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Tuesday, June 7, 2016

Pantheism

I have pretty much the same problems with a pantheistic concept of God as with any other, and really don't see much difference.  The ideas of omniscience and omnipotence to my mind already imply a sort of pantheism -- God is everywhere as the book of Jonah tried to show.  My complaints about suffering remain the same.
Now if what is being talked about is not a god (the word pantheism implies a god but words don't have to mean what they are derived from) but instead a generalized force of ethics and sentience and awareness that we partake of, and maybe rejoin at some point as the Transcendentalists had it, then pantheism is a flavor of atheism.   Forces are not gods -- gods are beings with personality and objectives and emotions and all that.  As I have said, this reminds me of Taoism, except there no attempt is made to understand it all.
Pantheism as a theist notion carries the same problems as other theist notions such as the need for evidence that is not produced, the problem of suffering, the absence of any discernible presence of such a being in either history or physics, and so on.

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