Abstract

© 1998 The Adelphiasophists and AskWhy! Publications. Freely distribute as long as it is unaltered and properly attributed
Contents Updated: Monday, June 21, 1999; Monday, 26 September 2005

Are You an Adelphiasophist?

• Does the vista of the sky on a clear night fill you with incredulity and wonder at the majesty of the cosmos and infinite extent of it all?
• Have you been in a forest, a cavern or a canyon and felt its silence and sombreness, giving it a solemnity greater than the mightiest cathedral?
• Have you been by the sea on a wild and windy day when the waves were crashing and spume was blowing through your hair, and felt how powerful Nature is?
• Have you looked across a valley on a balmy day with the sun warm on your back, distant sounds faint on the breeze and birds in song, and thought how wonderful it was to be alive?
• Have you looked at the delicacy of a flower, a feather, a butterfly or a snowflake and thought how fine and beautiful are the things that Nature makes?
• Have you picked up a new born child and cradled in your arms thinking: “Isn’t that amazing?”

If you answered “No” to any of these, and have no deficiencies of the senses, you are in a tiny minority of human beings. Most people on occasions in their lives feel the wonder of Nature, but because we are a part of it and live all our lives in it we rarely think about it. We take it for granted like the air we breathe or like a fish might take the water it swims in for granted. And curiously, when people do feel this natural sense of awe at Nature, they attribute it to some figment they have been taught as children and disregard the phenomenon itself.

Adelphiasophism refuses to cast aside the source of this wonder, Nature, and instead sees Nature as the source of the divine. At the heart of Adelphiasophism is reverence of the cosmos and Nature as sacred.

Adelphiasophists are pantheists that adore Nature and the cosmos as a Goddess—The Goddess, from whom all religious wonder and reverence sprang originally. She is the substance and life of the universe, but, though astonishingly mysterious, infinitely wonderful and constantly in the flux of evolution, she is not inexplicable, capricious or unintelligible as a supernatural divinity is.

The universe is a unique animal that contains within itself all other animals… and that is why it must of necessity be in sympathy with itself…

Plotinus

We are created of the substance of stars and the life that ebbs within us is the same life as that of a swallow and a woodlouse, a sequoia and a lichen, a bacterium and a blade of grass. All life is linked by a thread of descent and all creation is linked in a Chain of Being. We shall only have the profound respect for Nature when foolish primitive notions of supernatural beings are discarded and our attention is directed to the earth beneath our feet and the cosmos above our heads. We stand in a narrow slot in between and we had better keep it pure or the Goddess will clear us out.

People feel free to damage our world because wrong-headed religions have pronounced that the world is ours to do with what we will. These wrong-headed religions say it does not matter because the world is evil and there is a better world somewhere else. Wrong-headed religions say we must spend our time devoting ourselves to a being much bigger even than the infinite cosmos that we can see. While people think like this, they will pay no regard to the damage that is occurring about them in this temporary existence called life. We therefore reject the wrong-headed religions. Nature will never be given enough respect while people are taught to respect imaginary beings and an imaginary life more.

Adelphiasophism respects Nature as our Mother, indeed as her womb, within which we, and other life-forms, grow and prosper. The womb that gives us life cannot be evil, and no creature destroys its world and survives. We must have the reverence of a child for its mother over the world in which we live.

So, when we say that Nature is sacred, we mean truly sacred for without it we literally die. In supernatural religions the sacred gives us metaphorical life but all depend upon the Goddess to give the only life that anyone has experienced. What is truly sacred is not to be profaned, not to be treated irreverently and not to be put to unworthy use. We are not treating Nature as sacred! If we do not alter our ways soon, everyone on earth will be sorry.

Life is our concern—life here on earth, not a fantasy life whether among black-eyed houris or basking in the glory of Jesus Christ. Heaven and hell are visions of this world. They are alternative choices of its outcome. Adelphiasophists want our children to live in a paradise not a cesspit.

Adelphiasophism is positive, life-loving, creative and joyful. We are part of the ebb and flow of the evolution of Nature and our purpose in life as conscious beings is to facilitate evolution not devolution. We have been doing the latter for 2000 years and it is time to reject wrong practice.

There are no demons in the world that make us do wrong, we choose to do it ourselves and we are responsible for our choices. We shall have no reward in a life after death. Our actions have an effect on earth and it is our children and grandchildren who suffer from our wrong choices. Our duty is to our descendents, the future links in the Great Chain of Being and if we choose not to care then we shall become extinct as an evolutionary branch of life. Adelphiasophists want to reach out to future generations and be able to say, “Enjoy the legacy we left you.” That is our purpose. That is our duty.

Adelphiasophism is a strange name though. What does it mean? It is a sisterhood and a brotherhood from the Greek words “adelphe” and “adelphos” meaning sister and brother. To say sisterhood and brotherhood all the time is a bit of a sexist mouthful, so we call ourselves a “kinunity.” Our purpose is to propagate the wisdom or knowledge of the Goddess, which in Greek is Sophia. Whence Adelphiasophists, a kinunity that spreads the knowledge of the Goddess. Our symbol is a silver ring or disc or crescent, with or without AS, as or ασ inscribed.

Questions to Adelphiasophists

Are Adelphiasophists atheists? Adelphiasophists “are” atheists. They do not believe in a sentient God upstairs looking out for our sins and misfortunes. Christians say they know there is a God, but this knowledge is without any evidence. It is revealed, which means you take it or leave it, on trust. Christians have taken it, or been taken in by it.

Adelphiasophists believe, above all, in evidence so should any evidence for God be produced, Adelphiasophists would consider it. But after 5000 years of written history producing no evidence that stands muster for God, the hypothesis has to be thought so improbable it is not worth considering in practice. And in practice, there is no need of it.

Christians have the utmost difficulty is understanding that the burden of proof is on the one making the positive assertion about the world. Instead of saying, “I will prove there is a God,” they say, “Prove it is not so.” Christians will not prove there is a God, but proving there is not one is quite impossible. Proving a negative is not on. Can anyone prove there are no fairies, bogeymen or Santa Clauses? If we cannot, must we believe in them?

Adelphiasophists are pantheists. They believe that divinity is to be found in Nature. James E Lovelock has showed that the biosphere of the earth is a cybernetic system that regulates itself so that it is suitable for life. The whole of the living sphere of the earth is in some sense alive. He called this feedback system “Gaia,” after the name of the Greek earth goddess, also called Ge.

Adelphiasophists believe that the whole of Nature is the same. The cosmos is a goddess that creates her children and allows them to grow and mature. Some survive, some die out. In our minute cell of the universe many forms of life have formed, and could more easily be destroyed. The world suits us but any change is unlikely to be for the better. We therefore do not ask our divinity what she can do for us, we ask what we can do for her, and by doing it how we can benefit ourselves.

Since you deny God’s law, what authority do you accept as a guide to conduct? Christians do not seem to recognize that they abandoned God’s law when they split from Judaism. They can, if they wish, claim that the Pharisees were abusing the law by zealously enforcing the minor details while ignoring the main tenets, but God had given His law in person to Moses, according to the Jewish legend, still recorded in the Christian Holy Book, and errors in applying the law cannot invalidate a god-given law itself, now, can it?

The Son of God called Christ, that Christians also revere as God, said, again recorded in Christianity’s Holy Writings, that not a jot or tittle of the law would pass away until the world ended. None of this deterred Christians from abandoning this law because it was too hard. So, Christians denied God’s law long before any non-Christian philosophies saw fit to.

We have to decide upon conduct ourselves, using whatever wisdom other Adelphiasophists can offer, but deciding for ourselves who to believe above all, and even then not regarding what anyone says as unquestionable. Discussion and dialectic respectfully conducted is for Adelphiasophists a way to wisdom, as it was for Socrates. Adelphiasophists do not accept any ultimate authority other than the rule of Nature, and abuse of that rule makes itself evident to all.

How do you know what is good and evil? What does an Adelphiasophist consider a sin? Christians always identify “sin” with social wrongdoing or crimes, but sin is a crime against God in the Jewish religion and has been passed from there to Christianity. Thus for millennia it was a sin to enjoy sex but burning people at the stake was not a sin but a Christian duty. Adelphiasophists do not have such esoteric definitions as the Christians and Jews about what sin is, but we can see wrong happening when the earth or its children are being damaged and destroyed. Christians mainly can not.

So, the concept of sin is not useful any more. It is like all religious dogmas, notionally set in stone, though “sin” is conveniently lax in definition to allow the church to change it as it sees fit. Adelphiasophists define wrongdoing in relation to Nature. We do not imagine that we can pass through the world without leaving a broken stalk. The point is that we should not break stalks out of indifference, fun or malice. Stalks are not an infinite resource. Nature has to be preserved and humanity restrained.

Do Adelphiasophists do as they please? Everyone does whatever they please, but Adelphiasophists have a qualifying clause—not to offend the earth whether directly or indirectly.

Christians will claim that their religion stops them from committing heinous crimes, but statistically there is scarcely any difference in crime rates in respect of religious beliefs. Many Christians lead exemplary lives but so do many non-Christians. Society, not God, demands that people do not commit acts of vandalism to their fellow humans and their property.

Anti-social desires might be restrained by a desire to please God, but they might also be restrained by a wish to please friends, or to win the respect of a community, or to be able to contemplate oneself without shame. Society always has the sanction of punishment, whether the guillotine or the cup of hemlock but, in pre-Christian societies, people often had a much stronger sense of justice and duty and, when they thought they had done wrong or brought disgrace on to their own people, they would voluntarily commit suicide. It is this sense of disgrace that has been lost under Christianity.

Christians blame the devil for sin but have no compassion for the criminal. The criminal blames the devil for his crimes and has no compassion for the victim. As long as some imaginary supernatural criminal can be blamed why should anyone feel guilty? Guilt in Christianity is reserved for those who do not attend mass regularly enough. Adelphiasophists believe that everyone is responsible, and everyone has duties to others, themselves and to Nature. There is no one else to blame.

How does an Adelphiasophist regard the Bible? Adelphiasophist regard the Bible as a 2000 year old book containing some wisdom and history from earlier times and a lot of fiction and mythology. It is not divinely inspired or the word of God but an entirely human compilation. All of its books have been frequently edited and the most recent editions even of the Jewish scriptures are from little more than two millennia ago, not the 3000 years that Christians seem to believe.

The morality, especially of the Old Testament—and not just sexual morality but regard for humanity and the world in which we live—is primitive and not what concerned parents teach to their children. Consequently, Christians who rarely actually read the Bible, think the book is full of goodness and chivalry. God, through Samuel, ordered king Saul to kill every Amalekite man, woman, child and even babies at the breast, and even all their sheep, camels, donkeys and cattle. Saul let the animals live, and God never forgave him (1 Sam 15:1-11).

Did Elisha send the bears to kill the children mocking him as a morality tale for children not to mock people? If so, it does not work today. Today, Christian children would kill the bears with automatics, kill the prophet that sent them and then kill their school chums out of annoyance.

How does an Adelphiasophist regard Jesus, the Virgin Birth, and the Holy Trinity? Adelphiasophists regard Jesus as most probably a first century Jewish Essene leader who hoped that with God’s help the Romans would be evicted from Palestine and the new world order would be led by the Jews. According to the Christian gospels, Jesus died believing he had been forsaken by God.

Despite this, the Christians have elevated the Jewish leader into a European god, and continue to believe this mythology as the revealed truth until this day. The only thing it reveals is the power of superstition and those who control it—preachers and the priesthood. Adelphiasophists do not accept priestcraft or its inventions, and cannot agree with silly ideas that detract from proper concern for the only true superentity—Nature. Nor do we accept dogmas. No authority can be absolved from questioning.

Virgin births were a commonplace invention of the Pagan religions of Roman times. The first of the gospels knew nothing about it. It was tacked on to the history of Jesus to give him supernatural credibility when everyone accepted that outstanding men were virgin born and sons of gods. Once again, no one who knows the least bit of Roman religious history could possibly accept the virgin birth as anything other than mythical, but Christians, determined to stay ignorant as dunces, cannot let go of it.

Can an Adelphiasophist be a Christian? Many, perhaps most people nowadays, use the word “God” more generally than of old, as a sort of abstract principle rather like fate, and invoke the word only in oaths. God is less a a trinity of people, or even one person in His transcendental place, than a vague purpose in evolution. Adelphiasophists hold this sort of view but take the purpose or immanence to be a Goddess because only females can actually procreate.

If Christianity were accepted purely as an ethical system, as some “Christians” do today, depending upon the ethics that they hold, such Christians could conceivably be Adelphiasophists. For traditional Christians, though, their faith is in more than a system of ethics, and it surely must be true that those who discard all of the Christian trappings other than a supposed ethical code are not Christians at all, and might as well call themselves Adelphiasophists. Traditional Christians are ignorant of history and imagine that the only ethics that ever were are Christian. Such people can never be anything other than Christian—they are too ignorant.

If a “Christian” is someone who ardently wants a world freed from the cruelties and exploitation that spoil it, then they are certainly on their way to being an Adelphiasophist. The trouble is that ultimately Christian belief is dismissive of the natural world. A much better world beyond death is on offer, so logically the destruction of this vale of woe would be a boon. Would we put our dog into a pool of piranha fish entrusting them to clean the fleas off him?

Does an Adelphiasophist deny that man has a soul? Conventional religions necessarily formulate a hypothetical body called a soul. If there were no soul, then it would be obvious to everyone that death was final. If it is not to be final then something else must live on after death, contrary to any physical evidence, and the priests of the world tell us it is the soul. By definition, the soul is eternal life and the reason the body has died is that eternal life has left it. By the same token, one could argue that a computer or a motor car had a soul that left it when it broke down for good.

Of course, Adelphiasophists are willing to be swayed by evidence, but there is no evidence for souls and everything to persuade us that it is a wishful way of putting off the personal acceptance of death, and a false assurance by priests and preachers that will persuade simple but fanatical “soldiers of god” to give away their lives for nefarious reasons. For Adelphiasophists the acceptance of death is an important principle because it tells us that we have only a limited time, not an eternity, to enjoy life and do something useful in it. We do not get a second chance.

So Adelphiasophists do not believe in a hereafter, in heaven or hell? When Christians say they believe in an afterlife, they are buying a pig in a poke. Spiritualists claim they can contact the dead, but not one of them has ever stood up to controlled investigation. Quite the opposite, many of them have been proved to be frauds. A substantial prize has been on offer for a quarter of a century to anyone who could show any sort of supernatural phenomena under scientifically controlled conditions. Though there are plenty of fraudulent supernatural practitioners, some even with international fame, the prize has never been claimed.

Adelphiasophists will accept no belief without sound evidence. We do not discount life after death, but simply say there is not a mote of evidence for it. All of the evidence and our instincts are that death in this life is final. It follows that this is the only chance we have to do something useful.

It follows that there is no heaven or hell. They were invented to keep ignorant and superstitious people under control, notably by the priests who charged them to pass on favourable reports to God. Religion is, and always was, a scam. It also had the incidental effect—perhaps it was the main one—of justifying the most awful tortures of anyone that happened to contradict the Christian establishment. If God could do it for ever and ever in hell then His servants can justifiably give someone a one-off roasting in this world.

Are you never afraid of God’s judgement in denying him? The implication of the question is that Christians are afraid to deny God. The Jewish scriptures, called by Christians, the Old Testament, give some reason for being fearful of the Hebrew God. But these Christians try to win us over to their side by telling us that God and his Son love us. It seems that they only love people that love them. “Love thine enemies,” indeed. Do as I say not as I do, eh?

Truthfully, the reason Christianity has survived so long in these liberal times is that Christians do fear God, and they indoctrinate their children with the same morbid beliefs. Christians are moral cowards afraid to question their absurd superstition, just in case!

Adelphiasophists do not fear the god of the Jews and Christians or His Son because they are as mythical as Zeus and Medusa. What we fear is that our own greed, selfishness and indifference will cause us to lose our Goddess, Nature, the world that we live in, are accustomed to and depend upon. That is a real reason to be frightened. But what Christian is when they are smugly dreaming of a life of eternal bliss instead of the only life they will, in fact, ever experience.

How do Adelphiasophists explain the beauty and harmony of nature? We are supposed by the implication of the question to attribute the beauty and harmony of Nature to the Christian God. That it should be attributed to anything other than evolution is ridiculous. A dung beetle finds its own world beautiful and harmonious. The escherichia coli bacterium that lives in the human gut and makes up a quarter of the weight of human faeces will find its own world beautiful and harmonious. The bizarre creatures that live out of the sunlight altogether in the stacks of the fumaroles under the ocean also will find beauty and harmony in their environments.

Beauty and harmony exist only in the eye of the beholder. We have evolved in the world as it is, and necessarily find it ideally suited to us. Life would be intolerable otherwise. We did not evolve in hot fiery places, and so we find them unpleasant and not conducive to our existence. Nor do we find freezingly cold environments pleasant. If, however, we had evolved on a freezing earth, we should have found the freezing cold equitable, and the balmy warmth of a temperate beach would have been unpleasantly hot.

Nature is how she is and, providing that the conditions will support life, it will evolve in those conditions. The life that thus evolves finds the Nature of those conditions beautiful and harmonious. The point for us is that we are destroying the environment that supports us. If we do not stop it, we shall have a choice of trying to survive in an unsuitable and unpleasant environment or of dying out all together.

How do Adelphiasophists explain miracles and other revelations of God’s omnipotence? All religions are plentifully supplied with myths of the miraculous but no Christian will concede that they were real miracles. Only the Christian God does miracles. In fact, the least examination of the gospels with an impartial mind and a knowledge of the situation in Palestine in the first century shows that nothing is miraculous except that Christians are gullible enough to believe it. The healing miracles were beatings and the gospels scarcely seek to disguise the fact.

Christian belief is supposed to be that Jesus was God in the form of a man and the change of form was necessary so that the god could experience the man’s suffering. But no man can gratuitously perform miracles so the man must have been a god all the time. The point is that Christians are not even consistent in their own beliefs, and when the inconsistencies are pointed out, they claim it is a mystery of God. A defence is that the healing miracles were examples of faith healing, which certainly happens and so cannot be adduced as proof of divinity.

If God were real and really omnipotent, He could arrange an identical epiphany for every human on earth, preferably in a public place, and then only the really perverse could refuse to believe. No god could have a reason for saving only gullible people. Those interested in gullibility are human confidence tricksters.

Religion opposes cruelty. Would humanity survive without religion? Anybody who looks at Christian history impartially will find that it has caused more suffering than it has prevented. There is barely any historical evidence that religion prevented cruelty, but plenty to show it caused it. Christianity has sanctified it and allowed people to practise it without remorse. Torture was commonplace in Christendom for centuries.

Many religious people prove they are no better than termites by elevating themselves to being God’s bodyguards. They pronounce as a dogma some supposed law of God and then proceed to torture and kill everyone that demurs to protect the omnipotent! Persecution of other human beings is therefore justified by dogma. Only when people are free to think for themselves, and other views are respected, do people become kind and tolerant. Christianity has become tolerant through the spread of liberality in society largely stimulated by the success of the investigative methods of science. It was not Christianity that spread liberality as many modern Christians pretend. Christian churches and their attenders are invariably extremely conservative.

When Christians appear on your doorstep to convert you to their own particular creed, remember that not many years ago, you would have been burnt at the stake as a heretic had you refused. With the record that the churches have, it is only a fool that thinks they would not revert to the same pattern given the opportunity. The very basis of religious belief is some dogma or another. What then has fundamentally changed?

What is the meaning of life to an Adelphiasophist? The popular belief that life has a meaning is held by many but understood by none. How does Christianity give meaning to life—so that people can have an eternal afterlife? What then is the meaning of the eternal afterlife? Or perhaps it is to please God, but the implication that God has made a lot of inferior creatures so that they can please Him is surely unnaceptable to anyone that wants to believe that God is sane.

The natural purpose of life is simple. It is to create the next generation of life. When the lifeform is conscious and intelligent like humanity, then we should consciously and intelligently seek to serve that purpose. We should be trying to ensure that life continues, not trying to destroy it at every turn. We do not personally have to generate life by having children, but our duty is plain—it is the utilitarian principle of making future life no worse, and preferably better than ours. And the way to that is to preserve what Nature has given us, not to remove it and build a spaceship instead.

We cannot be sure of success, but the longer we leave the defence of the Goddess, the worse the prognosis becomes. And it can be no excuse that too much is stacked against us and it is easier just to succumb to the present world lunacy. What good would a doctor be who only took on cases that were curable? In the main, people can treat themselves of simple ailments. It is when the plight of the organism is serious that the doctor is needed. The plight of the earth is serious indeed.

Why anyone should be praying to unfathomable emptinesses in Church, when real human action is needed to save our environment for our children, defeats all reason and intuition. Anyone that needs religion to find a purpose in life when greed and selfishness threatens the life we lead is blind to reality. Sadly, that is the purpose of old-fashioned religions, like Christianity.

Is not faith in reason alone a dangerous creed? Is not reason imperfect and inadequate without spiritual and moral law? Adelphiasophists do not reject reason and actually place a great deal of credence on to it, but no one can depend on reason alone. Reason requires a basis of things, called facts and hypotheses, that it uses to come to conclusions. Most facts are observations in the world we live in and hypotheses are links between the facts that we infer and proceed to test. All of this is conditioned by the humility factor—the obvious fact that no human is a god and knows everything. At this point we have to rely upon intuition, which above all is a precautionary sense. Thus matters of fact alone are not sufficient to determine what we should do.

Intuition is also important in telling us what we ought to do. Adelphiasophists find their objectives in their own intuition and that is conditioned by Nature not by command of imaginary gods or their puppet master, the priesthood. Of the actions that we might take, most will be consciously done with a purpose in mind. Some purposes will be thought fitting and others will be thought inappropriate. Insofar as it is possible to make rational choices between different ends then we shall do so but when it is not possible we shall use our instinct for caution—our intuition—to choose what is right. And our intuition is always itself limited by the rule that we should not harm the earth unnecessarily.

Are science and religion impossible to reconcile? Religion at its best is an ethical system that seeks to make the world a better place for each of us to live in by laying down social rules that prevent or reduce strife between us. As such, it is perfectly compatible with science. As soon as religion asserts a system of dogmatically held beliefs, regarded as god-given and therefore unquestionably true for all time, it is incompatible with science.

The basis of science is asking questions and seeking their answers in Nature. The practice of science over the centuries has shown that Nature by degrees yields up her secrets to proper questioning and investigation. Questioning and investigation is forbidden only by institutions that benefit from ignorance and seek to hide truth. Religions have always done this. The inference is obvious to anyone intelligent.

What kind of evidence would show that God exists? Humanity has recorded 5000 years of its history and in that time nothing unequivocally shows that somewhere there is a god willing to interfere in the world we live in. If there were such evidence, then everyone would believe in god—it would be perverse not to. It is futile and stupid to claim that God is all powerful and is desperately keen to save the souls of his human creations, but choses not to manifest himself in a clear and unequivocal way so that people can be saved.

The “Trust me, you won’t regret it” approach of the Christian is one that the same Christian would warn you against if it were a second-hand car dealer speaking. Admittedly your loss might be greater to believe the second hand car dealer, but there is nevertheless a loss. Reputedly, there are over a billion Christians in the world today. If they each donate only one dollar a year to their church, the church is a billion dollars a year industry. Of course many donate far more. That is why the church exists. It is big bucks for a load of parasites feeding on the emotional distress of insecure people. Needless to say, the beneficiaries of this innocent largesse are not insecure.

If the omnipotent God has something to say, then let Him say it Himself and not delegate it to a lot of crooks or potential crooks. That will be the real evidence for God.

Avoiding the Catastrophe

Humanity is a species dependent on the natural world. The Earth’s vital resources are being exhausted, its atmosphere deteriorating and human populations are burgeoning. Natural ecosystems, the wellsprings of a healthful environment, are being irreversibly degraded. The earth has a malignant growth, a cancer—it is called mankind. As formidable as our intellect may be and as fierce our spirit, it is our hubris that allows us to say we can manage a spaceship earth with ever growing populations and ever decreasing resources.

Edward Wilson thinks we are smart enough and have time enough to avoid an environmental catastrophe, but a large part of humanity will suffer no matter what is done. And there is no way in sight to manage natural ecosystems and the millions of species they contain. Despite the seemingly bottomless nature of creation, humankind has been chipping away at its diversity, and Earth is destined to become an impoverished planet within a century if present trends continue.

The loss will not be replaced by evolution in any period of time that has meaning for humanity. Extinction is now proceeding thousands of times faster than the production of new species. It takes more than 10 million years for evolution to replenish completely the biodiversity lost when extinctions happen. We have only a poor grasp of the ecosystem services by which other organisms cleanse the water, turn soil into a fertile living cover and manufacture the very air we breathe. We sense but do not fully understand what the highly diverse natural world means to our aesthetic pleasure and mental well-being.

The world is our womb. When we debase the global environment and extinguish the variety of life, we are dismantling a support system that is too complex to understand, let alone replace, in the foreseeable future. We are destroying our placenta.

Yet the eternal optimists of this world, exhibiting one of our fatal defects, think that mankind, transcendent in intelligence and spirit by divine dispensation, has been released from the laws of ecology that bind all other species. No matter how serious the problem, we will find a solution by ingenuity and force of will.

Now if, as many complacent or uneducated people think, this is true, isn’t it about time they started using their ingenuity to find solutions? If they do not start exercising this force of will soon, then it will be too late anyway.

As the population continues to grow so does the land turning to desert. Visionaries have been talking for centuries about making the deserts bloom, but all that men succeed in doing is creating more desert. Now is the time to actually make it bloom. Here we meet the real problem. It is not science. Scientists would love to tackle such a beneficial and large scale project. The problem is, “Who pays?” Nothing gets done in this crazy world unless there is a profit to be made.

Perhaps the answer is to curtail population growth, then there would not be such demand for land. No good. Having twenty children is a God given right if you are a Christian or is a basic human right if you are not. Never mind that all these children’s lives will be crowded, poor, nasty brutish and short, and will serve to disturb even more the balance of the planet—they have a right to breed. The Chinese, who seem more than satisfied with having a sixth of the world’s population, sought to restrict this right and were derided merciless in the Western press, whether liberal or conservative.

We can succeed only by halting population growth and devising a better use of resources than we have managed so far. Better use of living resources means preserving ecosystems and the natural biodiversity they contain.

To continue as though scientific and entrepreneurial genius will solve each crisis as it arises implies that the declining biosphere can be similarly manipulated. But the world is too complicated to be turned into a garden.

Modern Luddites?

Though the history of technology is full of labour saving devices, no labour was saved because people had to operate and service the machines so that enough new jobs were produced to offset those saved. Modern technology however is on quite a different scale.

Motor car factories are cavernous hangers full of busy robots with hardly a human to be seen. Mining steelmaking and chemical factories used to employ millions. Now all are closed or run by mainly automatic plant.

The new machines are intelligent enough to do the jobs without any human control, merely occasional servicing. Any peripheral jobs can also be done by machines of the same degree of sophistication, so it is most humans that become surplus to requirements. When machines with an IQ of 80 can do mundane jobs then simple people are displaced from employment. When machines get an IQ of 100 then half the human population will be unable to get a job.

Despite this the various governments of the world blame unemployment on to idleness and call the unemployed “workshy.” Unemployed people are considered as parasites by employed people, and the idea is encouraged by the media. Yet many are distressed enough to commit suicide and others, perhaps less comprehending, turn to drugs and drink, a slower form of suicide. Meanwhile, the politicians bring out cosmetic schemes with a flourish.

Various governments over the last twenty years brag that they have created more jobs than have been displaced, but what sort of jobs are they? Mostly they are non-jobs, part-time, temporary and notional self-employment. Many people today are employed, but in pointless, unnecessary work—they are employed but functionally unemployed. Governments introduce a multitude of piffling regulations so that a mass of clerks can fill in the approriate forms, but even this is changing with the drive for “efficiency.”

Before long these will start to shake out and the reality will be harder to disguise. For the time being it has been possible to pad jobs to accommodate the displaced and to keep the rest on welfare, but what is to happen when the logical consequences emerge, and these devices can no longer be supported? The displaced people will be too dim to get a job and too much trouble to bother about. They will be non-people!

The underclass will have to be abandoned to their own devices. Many can see this already happening in our inner cities. The wealthy segments of society are barracading themselves into secure estates patrolled by private armies, fearful of the rampaging lawless “criminals.” Kidnapping the children of the wealthy has become a good earner for some of the dispossessed, after more than half a century when kidnapping was rare.

The trouble with the “efficiency” model of modern capitalism is that it leaves out the consumer. Notionally all production is for someone to consume, but once a substantial portion of humanity is marginalized in society as too stupid to be useful, then they cannot be rewarded and cannot consume.

This will not trouble the “advanced” technological industries that will be trying to develop and introduce the latest model of computers and robots that will displace anyone from work with an IQ of less than 120. But all those making a lesser living by making clothes and food will have to realise that they too are getting dispensable.

On a world scale this has already happened substantially, because the Third World has been marginalized as simply tracts of country, whose people are irrelevant, used for extracing oil or nickel or hardwood. No one over here cares whether these people live or die. “Band Aid,” and “Oxfam,” someone calls out indignantly. Precisely! Drops and sops! Drops in the ocean and sops to the Western conscience, and nothing more.

What are we to do? Destroy the robots and computers like modern Luddites?

There are only two possible solutions: downsizing back to a human scale, and violence. Downsizing is what Schumacher was recommending if the liberal capital system of the West is to survive. The alternative is the dispossession of the capitalists.

You might say, that has already been tried and failed, but then as now, desperate people are not going to listen to reason. The endless call for corporations to get bigger so that they can compete is just what should be regulated. Just as the US split up Standard Oil, the same must now be done on a world scale. To those who see it holding back innovation, then who says that is not a good thing? Innovation despoils more of the earth.

The Adelphiasophism in Buddhism

Gautama Buddha taught that the cause of human suffering is ignorance. People always crave satisfaction for something called self. But there is no self. Living things are transitory formations crystallized out of the general flux of things and events, and self is an illusion to ensure that each one had a sense of preservation. Preservation is self-preservation. To achieve peace and harmony, humanity must control the delusions and the ignorant cravings that go with selfhood…

…craving for the gratification of the passions, craving for a future life, craving for success in this life.

The right way was the “middle way”. Buddha believed in modesty in everything. He decided that neither ascetism nor self-indulgence were right. Human beings must learn through liberation of our minds from superstition, through the discipline of our wills, and through complete respect for the world to be symbiotic with it and be a humble and content part of it. In this lies peace and perfect happiness. Images of Buddha show a man, not a god, in the state of peace and contentment achieved by understanding that symbiosis is the natural state, not desires like status, lust and greed. “The Way” is the eightfold way.

1. Content are they who know, and whose knowledge is free from delusion and superstition.
2. Content are they who speak what they know in a kind, open and truthful manner.
3. Content are they whose conduct is peaceful, honest and pure.
4. Content are they who bring no gratuitous hurt or danger to any living thing.
5. Content are they who have cast out ill will, pride, self-righteousness, and replaced them with respect, pity and empathy.
6. Content are they who want to know, and seek knowledge, while rejecting excess passion and practising tranquility.
7. Content are they who find rapture in contemplating what is true in this world and life in it.
8. Content beyond measure are those who follow this “Way” in their own way, from the limitations of selfness.

The success of Buddhism is in its tolerance. Buddhists, like Adelphiasophists, do not tell you what to do, they are not dogmatic, having no centralized church, no dogma and therefore no heresy. You cannot find before you seek, and seeking must be active, not simply passive acceptance. Buddha believed in no god that could influence our lives, but believed in ““Rita”” (Persian ““Arta””), order in the world, including moral order. Every good act counts positively, every evil act negatively on the person, and the consequences of these acts cannot be evaded. In two and a half millennia of wars, Buddhism’s essential appeal is to reason and experience. Not only do people work out their own salvation, but they must think out their own creed, for Buddha advocated skepticism, specifically warning people against evangelism:

Do not believe anything, because the written testimony of some ancient wise man is shown to you. Do not believe anything on the authority of teachers or priests. Whatever accords with your own experience and, after thorough investigation, agrees with your reason, and is conducive to your own welfare and to that of all other living things, accept that as truth and live accordingly.

Paraphrase by Max Eastman, The Reader’s Digest

A concentrated contemplation of reality replaces the priestly rites, sacrifices and the empty prayer of conventional religion. The aim of contemplation is to find an acceptance of our place in Nature, and acceptance that we are not above it or superior to it, and nor can we beat it, but must resign ourselves to a contented, symbiotic relationship with it.

Christians in the West have a model for life in their Christ that they utterly ignore on the excuse that it is old fashoned, and a way of living no longer practical. They reject Christianity in practice, and merely mouth a discordant form of it. As a result the world is wearing out, unable to fulfil the demands that insatiable human greed puts on it. Like the Christ of the Gospels, Buddha actually lived his life according to the principle of modesty in all things, the same principle that Christ called being “poor in spirit”. No Christian practises it.

The story of both these ancient sages is that they generously taught all men, without recompense and without distinction of class or caste, the proper way to happiness. Irrespective of arguments about god or no god—irresolvable as long as impossible things remain impossible to prove—anyone can look at the personal example of how to live provided by saintly men like Buddha and Christ. Eschewing indulgent living is to live modestly and to live in a spirit of poverty. That would help preserve the world for others who will have to live in it after we are dead. That is the way to happiness—symbiosis.

Slow Down! Don’t Move So Fast.

”Slow Down” is a valuable motto that will go a long way toward restricting the despoilation. We should all insist upon it.

Donella Meadows, a professor of environmental studies at Dartmouth College, USA, in “Resurgence 184” proposes “Slow down!” as a solution to the exploitation of the world that is close to the heart of any Adelphiasophist.

Why are we in such a hurry? What do we do with all the time we save by rushing everywhere? The answer is we use it to rush somewhere else. Why not walk instead of drive, smell the flowers, feel our bodies, play with children, sail instead of fly, clean up our messes, discuss our community plans before we bulldozer away landmarks we were brought up with, figure out how whether racing to take the last fish in the oceans is sensible policy.

If we stopped gulping fast food, we could savour slow food, grown, cooked, served and eaten with care. Suppose we took time each day to sit in silence. Then the world wouldn’t need much saving.

Rushing consumes unnecessary energy and resources. Rushing causes mistakes. We could listen more and hurt each other less. We could take time to work out solutions to problems, test them, and learn what their actual effects are.

Time is money? That is what the greedy tell us.

Time is life! No one who loves life would want to rush through it. Death comes fast enough going slow!

The Adelphiasophist Wisdom of Mikhail Gorbachev

In an interview in “Resurgence,” Mikhail Gorbachev, the man who liberated Russia from dictatorship, shows his values are Adelphiasophist.

We are witnessing a breakdown of the proper relationship between humankind and the rest of Nature. The twenty-first century must be the century of human beings living in harmony with Nature, rather than being enslaved to technology. Economic liberalism is no less vulnerable than Socialism or Communism. Economic prosperity must go hand in hand with social cohesion and ecological sustainability. What good is a lot of money when the social fabric is destroyed and the environment polluted?

The need to harmonize relations between humankind and the rest of Nature are equally important. I want to put great emphasis on the intrinsic value of Nature, because without Nature people cannot exist. We must preserve both people and Nature. If we do not respect Nature, we could eventually disappear; and once again on Earth we could have Nature without humankind.

Humans gaining better knowledge of themselves and their role in the cosmos is of paramount importance. Humankind should become more modest in terms of its needs and more respectful of the environment of which we are just a part. If we do not learn to live in harmony with Nature, we shall make our own lives hopeless and we shall eventually jeopardize our own existence.

We should go back to a new kind of renaissance. This new renaissance should be based on the idea that people should live more naturally. We do not need any new values. The important thing is to restore universally known values which we have rejected. Thus, if freedom is not linked to morality, it is not freedom. It is permissiveness. It is just self-seeking, rather than freedom. We have to abandon all kinds of violence. And we have to understand that we should not resort to extremism.

If we fail to restore human dignity and ecological sustainability, the free market is of no use. Human beings are not just dust in the air, they want to be involved in changing life for the better. You can only achieve your goals when the entire society is involved.

I am proud of my rural roots. Rural people have a feeling for Nature, for the cosmos, for the world, for real life. They are born on the land and they live on the land. They have a feeling for that land and they know that land. Often they raise their heads to look at the sky, not just to see the clouds that bring the rain, but they look at the stars. People who are associated with the land interact with the stars. This association with Nature gives people a very good hold on common sense. Common sense refers to a sense of measure, a sense of moderation.

I believe in the cosmos. All of us are linked to the cosmos. I see all those stars in the sky and my feeling is that I am being supported by Nature and that I am dissolving into Nature. Look at the sun. If there is no sun, then we cannot exist. So Nature is my god. To me, Nature is sacred. Trees are my temples and forests are my cathedrals.

I am not afraid of death. Which does not mean I am indifferent to life—I like living. I am very curious and life is interesting. I am not a nihilist. Death is not the end. We come to the world, we will leave the world, but it will not be without trace. If I were dying, I would use all my remaining days to communicate and to be in contact with Nature—being at one with Nature.

Love for me is what unites man and woman, and what unites humans and Nature. It is a mystery of Nature and it is good that it will remain a mystery. It dies once you think you know its secret.

The Adelphiasophist Wisdom of the World’s Old People

Andrew Jackson and his wife decided to travel the world finding the views of the oldest people alive. These quotations are edited from “The Book of Life” by Andrew Jackson and published by Gollancz.

• The whole world is one. All are one, in universal brotherhood.
  Professor D B Deodhar, India, centenarian.
• We should respect Nature. Let Nature do the work.
  Ruth Muranda, Zimbabwe, nonagenarian.
• Don’t be a liar. Don’t be lazy. Don’t be a thief.
  Juana Mamani de Pilco, Bolivia, nonagenarian.
• Honesty and harmony. Be a leading model in your living.
  Bo Höglund, Sweden, nonagenarian.
• We old men do have the advantage of experience. Experience is the key.
  Xia Yan, China, nonagenarian.
• There is always change, so we must also change.
  Omari Jecha Kichachu, Zanzibar, nonagenarian.
• Knowledge is useless unless it leads to greater respect for Nature.
  Sir Mark Oliphant, Australia, nonagenarian.
• It’s real good to be here.
  Lonnie Stewart, Georgia, USA, centenarian.
• Make do with what you have, and have only what you can make for yourself.
  Maria Zemanova, Slovakia, nonagenarian.
• The future of the world lies with Nature, and Nature is stronger than anything, stronger than any government.
  Bela Varga, Hungary, nonagenarian.

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