Questions and Answers

What about Artgemeinschaft and God?

The Christian religion has lost all sense of value for an ever-increasing number of people from Northern Europe and their descendants in all parts of the world. The gulf between Christian beliefs and scientific facts is ever widening. The Christian church(es)'s pacifistic trend in the face of a freedom-threatening power is equally untenable.

As a result, many of us Northeners have left the churches as we reflect on the inherent nothingness of Dogma.

What about Artgemeinschaft and God?

Isn't religion not ever the relation between men and god? Well, not all religions keep this question as important. Confusianism for example doesn't. And when religions tell us about their imaginations about god, these will differ from one to the other. There is nothing shure to be said about "God" or "Gods", the Philosopher Immanuel Kant proofed this fact. The worldwide biggest religion, Buddhism, therefor has no imagination about god.

The Artgemeinschaft too takes this question not to be important. Members of our community may belief in the old germanic gods as personal beings as well as in gods like archetypes in the sense of C. G. Jung. They also may belief in an omniescience father as the creator of the world. They may have the imagination of "god within ourselves", they may belief in nature as a structure penetrated by god or gods. They also may have dissociated from all imaginations of god.

"God" is no central idea of our religion, so we have religious liberty.

Religion for us is the question for the sense of life, the confidence in our own strength and our inborn nature, the preservation of our race, the veneration of nature and its laws, and the veneration of our parents and ancestors. Religion therefor is not the speculation about unexplicable things, but knowledge about that we have to hold sacred.

What does the Artgemeinschaft - Germanische Glaubensgemeinschaft believe?

Our belief structures is a conscious reflection of our own Nordic-rooted beings.

The christian bible demands "subdue the earth" and the present eco-disaster is the result. We, however, want to live in harmony with Nature and her laws. Christ told a young man who wanted to bury his father "Let the dead bury the dead", that we should forsake even our families...and the result is the dissolution of family life. We, the Artgemeinschaft - Germanische Glaubensgemeinschaft respect and ennoble our parents and ancestors.

Paul claimed that marriage is needed to offset prostitution and that women in the community should shut up! This is typical eastern thinking, foreign to us Northerners. We want, however, to revive the respect for marriage and women that characterized Germanic life as described by Tacitus and the Icelandic sages.

Christ preached "If someone strikes you on the left cheek, offer him the right cheek" and "Who lives by the sword, will die by the sword". Pacifism (rarely practiced by the insitutional Church itself!) is the result and many countries and peoples have been exterminated as a result. We, the Artgemeinschaft - Germanische Glaubensgemeinschaft, hold bravery, courage, and valour in high standing.

Christians believe that all people are burdened with an "original sin" even before they are born, that we need a "redeemer" to free us from this "sin" or else we are condemned to "hell". We consider all this gibberish mere superstition that degrades human beings.

Christians view death as the "wages of sin". We find ourselves in agreement with scientific knowledge, that death is Nature's way of assuring the progressive development of life. Mankind could never have successfully evolved, if earlier life forms were eternal.

Christians see pain, suffering, and twists of fate as punishment for "sins" against a god, or as a "test" by this god of our faithfulness. We, the Artgemeinschaft - Germanische Glaubensgemeinschaft, see pain as Nature's way of alerting us to dangers around us so that we can take measures to defend ourselves.

According to the Christians, guilt can be absolved through prayer or believing. We, however, believe strongly, that guilt can be absolved only through good deeds exercised by the one who is guilty.

The Christians believe that there is a life after death "out there somewhere". We, the Artgemeinschaft - Germanische Glaubensgemeinschaft, believe that afterlife is realized only in our descendants. The object of our life is life for itself, the preservation of our race in a natural environment.

How did the Artgemeinschaft - Germanische Glaubensgemeinschaft evolve?

Our belief structures evolved from a pleasant dovetailing of our spiritual heirs with the present day scientific advancements. We draw our world-concepts from Kant, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and Ernst Haeckel, as well as contemporaries such as Ludwig Fahrenkrog, Norbert Seibertz, Wilhelm Kusserow, Eugen Duehring, Nicolai Hartmann, E. G. Kolbenheyer, Mathilde Ludendorf, Gustav Frenssen, Hans F. K. Guenther, Konrad Lorenz and Sigrid Hunke. These philosophers have tilled the soil in which our belief structures thrive. However, we do not canonize or "make blessed" anyone.

Does the Artgemeinschaft - Germanische Glaubensgemeinschaft have a dogma?

The Artgemeinschaft - Germanische Glaubensgemeinschaft has no dogmas as understood by Christians, no "word of god" books like a bible and no creeds. To be sure, as a religious community of individuals, we have a basic set of concepts, but these ideas are resonant with our (i.e. North European) world experiences, needs, hopes and desires. They are laid down in "Our Creed" and in "Our Laws and Morals".

These arenot embossed in concrete and, like human beings, can and will reflect the scientific and philosophical advances discovered by our kind of people. Beyond these very basic beliefs, every member is fully and totally free to persue his/her religious experiences and personal beliefs.

Why a new community?

We acknowledge that there are two standing objections to the creation of a new religious community:

1. Do our kind of people really need a religious community? Isn't this narrowing? Is it not really a substitute for the churches? Why leave one institution for another?
2. Religion is essentially an attempt to explain a "relationship" with a "god" about which one can only speculate, right?

We in the Artgemeinschaft - Germanische Glaubensgemeinschaft have freed ourselves from all images of an anthropomorphical god, from a personal god. Thus, for us, religion can not mean a relationship between us and a god. For us, religion means finding a sense to life, faith in our own abilities and in our own people, an ennoblement of Nature and her laws, and a respect for our parents and ancestors.

These concepts still exist despite a 1000 years Christian persecution (e.g: Mass murder of Saxons and Stedingers, burning of witches and heretics). Today there may be no smoldering funeral piles - instead we are inundated with mission stations and specially appointed sect pastors diffaming decent people with their pen. We still have exorcisms and other christian religious mumble jumble in our midst. Last year christian vicars disturbed our Solstice event by whisteling on alarm whistles.

In order to prevent a relapse into the barbarism of the middle ages, it is important for independent thinking people to form at least a loose federation of sorts. This way, we can support one another in resisting efforts by Christians to have us bring our children to "religious" instructions to get indoctrinated into Christians "ethics". Our community is a concerned effort at keeping alive the eons-old desire for genuine spiritual freedom.

Is the Artgemeinschaft - Germanische Glaubensgemeinschaft a sect?

Sects are nothing more than a kind of personality cult within a specific religion. They keep all, or most, of the general precepts of the "mother" church, differing only on an issue or two.

But, as with the various Christian sects, they all hold to the bible and other central precepts. For the Artgemeinschaft - Germanische Glaubensgemeinschaft, the bible has absolutely no binding faith value and we relate in no way with any Christian church, "mother" or "errant daughters"! The Artgemeinschaft - Germanische Glaubensgemeinschaft is a union of level-headed believers in tune with Nature; an independent religious body completely separate from Christianity; we have no "revelation" books or "prophets" or similar hokus pokus. The Artgemeinschaft - Germanische Glaubensgemeinschaft is absolutely no sect.

Who belongs to the Artgemeinschaft - Germanische Glaubensgemeinschaft?

Japanese and Pakastanis are also Nonchristian. They too find various aspects of Christianity difficult to accept. But, not being Northern Europeans, they also find our understanding of the world difficult to accept. Thus, the Artgemeinschaft is not a "World Union of Nonchristians". We are solely interested in reviving and nurturing the ethical views of our people as handed down to us over the centuries from the pens of great German and North European authors; a world view that resonants with our heartbeat and soul's yearning, a view that does not contradict reason and science. For this reason, we prefer to limit membership to "northern" peoples, specifically the indigent ethnics of Scandinavian countries, the German-populated areas of Europe, Netherlands, Flanders, England, and the descendants of these peoples living in the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa - in short Nordics in the broadest definition of the word. By limiting ourselves to these people, we resist the foolhardy temptation to create a world religion and its subsequent degeneration into sects and splittings. We recall that the Protestants, breaking away from the Catholics, caused untold of misery to Germany during the Thirty Years War, only to end up disintergrating into hundreads of sects. Utopian thinking is fine on paper, but worthless to persue.

What does the Artgemeinschaft - Germanische Glaubensgemeinschaft do?

We celebrate annual festivals like Solstice events, as handed down to us through the centuries. Christmas, for example, is an old Germanic winter fest that has nothing to do with a desert dweller born a l,000 miles from our ancestral lands. We also have festivals for all the important dates in a person's life: birth, puberty, marriage, and death. In additional to regular general meetings, we also conduct lectures and discussions at local levels. We welcome open-ended, unfettered discussions with peoples who think differently. We reject closemindedness. We support one another in educating our offspring. These aims are served by a common publication. Among German speaking people it is the "Nordische Zeitung", for English-speaking people, the publication is given to the "Internet" . It is called "Nordische Zeitung www, English Supplement" , the address is

http://purl.org/asatru/de

Is the Artgemeinschaft - Germanische Glaubensgemeinschaft worth looking into?

We think so. Within the last few decades countless Nordic peoples and their descendants in the New World and the Southern Hemisphere have foresaken the Christian religion and its far eastern dogmas that do not relate with our experiences and Northern appreciation of Nature. These people, perhaps you also, want to link up with similar thinking human beings to persue the development and evolution of a belief structure that speaks to us from who we are and echos from us our thoughts and sentiments. Our numbers have been growing constantly and we look forward counting you among us. The "Artgemeinschaft- Germanische Glaubensgemeinschaft" is the most important heathen Community of Germany. We have members in other germanic countries, the readers of our "Nordische Zeitung" live in 20 countries all over the world. We would be delighted if the number of our foreign friends would increase to the point where new kindreds ("Gefährtschaften") could be founded.

Perhaps you will find our liberation from oppressive dogmas as uplifting and refreshing. If you want to become acqainted with us read our websites and feel free to get in contact with us.

Die Artgemeinschaft-Germanische Glaubensgemeinschaft

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