Religion
Although raised a Presbyterian, Pierce became an Atheist as a teenager In the 1970s however, Pierce created the religion Cosmotheism, in what may have been a last-ditch effort to avoid paying taxes, as he had earlier unsuccessfully tried to acquire tax-exempt status for the National Alliance by claiming that the organization was educational. The Southern Poverty Law Center refers to it as a "bogus religion".
In effect, Cosmotheism it is a form of panentheism, asserting that "all is within God and God is within all." It considers the nature of reality and of existence to be mutable and destined to co-evolve towards a complete "universal consciousness," or godhood. Cosmos means an orderly and harmonious universe and thus the divine is tantamount to reality and consciousness, an inseparable part of an orderly, harmonious, and whole universal system.
In his speech "Our Cause", Pierce said:
All we require is that you share with us a commitment to the simple, but great, truth which I have explained to you here, that you understand that you are a part of the whole, which is the creator, that you understand that your purpose, the purpose of mankind and the purpose of every other part of creation, is the creator's purpose, that this purpose is the never-ending ascent of the path of creation, the path of life symbolized by our life rune, that you understand that this path leads ever upward toward the creator's self-realization, and that the destiny of those who follow this path is godhood.
Pierce described his form of panentheism as being based on "he idea of an evolutionary universe ... with an evolution toward ever higher and higher states of self-consciousness," and his political ideas were centered on racial purity and eugenics as the means of advancing the white race first towards a super race and then towards personal godhood. In his view, the white race represented the pinnacle of human evolution thus far and therefore it should be kept genetically separate from all other races.
Pierce believed in a hierarchical society governed by what he saw as the essential principles of nature, the survival of the fittest. In his view, White people should remain separated from other races and establish a ruled by the most qualified. He thought that extensive programs of "racial cleansing" (mass expulsion) and of eugenics, both in Europe and in North America, would be necessary to achieve this socio-political program.
Read more about this topic: William Luther Pierce
Famous quotes containing the word religion:
“Is there any religion but this, to know, that, wherever in the wide desert of being, the holy sentiment we cherish has opened into a flower, it blooms for me? If none sees it, I see it; I am aware, if I alone, of the greatness of the fact. Whilst it blooms, I will keep sabbath or holy time, and suspend my gloom, and my folly and jokes.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“My great religion is a belief in the blood, the flesh, as being wiser than the intellect. We can go wrong in our minds. But what our blood feels and believes and says, is always true. The intellect is only a bit and a bridle.”
—D.H. (David Herbert)
“Religion is this. They act as in religion that is to say they neither wait nor stay away. Religion is best as it is. If they like it at all they like it all, not only more than once but often.”
—Gertrude Stein (1874–1946)