christ-like. In what sense are George W bush and his Christian cabinet Christ-like? None! Admittedly an effective religion, a political religion, has to have the people behind it, but their is no point to religion (or party) if it has to abandon its purpose and principles for popularity. That is precisely what Christianity has done.

A religion must be concerned with the political and economic condition of its followers on earth, whatever post-mortem promises it might make, but Christianity was not, and had to direct itself vicariously against movements that the Christian God could well have personally justified. The Cathars accepted apostolic poverty, but also allowed people a freedom that Catholicism denied them. The Cathar country became the most propsperous in an impoverished Europe. The Waldensians and Free Spirits, also accepted apostolic poverty. The Waldensians were driven into the valleys of the Alps, upland marginal lands, but still prospered until they were again cruelly persecuted by the Catholic Christians.

Besides their interest in living poor and humble lives, the Free Spirits took literally the example of Christ as a carpenter, determining that each should have a skill to earn an honest crust! In this they were like the Jewish rabbis. The Catholic Church thought every one had their pre-ordained place, mainly that of a serf, and should accept their position subject to lord and priest without complaint. The Free Spirits disagreed, founding the basis of craft production and mercantilism that manifested in the guilds and ultimately capitalism.

Today, conspicuous consumption, built-in obsolescence, faddism and fashion has led to such gross waste that the world’s resources, once thought inexhaustible, are getting exhausted! At the same time whole nations are left in such dire poverty their people are starving and succumbing to opportunistic diseases. This will not cease until the waste makers realise what they are doing, and how they will ultimately join the starving millions when resources become too expensive to remain commodities as they are to westerners now. Even westerners, therefore, have an urgent reason to espouse the cause of poverty. If they do not do it voluntarily, they will be forced into it.

The desire to save the earth rather than ravage it, will conserve natural resources and allow scientists and technologists time to find an alternative to our wasteful economic methods. It will not have to be poverty stricken, but it behoves us to adopt the motto “enough is sufficient”. More than enough will continue to offend the Goddess untol she gives up, and we choke or starve to death with the others.

An Adelphiasophist is, therefore, both missionary and revolutionary, as the Christian saviour was. Adelphiasophists are saviours—saviours of the world! They have that conviction, and accept that duty—to serve the most urgent, life and death purpose through their precept and example, their political activity and achievements.

The mystics of the world, false though their interpretation of their experience is, seem to agree that, to be genuinely good, people must not be attached to the objects of human desire like wealth, comfort, pleasure, success and power. They must not only not be self-indulgent but must be devoted to the good of all life. This conclusion offers the correct interpretation of their experience. They have not looked upon God but they have glimpsed the totality of Nature in all its interwoven connexions. In this sense, the eastern mystics who experienced the impersonal god were more correct than the Christian ones. Nature is all life, whence their maxim about being good. What they experienced is God only if Nature is God. It is! But since the female preceded the male, Nature must be a Goddess.

The Christian Perfect Being

The Jesus of the gospels is far from perfect. His teaching is often obscure and is inconsistent. What can “blasphemy against the Holy Ghost shall not be forgiven, neither in this world, or the world to come” mean? If we cannot serve God and Mammon, why should we be friends with the Mammon of Unrighteousness? Jesus can be horrible. He threatens sinners with torture in hell. He whips market traders carrying out legitimate businessin the temple forecourt. He cursed a poor fig tree simply doing what God had made it do. He made false prophesies that the end of the world is at hand, and that God will not allow His children to starve. When a hearer asked him for a sign he was genuine, he called the audience names. Would a good God do any of this let alone all of it?

Pious Fraud

John Macmurray, a twentieth century philosopher who wrote Challenge to the Churches thought nothing should stake a claim on our belief unless it was verified. He noticed that many philosophers were merely speculating, playing a game of little consequence and no confirmable truth—rather like theology. Like Marx, he thought philosophy had the purpose of changing the world, not just explaining it.

One thing that human beings are good at is changing the world. The question is, “Is it changing it for the better?” All too often it is not, and when the meaning of “better” is extended to include other species on earth, our success rate declines even further. It is a problem that philosophers could usefully address. Macmurray, though, like Shaw, was a Bergsonian, and had a poor opinion of science which he saw as useful only for manipulating matter. Belying his own principles, he made the unverified assertions that science can tell us nothing about reality or about values. Nothing can tell us about reality because all thought is symbolic. So, apparently the symbols we use for thought, such as these words we use for communicating, tell us nothing about reality. You have to admit these gurus are amazing.

What of values? No word of symbols now. Values depend on emotions, and they are addressed through art and religion. Science is subsidiary to these, Macmurray says, and art and religion must be free of the problem of symbolism! Even so, Macmurray accepts that science expresses one of the greatest values—truth. Adelphiasophsist would get rid of the qualification here. But what of other values?

What of beauty? the gurus like to go back to the speculations of Plato, a Pagan Greek whose works are preserved for us because Christians found his views agreeable and had no philosophy of their ownm. Plato thought the world we sensed—the real world—was an imperfect image of an ideal world which was perfect. Since this sounded like heaven, and the ideal objects or “forms” which constituted it sounded like souls, Christians were ready to accept Plato as a Christian though he did not know it. For the prophets and gurus, beauty is an ideal or a form in the world of of ideals. When we sense it, our aesthetic emotions are changed, and artists and acolytes rush off to express it in art and religion respectively. So it is that art and religion tells us a greater truth about reality than science does, even though the art and religion, far from being verifiable are often fakes and confidence tricks. Bauty is explained quite simply by science in the observation that dung is beautiful to a dung beetle. Give it the choice of dung and the Mona Lisa or the gospel of John, it will choose the dung. The gospel of John and the Mona Lisa are simply the dung of human beings. Bauty is how we view an environment that is conducive to our survival. Trees are beautiful to us but New Jersey is not.

John Macmurray was a Christian as barmy as most but had the saving grace of criticising the organised churches as a conservative and reactionary force. Christianity in practice wanted to remain spearate from the political and economic structure of society. Macmurray thought that, though it had an appalling record of human rights, the Christian offshoot, communism, had a more Christian economic doctrine and practice than its parent. It is the very separation and obscurantism intended in the supposed importance of the spiritual sphere, as opposed to the sphere of reality in which we actually find ourselves, that relegates any practical value of Christianity to the minimal. Macmurray denied a supposed spiritual equality that nevertheless condoned inequality of social and economic status in the actual world. Christianity became a wholly conservsative force in practice when it became the state religion of Rome, and, thereafter, the only acceptable religion of the feudal princes of Europe. The price to the Church of immunity from the secular Roman authorities was its agreement not to interfere with the economic and the social order. The Church became a political institution parallel with the Roman state intent on increasing its own power. Thus it was that:

The kingdom of heaven became the kingdom in heaven, and it was possible to make admission to the new community in this life. The Christian Church could now sanctify and defend the traditional system of morality, of law, of property, of warfare as well as of myth and philosophy by referring its revolutionary sense of community to another world. This pious fraud, for it is nothing less, might be very effective for a time. But it must eventually recoil on the Church herself in the long run. Why should we be surprised that the revolutionary movements of our time are anti-religious, anti-Christian and materialist? The Church has willed it so.

The answer for Macmurray is that Christianity should turn away from the conservatism it accepted. The choice today is between Christian authoritariansim and democracy, the latter being a society wth a sense of community matching the original Christian dynamic, not ist opposrtunistic overlay. Authoritarianism stifles creativity by limiting it, whereas democracy liberates the creative instinct in the sense of fellowship and mutual assistance that gospel Christianity is meant to promote. In short, Macmurray wanted yet another return to the apostolic values and teachings of the Christian son of God.

God’s aim (The Clue to History) was a universal brotherhood of free creative people. Institutional powers, whether the Catholic Church or the Protestant sects defy God’s will. Those who refuse to see humanity as God’s brotherhood and to promote it actively have sown the seeds of their own destruction. Ultimately then, religion for John Macmurray, or the central feature of it, is fellowship—universal fellowship, but not so universal that it extends to other species and everything in the whole world. That is the fellowship embodied in the “adelphia” of “Adelphiasophism”. The Brotherhood of Man is inadequate today, but Adelphiasophism addresses the truly universal sisterhood, irrespective of sex or species.

A Common Faith

The great need of the hour is common faith. Christianity has had 2000 years to oversee the world in every state of distress culminating in the present situation. 2000 years is long enough. Christianity has failed. It has not and cannot provide an effective faith, yet alone a common one, when its answer to immediate problems is a fairyland after death, while tolerating excessive violent retaliation to supposed enemies in the living world. The common faith must be effective in uniting people against the dire common threats we face in reality. The realistic logic of salvation after death is mass suicide—precisely what our leaders offer us in their pious insanity. Salvation must be in real life, and in real life salvation must be communal, indeed universal, not personal. So, the common faith must link people logically and emotionally to all others in a common purpose.

It will direct people to emphasise their duties selflessly not just their rights selfishly. The alternative is to contunue being governed by an oligarchy of corporate bosses and their puppets in government—greedy, selfish people whose profession of democracy is a sham meant to keep as many people as possible apathetic TV zombies. Our message warns them of a danger not so far off that the TV zombies of the next generation, if not this one, will experience it. Only awareness of it will motivate them to join together against the common enemy. The aim of the Adelphiasophists is to bring ordinary people misguided by the mass media to this awareness.to promote their unity of action and cooperation in ridding the world of castes and the classes whose selfishness is murdering our children’s world. All of us must be saviours, and those with special skills should lead them as delphians—wise women, scholars and troubadours—Adelphasophism’s communicators, intellectuals, propagandists and heroes. They will teach that Adelphiasophism’s “weltanshauung” is a religion in the sense of it being humanity’s highest conception of duty.

Religion is not a demand for a reward from God. Any good God cannot give in to demands or He is not God, and cannot promise any reward without genuine merit or He is not good. Mere faith or belief, in the absurd theology of Christianity merits no reward, even if it is sincere, and God knows most of it is not!

Humanity prides itself on being able to act consciously, thereby distinguishing itself from bricks, and, according to Christians, from the rest of creation generally. Faith alone cannot distinguish a man from a brick. Action is what does. The so-called brother of Christ, who should have known as well as anyone what Christ meant, was admant that God rewarded good works not mere faith. So, properly interpreted, Christianity always was a religion of duty not merely a specious right to salvation—to God’s reward. Duty and service are the characteristics of piety, but even duty and service get easier when they are seen as essential. Our duty is our duty to Nature, the Goddess, not merely to mankind or to a mental figment. The Goddess not the figmentary father is what provides for us. Unless we save her, there can be no salvation for humanity.

Tough-Mindedness

Willam James (Pragmatism) classifies people into two categories:

1. The tender-minded—idealistic, optimistic, relgious, gullible, dogmatic
2. The tough-minded—materialistic, pessimistic, irreligious,skeptical, liberal

Hitherto the world has been conditioned to James’s tender-minded folk, people unable to accept reality for what it is, dreaming up impossible castles in the air, and their leaders inspiring their disciples to follow them to disaster. The world can no longer we run by clueless dreamers. It needs to be run by a consensus of those who can see reality clearly and so avoid the impending disasters ahead instead of leading us into them. Poetry and dreams have their place in letting us imagine what might be, and what might have been, but it will no longer do, if we are to survive to apprach the future blindly because we do not like what we see when we open our eyes, or by devising romantic plans and testing whether they might work by trial and error. Mainly they do not.

Frankly, how is someone deluded enough to believe that divine love suffuses the world able to cope with natural phenomena and human behaviour that belie it? Realism must rule. The hope for wish fulfilment is no longer adequate, or rather it never has been, and now there is not enough time left for failed master plans sent by God to those who declare themselves prophets or saints. The capitalist master plan, based on its appeal to individual self-interest, is impossible in this world of 6 billion people—and growing rapidly. The very desire for children is driven in much of the world by self-interest, often economic in the Third World, but by vanity in the developed countries. Yet self-interest is an evolutionary response that cannot be suppressed. It has to be fulfilled by showing it is in everyone’s interest to unite in defence of our world, in defence of our provider that we are destroying.—no longer slowly—under the greed motive of our Christian capitalist ruling caste.

Of course, these are mainly tough-minded men, in James’s classification, not poets or saints, but they propagate tender minded values as a smokescreen for their iniquities. Tough minded tyrants need to be opposed by an equally tough minded popular movement of salvation. Christianity is a movement propagating tender minded values for its tender minded sheep, but used by unscrupulous tough minded shepherds intent on confusing the lambs. How can a class of selfish, greedy money grubbers pretend that they follow a man who gave all he had to the poor, owned nothing but his own garments, and advocated communism to judge from the actions of his followers. The gross contradiction in these outlooks illustrate the power of propaganda over the minds of normal humans. The ruling class treat them like mushrooms. They keep them in the dark and feed them on bullshit.

Standing Up to Ghengis

Adelphiasophists have no easy task in persuading the TV zombies—those ordinary people perverted by the mass media into the state of brain numbing apathy the corporate basses want—to listen to the message that truly concerns them. It is a lot easier to to pander to addictions than to wean someone off one. It is a lot easier for the addict to succumb to temptation than to give up the comfort of the drug. Media moguls know it only too well, and “dumbing down” or zombification is their response.

People are not , however, all alike. They vary in characteristics according to the normal distribution. At one extrme will be those ready to listen to the apocalyptic evidence for the destruction of earthly Nature by over-exploitation of resources, and the pollution that accompanies it. The aim of the Adelphiasophists is to impress the people with their purpose in life, integrity, devotion and selflessness in building a united movement to save the earth. Once the leading edge of the distribution is won over, they will become the Delphians of the next generation, making a greter impact on the passive majority. Always there will be the need to show commitment and unity through demonstrating in public, a human right that people are made to feel ashamed of by the moguls.

The problem of the couch potatoes is no different from that facing all human beings—that of evolutionary adaptation. The natural behaviour of a sated mammal is to rest, to relax and to laze around. Westerners now are more than sated, they are stuffed with manufacters’ junk, and are often only too glad to collapse on a sofa in front of a TV to get their mind’s polluted. It is maladaptation, but humans have the answer, if they choose to use it—their brains! Humans are conscious, and given an awareness of the damage to them and their children, of a lifetime so apathetic that they ignore the avalanche that will soon engulf them, they can respond. The duty of Adelphiasophists is to put over that message. Herbert George Wells knew this a century ago. Why then is it not better known today? Ask the media moguls!

The whole point about having a brain is that it can bypass evolutionary selection. The animal that can think and act on its thoughts does not have to follow some maladapted instinct.Not only that but the optional behaviour can be taught to offspring who also therefore do not have to act in a maladapted way. When people, supposed to be passing on some divine message, tell us God has prescribed righteous behaviour in His holy book that is fixed for all time, they are telling us we ought not to use our brains to respond appropriately in new situations.

Take, for example, the prescription against homosexuality and the command to go forth and multiply in a world with six billion people. Are we really supposed to keep on multiplying even though we are destroying the natural resources of the world, and ultimately must cause a mass death. It is insane. Nature’s response to excessiive breeding might be homosexuality! People have a satisfactory loving reltionship with people of their own sex because the strain of overpopulation induces it. Populations stop rising so fast. Yet the priests, prophets and gurus know God wants us to mutiply ourselves to extinction. It is no interest to our divinity that we are so stupid, that we believe liars acting out of deceit or delusion to be speaking for Him. Even the supposed holy book tells people not to be so-deceived, but Christians like it, and anyway, only accept from the holy Word what they want to. We must reject such nonsense and use our heads, adapting appropriately—consciously.

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