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Nox
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 Posted: Wed Oct 17, 2007 3:08 pm Post subject: Enter the Pantheist |
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Hello to all.
I've never really felt comfortable writing introductory posts (what to say? the norm is so bland...), but I also feel weird skipping them. For the last few years I've been a religious atheist (after being non-religious for most of my life I discovered how many religions defied my conception of the concept and began exploring those which did not require faith), and rather recently I discovered pantheism and "made the switch."
I'm a complete forum-whore, and so I'm always looking for new communities. It seems like most of the views held here conflict with mine enough to spark interesting and beneficial conversations (I'm a strong believer in surrounding myself with people who disagree with me so that I always question my views), but at the same time they aren't so radically different as to make me entirely out of place.
Here's to the hope of intelligent conversation and new insight. |
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Nimitz
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| Posted: Wed Oct 17, 2007 3:21 pm Post subject: |
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Welcome Aboard Nox!
A Pantheist eh?! Well we have a Wiccan or two floating around here. So you're not totally alone in the multiply deity catagory.
This might be fun.
All are welcome at the baby BBq.
(old running joke here) |
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Nox
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| Posted: Wed Oct 17, 2007 4:20 pm Post subject: |
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| You're thinking "polytheist." I'm religious, but I don't take things on faith. Pantheism is the belief that everything is God and God is everything. |
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Nimitz
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| Posted: Wed Oct 17, 2007 4:43 pm Post subject: |
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OOOOPPPPSSS! My bad!
I need to get an updated scorecard!
But hey, you're still welcome.
You like your baby extra crispy or rare? |
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Nox
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| Posted: Wed Oct 17, 2007 5:01 pm Post subject: |
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| Normally I like my meat rare, but extra crispy reminds me of KFC, which immediately fills me with happy. I guess preparation is the big factor here - if we have some kind of sauce thing going on I'll go seared to a crisp on the outside, but if we're going straight I want it rare. |
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spozmo
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Joined: 12 Oct 2007
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| Posted: Wed Oct 17, 2007 6:23 pm Post subject: Re: Enter the Pantheist |
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Welcome.
| Nox wrote: | | my conception of the concept |
Go on...
I may be taking this in a much more complex way than it was meant. I just came from a confusing thread.
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"There is too little love in the world to devote any of it to an imaginary being."-Nietzsche
"The hard work of one man does more than the prayers of millions."- A Bumper Sticker |
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Nox
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| Posted: Wed Oct 17, 2007 6:34 pm Post subject: |
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| I was under the impression that "religion" was faith-based, required belief in a deity, had strict dogma, constricted human behavior, claimed to be the ultimate and only truth, looked down upon non-believers, ect. - the standard "every religion is more or less Christianity" bit that so many teenagers probing the waters of pseudo-rebellion get locked up in. |
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aileron
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| Posted: Wed Oct 17, 2007 7:31 pm Post subject: |
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Welcome aboard, Nox.
Do you believe this pantheistic God to have consciousness, cognition, etc? If so, isn't that a personal God? If this concept of God does not include consciousness or cognition, isn't that just the cosmos?
I dunno, perhaps I am wrong, but I wonder if pantheism is a coherent concept. Perhaps I am making a false dichotomy, but I think the choices are mutually exclusive and exhaustive. |
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SalsaShark
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| Posted: Wed Oct 17, 2007 8:32 pm Post subject: |
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Well, if everything is God (as a pantheist would say), and consciousness is in the set of everything, then yes, consciousness is, presumably, God. I see nothing personal about this God though...
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"Oh bury me, far away please, bury me." |
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aileron
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| Posted: Wed Oct 17, 2007 9:27 pm Post subject: |
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| SalsaShark wrote: | | Well, if everything is God (as a pantheist would say), and consciousness is in the set of everything, then yes, consciousness is, presumably, God. I see nothing personal about this God though... |
I find it hard to define consciousness as the set of everything. |
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Sal1981
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| Posted: Wed Oct 17, 2007 10:13 pm Post subject: |
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Hi.
Not to sound offensive, but I think pantheism is just the linguistic exercise of renaming the universe God.
_________________
"The first principle is that you must not fool yourself - and you are the easiest person to fool" --- Richard P. Feynman
"Why not just make your null hypothesis be that..." - Philosophos |
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Nox
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| Posted: Thu Oct 18, 2007 12:40 am Post subject: |
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I think the Standford article does a pretty good job of responding to the "pantheism is just renaming the world."
| Quote: | 4. Misunderstandings
Schopenhauer criticized pantheism's identification of "the world" with "God," on the basis of what he took to be the meanings of both for the pantheist. He said calling the world "God," or God "the world," is "superfluous," and redundant. He also ridiculed the idea that the world could be called God given our general notions of what God and the world are like. Schopenhauer's criticism fails because he equivocates on the terms central to his argument. The meanings of both Unity and divinity involved in the pantheistic claim that there exists an all-inclusive divine Unity are different than the senses Schopenhauer attributes to the world and God in his criticism. The pantheist does not mean what Schopenhauer means by God, and the "all-inclusive unity" in pantheism is not another word for the "world" as he uses it (i.e. everything). The interpretation of "world" Schopenhauer attributes to pantheists is not what they mean when they describe it as a Unity.
For the pantheist, however Unity is interpreted, the world is not simply an all-inclusive Unity in the sense that the world, understood to be everything, is the "unity" composed of everything. This would be to interpret it as asserting that everything that exists simply is everything that exists; or to put it another way, everything is (of course) all-inclusively everything. This is true but vacuous, and it trivialises pantheism at the outset.
Attributing Unity simply on the basis of all-inclusiveness is irrelevant to pantheism. Formal unity can always be attributed to the world on this basis alone. To understand the world as "everything" is to attribute a sense of unity to the world, but there is no reason to suppose this sense of all-inclusiveness is the pantheistically relevant Unity. Similarly, unity as mere numerical, class or categorical unity is irrelevant, since just about anything (and everything) can be "one" or a "unity" in these senses. Suppose "formal unity" to be "the sense in which things are one in virtue of the fact that they are members of one and the same class … the same universal" (Demos 1945-6: 538). Then clearly formal unity is not pantheistic Unity. Furthermore, formal unity neither entails or is entailed by types of unity (e.g. substantial unity) sometimes taken to be Unity. Hegel's Geist, Lao Tzu's Tao, Plotinus' "One," and arguably Spinoza's "substance," are independent of this kind of formal unity.
Unity is explained in various ways that are often interrelated. These connections range from mutual entailment, to different types of causal and contingent relations. Roughly, Unity is interpreted 1) ontologically; 2) naturalistically — in terms of ordering principle(s), force(s) or plans; 3) substantively — where this is distinguished from "ontologically"; and 4) genealogically — in terms of origin. Christopher Rowe (1980: 57) calls 4 a "genealogical model of explanation" of unity. "Thales, Anaximander, and Anaximenes, the Milesian monists appear to have claimed that what unifies the world is that it sprang from a single undifferentiated substance.
Unity may have to be explained partly in terms of divinity. The all-inclusive whole may be a Unity because it is divine — either in itself (Spinoza's substance), or because of a divine power informing the whole — as with the Presocratics. The Presocratics give an account of why they think the unifying principle is divine. It is immortal and indestructible. But this does not satisfactorily explain the relation between Unity and divinity, or why divinity might be seen as a basis of Unity. Similarly, though less naturally, the question arises as to whether the all-inclusive whole is divine because it is a Unity. Can Unity be a basis for attributing divinity to the whole? If divinity is the basis for Unity, as it may be for the Presocratics; or alternatively if Unity is the basis for divinity; then there is something of a redundancy in the definition of pantheism as the belief that everything that exists constitutes a divine Unity. A simpler non-redundant definition would be that pantheism holds that "everything is divine".
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Sal1981
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| Posted: Thu Oct 18, 2007 1:44 am Post subject: |
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I've seen that contention before; it reduces to 2 distinct categories, a dichotomy. Dualism (in the theistic sense) or naturalism.
Pantheism, per definition, reject Dualism because it separates nature (the universe) from what they call divinity or the supernatural, or whatever they call it. It's one big essence.
So, it's just naturalism, as far as I can tell. The distinction cannot be found, because there is no distinction. It's just hidden in what they call it, just a linguistic exercise, a superfluous way of making a non-existent distinction.
Spinoza, Hegel, etc. didn't mean essence in the sense there was some sort of divine unity - they meant in the purely naturalistic sense. That everything is nature, so mind is just an expression of the materialistic property of the brain, the brain is just matter organized in a certain way to be able to "express" a mind.
_________________
"The first principle is that you must not fool yourself - and you are the easiest person to fool" --- Richard P. Feynman
"Why not just make your null hypothesis be that..." - Philosophos |
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aileron
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| Posted: Thu Oct 18, 2007 1:49 am Post subject: |
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Good grief... I think they're trying to at once claim something supernatural and then deny it's supernatural because supernaturalism is sneered at by the elite academia. Unity, Geist, Tao, the force from Star Wars, whatever you want to call it. What is it? They seem so ambiguous, confused, and noncommittal in their explanation that I'll go ahead and call this one a failure to assert.
At least Einstein was clear and asserted his claim that he believed in a cosmic spirit, so he unambiguously asserted belief in the supernatural. He even said something to the effect that Bhuddism is the religion best equipped to deal with modern science (I assume the no god flavor).
Nox, does your take on pantheism accept supernaturalism? |
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Nox
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| Posted: Thu Oct 18, 2007 1:58 am Post subject: |
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| Quote: | I've seen that contention before; it reduces to 2 distinct categories, a dichotomy. Dualism (in the theistic sense) or naturalism.
Pantheism, per definition, reject Dualism because it separates nature (the universe) from what they call divinity or the supernatural, or whatever they call it. It's one big essence.
So, it's just naturalism, as far as I can tell. |
What you've described is closer to monism than naturalism, IMO. Not all pantheists believe in single-substance pantheism ala Spinoza.
Once again, Stanford ftw:
| Quote: | | Following a long and still current tradition H.P. Owen (1971: 65) claimed that "Pantheists are ‘monists’…they believe that there is only one Being, and that all other forms of reality are either modes (or appearances) of it or identical with it." Although, like Spinoza, some pantheists may also be monists, and monism may even be essential to some versions of pantheism (like Spinoza's), pantheist's are not monists. Like most people they are pluralists. They believe, quite plausibly, that there are many things and kinds of things and many different kinds of value. Even in Spinoza's case, explaining his pantheism in terms of his substance monism glosses the far more significant, pantheistically speaking, evaluative implications he sees as entailed by that monism for his pantheistic metaphysic and his concept of Unity. The Ethics is not about monism, but about what it entails. Why Spinoza sees things as a Unity cannot be explained wholly or even primarily in terms of his monism. |
| Quote: |
Spinoza, Hegel, etc. didn't mean essence in the sense there was some sort of divine unity - they meant in the purely naturalistic sense. That everything is nature, so mind is just an expression of the materialistic property of the brain, the brain is just matter organized in a certain way to be able to "express" a mind. |
That's because Spinoza adhered to monist pantheism. Hegel never claimed to be a pantheist - his views were more consistent with what you posited pantheism to be.
You've isolated the unity aspect of pantheism, but the divinity aspect cannot be discarded - it is a fundamental part of the stance. This is why Spinoza, who chose the label "God" for a reason, is a pantheist and Hegel is not (my own views are more similar to Lao Tzu's than to Spinoza's, though). It, along with elements of transcendentalism, is key to distinguishing pantheism from naturalism. |
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