Daily Archives: July 19, 2015

Instilled by the power and mystery and beauty of the Universe and Nature, Pantheism is the perennial religion. Children are born with it, and it continually emerges from all human spiritual traditions.

Pantheism is the belief that the universe and nature are numinous - that they and they alone are worthy of the reverence that traditional religions devote to "God."

Pantheism is the perennial religion. Children are born with it, and it continually emerges from all human spiritual traditions. It is the feeling of awe and wonder that reality itself inspires, onto which theistic religions project their imagined deities.

Pantheism is as old as human speculative thought. It dates as far back as the Upanishads, the Tao te Ching and the first Greek philosophers such as Thales and . Heraclitus, the Chinese Taoist Chuang Tzu, and the Stoic philosopher Zeno of Cittium.

After Christianity was enforced as the state religion of the Roman empire, it became dangerous to express pantheistic beliefs. Pantheists such as Meister Eckhart were marginalized, while others were burned and their books suppressed. Giordano Bruno, the first post-Christian pantheist, was burned at the stake in 1600 CE.

When religious tolerance spread in Europe, after the religious wars of the 16th and 17th centuries, Pantheism was able to express itself more openly, starting with Spinoza.

Pantheism began to spread more widely in the later 18th and early 19th centuries, in Germany with Goethe and Hegel, and in Britain with the romantic poets - Wordsworth, Keats, and Shelley, and the transcendentalists in the USA - above all Emerson and Thoreau.

During the 19th century Pantheism seemed set to become the dominant religious philosophy. But the wars and ideologies of the 20th century caused some regress. Political ideologies such as Communism and Fascism, along with the wars and upheavals they caused, commanded attention. Post-war existentialism and post-modernism spread the beliefs that there were no basic truths.

Yet pantheism persisted, often among the most eminent writers and scientists, including Einstein and Hawking, D. H. Lawrence, Robinson Jeffers, and Frank Lloyd Wright.

Related to pantheism is panentheism. Panentheists believe that a conscious, usually personal God is present in the sensible universe, but also extends beyond it. These include the neo-Platonist Plotinus and most Christian and Islamic panentheists. Some of these are included for comparison.

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Pantheists in History: a history of pantheism

Naturalistic pantheism is a phrase referring to a kind of pantheism, and has been used in various ways. It has been used to identify God or divinity with concrete things,[1] determinism,[2] or the substance of the Universe.[3] God, from these perspectives, is seen as the aggregate of all unified natural phenomena.[4] The phrase has often been associated with the philosophy of Baruch Spinoza,[5] although academics differ on how it is used.

The term pantheism" is derived from Greek words pan (Greek: ) meaning "all" and theos () meaning God. It was coined by Joseph Raphson in his work De spatio reali, published in 1697. The term was introduced to English by Irish writer John Toland in his 1705 work Socinianism Truly Stated, by a pantheist that described pantheism as the "opinion of those who believe in no other eternal being but the universe."[6]

The term "naturalistic" derives from the word "naturalism", which has several meanings in philosophy and aesthetics.[7] In philosophy the term frequently denotes the view that everything belongs to the world of nature and can be studied with the methods appropriate for studying that world, i.e. the sciences.[8] It generally implies an absence of belief in supernatural beings.[7]

Joseph Needham, a modern British scholar of Chinese philosophy and science, has identified Taoism as "a naturalistic pantheism which emphasizes the unity and spontaneity of the operations of Nature."[9] This philosophy can be dated to the late 4th century BCE.[10]

The Hellenistic Greek philosophical school of Stoicism (which started in the early 3rd century BCE)[11] rejected the dualist idea of the separate ideal/conscious and material realms, and identified the substance of God with the entire cosmos and heaven.[3] However, not all philosophers who did so can be classified as naturalistic pantheists.[12]

Naturalistic pantheism was expressed by various thinkers,[5] including Giordano Bruno, who was burned at the stake for his views.[13] However, the 17th century Dutch philosopher Spinoza became particularly known for it.[5]

Possibly drawing upon the ideas of Descartes ,[14]Baruch Spinoza connected God and Nature through the phrase deus sive natura ("God, or Nature"),[15][16][17] making him the father of classical pantheism. He relied upon rationalism rather than the more intuitive approach of some Eastern traditions.[18]

Spinoza's philosophy, sometimes known as Spinozism, has been understood in a number of ways, and caused disagreements such as the Pantheism controversy. However, many scholars have considered it to be a form of naturalistic pantheism. This has included viewing the pantheistic unity as natural.[19] Others focus on the deterministic aspect of naturalism.[20][21] Spinoza inspired a number of other pantheists, with varying degrees of idealism towards nature.[22][23] However, Spinoza's influence in his own time was limited.[24][25]

Scholars have considered Spinoza the founder of a line of naturalistic pantheism, though not necessarily the only one.[26][27][28]

In 1705 the Irish writer John Toland endorsed a form of pantheism in which the God-soul is identical with the material universe.[29][30][6]

Here is the original post:
Naturalistic pantheism - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

by Lewis Loflin

Pantheism is just spiritual atheism, that has no relation to Deism. It claims to be based on science, but is poisoning science with pagan philosophy and mindless mysticism. It's become a type of fundamentalist' religion increasingly driven by emotion devoid of reason. This discussion will look at just what pantheism is and how it is a threat to humanity.

Rational? Really? No it's not it's about feelings not reason. Most of the universe is simply rock, gas, and metal completely devoid of life or real purpose, but the worship of this is rational? This person would go on and claim his belief was derived from chat boards and never bothered to look up the historical and dictionary definitions of the term.

This is a common problems with alleged deism websites that refuse to even define deism and openly reject its historical context - while claiming the authority of it. Many modern deists simply seek a way to attack theism.

Referring to New Age Religion from http://www.religioustolerance.org/ in their article that listed New Age beliefs:

According to Quakers and Deists and from John Punshon's Portrait in Grey: A Short History of the Quakers they quote Deism as,

And pantheism as,

It also leads to Universalism (as we define it, the belief that all religions are means to approach a the same spiritual reality) since many other faiths also practice this form of spiritual worship, e.g., Buddhism, Hinduism. Gandhi's book "All Religions Are True" is consistent with this philosophy. Pantheist Quakers view the "light [as] the direct operation of God upon the soul, something which the deist cosmology in principle refused to admit." (161)."

My dictionary says on pantheism, "a form monism that identifies mind and matter...making them...the self developing universe, conceived as a whole, as God...The worship of all as Gods...." So says Funk and Wagnalls.

I know of no Deist that believes what Atresica stated above. Deism says God created the universe, not God created God nor made the universe divine or is the universe divine. Deism rejects the divinity of the material world be it the universe or its parts or contents. This kind of pantheism and other Eastern style religion led to transcendentalism that is at total odds with both Deism and its close cousin Christian Unitarianism. Let me remind the reader of what traditional five articles of English Deism, which in no manner God merely created the universe and went away:

See the article here:
A discussion of Atheistic Pantheism and Classical Deism