Around 1920, Nicolaus Alexander Niederer began to publish his humanist philosophy and his thoughts on religion in a publication titled "The Antichrist."

Below is published the basis of his philosophy as detailed on page one of the first publication of "The Antichrist."

The links below take you to scanned copies of some of the publications that I have managed to preserve.

Man is the Highest Being known to Man

Man should be God to Man

The Antichrist.

                  THE ANTICHRIST.

The above title is given to these pages, which are intended to appear regularly, to show that Christianity is not founded altogether on facts. Any religous system which lends itself to endless controversy, endless wars between nations, and bitter wars within nations, which is able to split itself into innumerable factions called sects, and within those sects itself causes disruptions and rancour; a religious system which divides members of the same family into bitter opposition to each other; a religious system which has caused the above-mentioned troubles from the beginning of its inception, must be immensely faulty. These humble pages, like numbers, are intended to be written and appear regularly to form an addition to those periodicals which attempt to try to lead the thoughts of the reader from the old orthodox and ancient dogmatic way of thinking to a newer way, one more in keeping with the modern advancement which is taking place. The thoughts of all people of the world are wistfully looking and hoping for something that makes for the betterment of humanity, the world over. The whole human race anxiously wants to know the truth of things if that truth is ascertainable. The reader of these lines, who may be a Christian, need have no apprehension: no harm will be done to him: all that he is requested to do is to transfer his heaven from the sky to the earth, and instead of turning away from these pages, to co-operate with this pamphlet, and try and help to make this world better thhan he or she has found it when they entered it. The Christian has often asked the modern thinker what he would substitute for the Christian religion. The answer is plain and simple: he would substitute humanity in place of an old, disputable dogma. Whenever a nation or group of people becomes sufficiently far advanced in knowledge, education, and enlightenment, the belief in the supernatural and miraculous loses its hold, and they may float for years between belief and unbelief. But if these people would only reflect deeply enough, they could see that it is useless to believe in the unknowable. All our acquired knowledge of Nature and natural phenomena reveals no evidence of any influencer power outside of Nature. So, let us transfer our faith to brother man, and let us all strive to make that brother man better by being better ourselves. Let us trust in him by our example of being worthy of his trust in us, a man's inhumanity to man, which held sway for all those long bygone centuries to the present hour, founded largely on the Old Testament of the Bible. Let us change our lives to one another to man's humanity, to brother man.

       MAN SHOULD BE GOD TO MAN.

If man had common sense, common honesty, and frankness, clear of hypocrisy and cowardice to adopt the above injunction, it would have been, from time immemorial to the present, and all time in the future, a better world than man has made of it, or is making it still, by looking up in the sky for a God to ameliorate the troubles which men incessantly cause one another.

Man is the Highest Being known to Man, and Man should be God to Man. The truest word that could be addressed to us is: If thou wilt ever see the perfect, thou must create it.

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We can see the futility in the belief of this God of the Christians, by those who most ardently believe in his presents and attributes. These are the very people who from day to day, transgress his supposed commands and supposed precepts of life, by making this life, in most cases, wretched and miserable to one another. If man would have tyhe good sense to see that the faith in such a God is valueless by his inability to mend this wretched trait in human nature, which in a million ways hampers and destroys his happiness, why does he not then adapt brother man as his god if he requires a god? Man is a living fact, conscious and appreciative of what is honourable, kind and true; whereas his god of the sky is a phantom, changeable, in form and attributes according to each person's mind and imagination, invented by priests of savages and pagans, long anterior to Judaism and Christianity, and still hawked about by the priestly fraternity of today.

there is no necessity for the idea of a personal creator, or for a unique personal saviour. if we want to be what is called saved, the best way to attain to this is to have the respect, goodwill, and good wishes of all those with whom we come in contact, and the love of those of one's own family. the best way to attain this reputation is to assist by devoting ourselves towards the deliverance of misery and wrong in the world.

most nations of the world should have arrived at a stage of civilisation where they should acknowledge and understand that the supernatural is impossible. Nothing miraculous and supernatural can, or even should, happen in the world. Nature is unchangeable in its operation. Nature does not lend itself to foibles and fits to accommodate some fanatic who wants to make people believe that he is so important in the world that nature throws itself out of gear to accommodate his wishes. The acceptance of the Bible stories as true is a wistful obstruction to progressive thought, and almost criminal in tendencies to prevent enlightenment and knowledge of nature. The teaching of creeds enfeebles the mind, and instead of broadening the intellect, it makes the believer fanatical, intolerant, and narrow-minded, and in fact, fetters the intellect to the impossible and leaves the individual intellectually stranded. The attempt to nationalise all religion - that is to accommodate reason, and yet at the same time to bind and put thought under the yoke of faith - is a double crime against human nature. For such an attempt to succeed, the delusive belief in dogmatism must first become a raving madness. A church doctrine which had been patched together out of the most varying foreign fragments and which contradicted itself in the most fundamental points had to be declared eternally divine, though. A fragmentary, badly-translated, often totally misunderstood, essentially individualistic Judao-Christian philosophy had to be declared infallible, for without these prodigious acceptations, such an attempt would never have succeeded. And so theology and philosophy, which had no connection with one another, were forced into wedlock, and so a monstrosity was imposed upon humanity as an absolute, all-embracing system to be unconditionally accepted. The impious caprice of a human system that lays down the law of supposed "truth" and carries it out with fire and sword soon reaches its limit, and any further step would be a negation of itself.

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