Monday, June 22, 2026 · 天火 · tianmu.org

Introduction to alt.religion.all-worlds

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The name alt.religion.all-worlds points toward the Church of All Worlds, one of the foundational American Neo-Pagan organizations, but this Good Works shelf is not a Church of All Worlds archive. It preserves one public Usenet witness: the World Pantheist Movement's short creed of scientific pantheism, posted in September 2004 during a cross-posted argument about whether religion can exist without a supernatural deity. The source corpus is much larger: 10,951 messages from 2003 to 2014. But the public shelf is small because the recovered group was dominated by atheist-theist debate, Christian apologetic cross-posting, spam, and late Usenet noise. The task is therefore not to make the shelf look richer than it is. The task is to show why one naturalistic-pantheist post belonged in a room named for all worlds.

What This Shelf Is

This shelf contains two files: this introduction and The Creed of Scientific Pantheism. The preserved text was posted to alt.religion.all-worlds on September 28, 2004, by a user writing as naked_ape, in response to a discussion about whether a religion without a deity was possible. The answer offered was the World Pantheist Movement's creed: a nine-part statement of naturalistic reverence for the Universe, nature, matter-energy, science, equality, human rights, ecological care, and freedom of non-harmful religious expression.

That is the whole public holding. The full raw corpus is not small, but the selected shelf is. This distinction is essential. A 10,951-message archive can still yield only one public reader text if the material worth presenting is thin, derivative, private, noisy, or better preserved elsewhere. In this case, the public shelf does not preserve CAW liturgy, a sustained CAW theological essay, a Green Egg archive, or a full debate over Neo-Pagan organization. It preserves one compact statement of scientific pantheism that circulated through a CAW-adjacent Usenet address.

This does not make the shelf trivial. A one-text shelf can still matter when the text reveals a precise religious question. Here the question is: what happens when a modern Pagan, nature-religion, science-fiction-influenced, internet-era forum receives a creed that is almost religion and almost atheism, both devotional and anti-supernatural, reverent without revelation, cosmic without a personal god?

The answer is not a system. It is a signal. In a battered public forum, someone replied to a challenge about religion without deity by pointing to the Universe itself as sacred.

The Name Behind The Address

The phrase "all worlds" belongs most visibly to the Church of All Worlds, a Neo-Pagan religious organization formed in the early 1960s by Tim Zell, later Oberon Zell-Ravenheart, and Lance Christie. The group's most famous inspiration was Robert A. Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land, whose fictional Church of All Worlds supplied language, ritual imagination, and communal form. Scholars of new religious movements have treated CAW as a major example of fiction becoming religious source: a community taking a novel not merely as entertainment but as mythic seed.

CAW's own current welcome materials present the church as a Pagan support network, spiritual touchstone, and catalyst for Pagan community, oriented toward life in harmony with the rhythms of Mother Earth. They direct new Waterkin to Stranger in a Strange Land, Drawing Down the Moon, CAW ritual and liturgical materials, water-sharing, RINGs, nests, and the church's wider Neo-Pagan context. The language is self-consciously communal: not only a set of beliefs, but an experiment in belonging, practice, and tribal governance.

The best-known CAW themes help explain why a scientific-pantheist creed could appear in this group without feeling foreign. CAW emphasized immanent divinity, water-sharing, the recognition of sacredness in persons and nature, ecological consciousness, myth-making, and religious invention without embarrassment. It did not depend on a single ancient lineage or a fixed creed. It belonged to the broader modern Pagan and Aquarian world in which new religious forms could be openly made from fiction, ritual, ecology, personal experience, and deliberate community design.

But the Good Works shelf should not quietly turn alt.religion.all-worlds into a full CAW page. There is already a separate need for a serious Church of All Worlds profile built from CAW materials, Green Egg, published scholarship, and living-practice context. This shelf is narrower. It is a Usenet source room, and its public item is not a CAW document at all. It is a World Pantheist Movement text that happened to travel through the all-worlds address.

The Source Corpus

The raw file behind this shelf is alt.religion.all-worlds.20140819.mbox.gz. A local count finds 10,951 messages, with date headers running from July 21, 2003, through June 24, 2014. A rough keyword pass is enough to show the problem. Only a few dozen messages mention CAW, Oberon/Zell, Heinlein, grokking, Green Egg, or the World Pantheist Movement. By contrast, language associated with Bible, Jesus, Christianity, atheism, and apologetics appears across much of the corpus, because many threads were cross-posted from wider atheist-theist argument rooms. The first visible subjects in the raw file already include spam, commercial come-ons, and generic religious argument rather than CAW community life.

This is not unusual for late Usenet. A group name could remain meaningful long after the community that gave the name meaning had moved away. Cross-posting made one argument appear in many groups whether or not it belonged there. Evangelical, atheist, anti-theist, apologetic, political, pornographic, and commercial traffic could all pass through the same address. If a group lacked active moderation or a strong resident community, the address became less a room and more a surface on which other rooms left marks.

The old introduction called the group the official online space for the Church of All Worlds and described the archive as a record of CAW's encounter with the open internet. That may preserve a real memory of the group's intended identity, but the public shelf cannot let intention substitute for evidence. The recovered corpus does contain CAW-related argument, including early 2003 disputes around "CAW-Trad," the use of the Church of All Worlds name, and questions of lineage, independence, and authority. Those threads may be historically interesting. They were not selected here as public reader texts, likely because they are messy argument threads, personally identifying, incomplete, and source-sensitive. The one text that became a Good Works witness is the scientific-pantheist creed.

The Missing CAW Argument

The CAW-related material that appears in the raw corpus is important precisely because it is not the same kind of witness as the creed. A keyword pass finds early exchanges around "CAW-Trad," with participants arguing over whether a group could derive practices from the Church of All Worlds, who had authority to use the name, whether Oberon Zell's permission mattered after internal institutional changes, and whether a tradition can be independent while still naming itself through its parent body. These are real new-religion questions. They are not merely gossip.

Modern Pagan organizations often have weak or experimental institutional forms: nests, covens, groves, circles, informal lineages, small nonprofits, charismatic founders, breakaway groups, festivals, mailing lists, and personal networks. Authority is rarely as simple as a single bishop, canon law, or centralized bureaucracy. A dispute over a name can therefore become a dispute over what a religion is. Is the tradition held by a corporation, a founder, a ritual form, a body of practice, a web of friendship, a magazine, a set of stories, a shared sacrament, or a living community that can split and still remain kin?

Those questions matter deeply for CAW because CAW itself emerged from deliberate religious invention. If a church can be founded from a science-fiction novel, then religious authenticity cannot rest only on antiquity. It must rest on practice, recognition, continuity, consent, and the ability of a story to generate a life. But those same principles make boundary disputes harder, not easier. If story and practice are live sources, then who decides when a derivative group is still inside the story and when it has become something else?

Good Works should probably return to those threads only with a separate public-internet method decision. Reply chains about living or recently living religious communities may contain personal addresses, unfinished conflict, legal accusation, and community pain. They can be historically valuable without being ready for a public reader shelf. The scientific-pantheist creed is cleaner because it is an already-public, intentionally distributed movement statement. The CAW-Trad exchanges are messier because they are arguments among people negotiating ownership, memory, legitimacy, and belonging in public.

That difference is a source lesson. The most dramatic material in an archive is not always the most publishable. Sometimes the public shelf should preserve the cleaner witness and name the mess without exploiting it.

The Preserved Post

The preserved post was not originally a calm statement issued in a pantheist forum. It appeared inside a contested thread. A participant had argued that it was difficult to have religion without a deity: if not one deity, then lesser deities; if not deities, then some intense otherness greater than oneself and one's friends. Naked_ape replied that scientific pantheism came close, then posted the creed.

That context matters. The creed is not only a manifesto. In this archive, it is an answer to a problem raised by public argument. It says, in effect: a religion may be built around reverence for the actual Universe, without supernatural realms, personal gods, revealed scriptures, secret gurus, or life after death. It may still have awe, ethical obligation, ritual freedom, ecological seriousness, and a sense of belonging to something larger than the individual ego.

This is why the post belongs in alt.religion.all-worlds. The group's CAW background was already comfortable with immanent divinity, myth-making, Pagan ecology, and the refusal to separate science, imagination, and sacredness too sharply. Scientific pantheism is not the same thing as CAW. It is cooler, more naturalistic, less mythopoetic, less tribal, less fiction-rooted, and more explicitly committed to scientific realism. But both occupy the borderland where the sacred is sought within the world rather than above it.

The post also reveals an internet-specific mode of religious circulation. Naked_ape did not write the creed. The user selected it, introduced it, and placed it into debate. That is a weaker form of authorship but a real form of witness. Much public internet religion works exactly this way: not by composing new scripture, but by pointing, forwarding, excerpting, quoting, reposting, and saying, "this answers what we are arguing about."

Scientific Pantheism

Pantheism, in the broad sense, identifies God with the universe or nature, or refuses any deity separate from the substance, laws, and powers of the world. Western philosophical pantheism is often associated with Spinoza's language of God or Nature, while modern religious and ecological movements have developed many looser forms of nature-centered pantheism. The World Pantheist Movement represents a specifically naturalistic version: no supernatural beings, no revealed scriptures, no personal creator, no afterlife as continued personal consciousness, and no hidden realm behind the physical universe.

The World Pantheist Movement's current principles are not identical in wording to the older creed preserved here, but the continuity is clear. The movement emphasizes reverence for nature and the wider Universe, active care for humans and animals, celebration of embodied life, freedom of religion, church-state separation, strong naturalism, respect for evidence, scientific method, realism, and ecological responsibility. The older creed says much the same in a sharper early form: the Universe is the only real divinity; all matter, energy, and life are interconnected; body, mind, and spirit are not separate substances; death returns the person to nature; ultimate reality is directly available through perception and emotion rather than secret wisdom.

The religious force of this position can be missed if the reader hears only the negations. Scientific pantheism rejects many things associated with religion, but it does not reject awe. It rejects supernatural authority, but not reverence. It rejects revealed scripture, but not moral seriousness. It rejects personal survival after death, but not continuity through matter, memory, action, and participation in nature. It rejects a God outside the world, but not sacredness.

That is why it was useful in a newsgroup where atheists and theists were arguing past one another. Scientific pantheism offers a third grammar. It says that the question is not merely whether one believes in God. The question is whether reality itself can be met religiously without adding another realm.

CAW, Pantheism, And The Pagan Border

Church of All Worlds and scientific pantheism are not interchangeable. CAW is warmer, stranger, more ritual, more mythic, and more socially experimental. It has water-sharing, nests, circles, "Thou art God," Heinlein, Green Egg, Neo-Pagan community, and a long history of living with the consequences of turning fiction into practice. Scientific pantheism has a leaner philosophical center: nature and the Universe are enough; science deepens rather than defeats reverence.

Yet the overlap is historically important. Modern Paganism has often included people who believe in gods as persons, people who treat gods as powers or archetypes, people who practice magic without firm theology, people who are animists, polytheists, pantheists, panentheists, atheists, agnostics, and poetic naturalists. The public argument over whether such positions count as religion is not a side issue. It is one of the central pressures in modern Pagan and nature-religion history.

The all-worlds address therefore becomes a useful archive even in its brokenness. It shows a religious category under stress. In a room named for an organization that made religion from science fiction, water, ecology, and immanent divinity, a naturalistic pantheist creed appears as evidence that the sacred can be argued for without leaving the world. The post does not resolve the debate. It preserves the debate's hinge.

What Not To Infer

Do not infer from this shelf that Church of All Worlds is reducible to scientific pantheism. CAW has its own history, rituals, leaders, controversies, publications, and communal practices. A CAW reader may recognize affinities in the creed, but the creed is not CAW doctrine.

Do not infer that alt.religion.all-worlds was mostly a scientific-pantheist group. The raw corpus contains only a small number of pantheism-relevant messages. The preserved post is selected because it is clear, compact, public, and reader-worthy, not because it represents the majority of the traffic.

Do not infer that the absence of CAW texts here means CAW lacked internet life. It means this particular public selection did not produce a publishable CAW reader shelf. Other CAW materials belong in official sites, Green Egg archives, books, oral memory, living community records, and scholarly studies of invented religion and Neo-Paganism.

Do not infer that reposting the creed makes the Usenet user its author. The witness is the act of circulation and placement in argument. The text itself belongs to the World Pantheist Movement's public self-presentation.

Reading The Creed

Read the creed first as a theological threshold document. It is not a poem, not a myth, not a ritual script, and not a philosophical treatise. It is a boundary statement: this is what a naturalistic pantheist community can affirm together.

Then read it as an answer to the thread from which it came. Its most important claim is not only that the Universe is sacred, but that reverence, ethics, community, and religious freedom can survive without supernaturalism. That claim is what made it useful in cross-posted atheist-theist argument.

Finally, read it as a Good Works micro-witness. A small post can preserve a whole pressure point in modern religion: the desire to remain faithful to science without surrendering awe; to reject supernatural claims without flattening life into indifference; to belong to nature without needing an outside deity.

The old Usenet room is broken. The witness is not.

Good Works Duties

Future work should keep three shelves distinct.

First, this Usenet shelf should remain a source-critical micro-shelf around the one preserved WPM creed unless more public, rights-safe, context-rich all-worlds posts are selected with clear reason.

Second, Church of All Worlds deserves treatment as a living and historical Neo-Pagan tradition through CAW materials, Green Egg, Oberon and Morning Glory Zell-Ravenheart, scholarly new-religion studies, and careful attention to living community self-understanding. That work should not be hidden inside a one-text Usenet shelf.

Third, scientific pantheism and religious naturalism deserve their own broader context if Good Works builds a naturalistic religion room. The WPM creed can serve as one doorway, but not as the whole field.

The dignity of this shelf lies in proportion. It preserves one answer to one public religious question, and that answer still matters: perhaps the sacred does not need to be elsewhere.

Selected Sources And Shelf Witnesses