THE AUTARCHIC CREED
We of the Old Religion have our own particular compact with our deities that charges simply, "An it harm none, do as ye will." And our gods do not despise us for being human but delight in our celebrations of life and love. We are ageless souls, only for a while within bodies - merely visitors upon this plane. We are brothers to the gods and only temporarily cousins to the ape, and our lives belong to us, not to this world nor to its earthly governors. We are not doomed to shame and decay; not lost; not indentured to perish with earthly manifestations; not disposed to eternal misery for any past or present lapses of courage or wisdom. We are as children in the school of life who must learn our lessons, on life at a time, before we graduate. Our lives span the march of time, striving upward, subordinate only to our individual probity and growth.
But in this mortal life, greedy, trivial hierophants and mundane rulers have perpetrated a fraud upon humanity. They have purloined for profit and temporal power, our legitimate heritage, and that of all society, and have substituted for it shame, despair, and fear, inventing evil deities to terrify and to constrain mankind from the exercise of his own native conscience.
Still we take our uncertain portion time and again, joining with the species on this plane, only to meet with earthly disunity and distress; only to be told by bogus, uncelestial shepherds that we are deficient and fundamentally iniquitous; constantly rebuked that our natural birthright is insubstantial or even sinful, and that we must cleave to the pious injunctions of reigning mortals, no matter how oppressive, or suffer beyond measurable time, yearning for some mythical golden glory just out of reach, but somehow never quite worthy of it.
That is the apocryphal hell and the fabled satan; they are of mortal creation; they are now, not in some remote bye-and-bye; and those who choose to believe in them perpetuate them in this earth. But nevertheless, by sublime design, despite narrowness, folly or fear, we all, each and every one, possess this wondrous legacy:
that each of us sustains a singular covenant with the cosmic, in that the soul is and ever was, one with the universe, conducting itself in concordance with the absolute. And whatever paths it may walk, or whichever faith it may follow, on sojourn at a time, each shall as a consequence of that oneness, and attuning with its destiny, eventually return on its own to its source to again be part of that totality, atoned, aware and unshackled.
"JUSTIFICUS"