A little girl was told that God was present everywhere and could see everything. Frowning, she retorted: “That’s indecent!”

Adelphiasophism: Wise Women’s Words on Nature and her Rule of Life

Positive Unbelief— A New Movement

We read in the Washington Post (15 September, 2007), under Mary Jordan’s byline, that there is a backlash against the plugging of religion by Christian and Moslem fanatics and political leaders including Bush, Blair and Brown who flaunt their religiosity.

Now I truly loathe any sight or sound of religion. I blush at what I used to believe.
Graham Wright, ex-anglican

Mr Wright, a mild mannered schoolteacher, who once considered the Anglican priesthood as a career, is now one of many who had joined secular and humanist groups in Europe this year. He is a confirmed atheist, appalled by the way religion had revealed itself as the monster it is in the world. The intolerance of the whole gamut of believers from Southern Baptist anti-progressive, fag-haters to Moslem bomb-heads, religion is exposed now as anything but good and kind, though anyone who had read any the history of these religions ought to have known. The Old Testament is hardly a vade mecum of good behaviour, especially by God, so why Mr Wright or any other Christian should think anything derived from it must be good is hard for the skeptic to comprehend.

Having interviewed Wright at home, Mary Jordan reported him as saying, “It’s a bit of opposition, isn’t it? Why should these religious groups hold so much sway?” Not believing in an afterlife, “makes you think you have to make the most of this life. It’s the now that matters. It also makes you feel a greater urgency of things” such as halting global warming, and not just dismissing it as being “all in God’s plan. There is no going back. There is nothing to go back to. One has to step up and stem the rise of religious influence.”

More and more people are taking Mr Wright’s view. People are wearing anti-religious T-shirts, such as “Born Again Atheist” and “Happy Heathen”, and posting similar car stickers in their vehicles. The silent majority—it is a majority, for most people say they are Christians in the USA to avoid the oppobrium and even violence of their Christian neighbours, and many more who know nothing and care less about Christians say they are Christians because they think it means western culture and is being a good citizen—are finding the voice to criticize religion. In old peoples’ homes, pubs, cafes, homes, and public lectures and debates, nonbelievers are talking about pushing back increasingly intrusive religion. Even British MPs are fed up with having religion pushed onto them, and the humanist group of Parliamentarians has quintupled its membership to 120 in a year. It is good news indeed, and more people must get involved in this communication era to express our views against the organized religion being thrust down our throats by supposedly Christian millionaires rich on gambling casinos and used car lots.

A majority still say they are religious, right across the world, but “religious”, in practice, simply means being good people in society, helping others, and obeying the law, and you do not need to believe in gods who impel their supporters to murder and suicide to do it. Even people who cannot stop believing in gods cannot think that gods want people to go about killing each other over their beliefs. It is men who spread such thoughts, men who want to use others for their own gains, and find it easy to use the belief in gods to do it. Ordinary people should feel proud to be able to say they have no religious faith, but put their efforts into improving the state of the world for others and especially all of our children.

Christians meet in churches, and organizations of the nonreligious never had an equal motivation. Now, in Europe especially, but so too in the USA, growing numbers are rejecting imaginary entities and beings intended to coerce simple people into obedience like heaven, hell, angels and devils, and instead are concentrating on what governments and corporations are doing to the earth. This world is in danger, and to dream of salvation in an imaginary one while our children will suffer the consequences of our negligence in this one seems idiotic. Atheism is not purely negative. Adelphiasophists, for example, have plenty of positive things to advocate and act on. The internet has helped.

The nonreligious movement seems to have begun with the 9/11, terrorist attacks in 2001. Religious fanatics killing 3000 innocent people was scarcely enlightening, but then Bush’s arbitrary revenge on the Iraqis, who had had nothing to do with the attack, and had suffered Saddam Hussain imposed on them by the US for thirty years, showed that convinced Christians running a supposedly democratic country were no better. In terms of innocents, they were considerably worse. Many people began questioning, and rejecting, all religions. Religions should not have any monopoly on ethics and morality. Most British people don’t want legislators to base on their religious beliefs public policy decisions on issues such as abortion and stem cell research, but Christians have disproportionate power and influence in Parliament and the BBC. Polls show that 80 percent of the British want the terminally ill who are in pain to have a medically assisted death, yet bishops in the Lords prevent it. Humanist groups represent the wishes of many people. The British Humanist Association, which thinks the government pays too much attention to religion, has seen its membership double in two years.

Europe’s fastest-growing religion is not Christianity, which continues to decline, but Islam now with 20 million followers, and the pussyfooting approach of European governments to Moslem demands annoys many otherwise tolerant people who cannot see why any religious group should benefit in a secular society. Secularism requires tolerance of religion, not support for it, and even the tolerance wears thin when religious leaders have the mentality of serial killers. If people must be religious and want certain facilities, then they should provide them themselves, and not expect taxpayers to cough up the money. Nor should religious conventions such as dress be “respected”. The niqab is a symbol of female subservience, and while women can choose to wear it, there is no reason why the choice should be particularly respected. Tattooing the skin, and wearing pins through your skin have become fashionable habits in the last two decades, but there is no reason why such choices should be respected. Some Moslems have the courage to object to their repressive religion, and have formed the Council of Ex-Moslems.

You can’t tell us religion is peaceful. Look around at the misery it is causing. We are all atheists and nonbelievers, and our goal is not to eradicate Islam from the face of the earth.
Maryam Namazie, UK Council of Ex-Moslems

She is happy that belief should be a private matter not imposed on others, and that is true of all such beliefs. Christian fundamentalists against scientific cell research, abortion and gay rights but for creationism in schools rather than evolution get up the nose of secularists who think such views are uncivilized. Jordan reports the leader of the British National Secular Society as saying:

There is a feeling that religion is being forced on an unwilling public, and now people are beginning to speak out against what they see as rising Islamic and Christian militancy.

Atheism sounds negative to many people, and some nonbelievers say they are speaking out only because of religious fanatics, but atheism has many positive aspects. It is much more positive that religion in that it puts the emphasis on the here and now and not on any Christian or Moslem dreamtime. Notably it makes the most of the one life we are sure of, doing as much as we can in it to improve the world, and keep it safe for our children. Those who do not like the word, “atheist”, can call themselves Adelphiasophists, humanists, secularists, freethinkers or rationalists. In the US, because Christians are determined to be dim, they have coined the name “Brights”, for believers in reality as opposed to unreality.

Nonbelievers on campuses, students and teachers must organize atheistic, Adelphiasophist and secular societies to counter Christian campus “crusades” and the equivalent Islamist groups that have been operating in education for over a decade.
More anti-religious blogs must be set up on the Internet to counter the Christian lies that wealthy US “missions” are promoting to get Paypal donations.
Nonbelievers should be able to have nonreligious funerals, weddings and “christenings” of new babies. Christianity has claimed all of these as its own, calling them sacraments, but they have always been done long before Christianity was thought of, and people with no religion at all have just as much right to celebrate all rites of passage through our natural lives—the one life we know.

Nonbelievers must demand equal access to the media, and television and radio airtime as religions. As a relic of an age when religions were more popular, and a perpetuation of the favour shown to them by corporate bosses and politicians, the media have always given religions unprecedented access. Every serious crime has a clergyman pronouncing on TV. If any such view should be given, it should be accompanied by a secular view. No clergyman has more access to God than anyone else, and if they are asked to pronounce, then so should the unbeliever. For some obsequious vicar to say after a disaster, “Thank God it was not worse”, and then to pray for the injured and dead is nothing but a mockery and an insult to people’s intelligence. We need political clout to reduce the baneful influence of patriarchal religion.

The Wise Woman’s Way
Contents

Roots and Influences

Anti-Patriarchal Religion

Women and Matriarchy

Nature and Science

Pseudoscience

Science and Supernatural (28KB)
Survival of Death and Immortality (43KB)
Christian Creationism (28KB)

Extinction

Experts (20KB)
The Human Syndrome (29KB)

Goddess Praxis

Worship (25KB)
Intuition (14KB)

Society

Health and Spiritual Health (34KB)
Social Problems (27KB)
Metaphor and Morality (58KB) on MM’s pages

Our Religion

Our Religion (32KB)
Are You an Adelphiasophist? (49KB)
AS Guidelines for Kinunity Voluntary Action (101KB)
Students (5KB)

Adelphiasophism Presentation

Adelphiasophism in presentation format at the AS website

Wise Women’s Wisdom

Science, Politics and Evolutionary Psychology (17 KB)
Adelphiasophism in Short Sentences (29 KB)
Ursula Goodenough: Religious Naturalism (31 KB)
God and Chimpanzee Culture (43 KB)
What Witches Believe (70 KB)
The Horrors of Paganism According to “Culture and Family” (23 KB)
Visible Queen or Invisible King (39 KB)
Ibn Arabi and Sufi Mysticism (54 KB)
Skeptical Enquirer and other critics of the Goddess (52 KB)
Overpopulation and the Pro-lifers By Russell Odell (37 KB)
The Evolution of the Afterlife—Fr Richard Barrett (7 KB)
The Goddess and the Serpent—Mary Condren (19 KB)
Le Milieu Divin—Teilhard de Chardin (44 KB)
Lost Civilisations of the Stone Age: Review (14 KB)
The Treatment of Women and their Religion (37 KB)
The Book of Hosea God marries a harlot (25 KB)
How I Lost a God and Found a Goddess (36 KB)
Modern Druids (14 KB)
Moors and Christians (13 KB)

Reviews, Collections and Poems

What People Thought about Christianity (25 KB)
Review of some Book Reviews (21 KB)
Matriarch’s Way: Journal of Female Supremacy Magazine Review (28 KB)
The Gospel of the Goddess Book Review (20 KB)
An author of The Gospel of the Goddess William Bond, replies (12 KB)
A collection of poems and anthems to the Goddess. Please send us any suitable that you know (12 KB)
Amyech at MySpace Nice independent Blog

Send us your comments
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The Goddess in the Hebrew Religion Did the Israelites worship a goddess before the Persians came? (48 KB)

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Last uploaded: 19 April, 2008.