Pandeism and the world of Harold Ramis

Today I eulogize a gifted man the only way I know how: by writing about how his world is fully accounted for, and so superseded, by the theological theory of Pandeism.

....A Twinkie 35 feet long weighing 600 pounds....

But first, I note that Patton Oswalt tweeted thusly:

If a Twinkie represents amount of grief I feel when someone dies,

Harold Ramis' death would be a Twinkie 35 feet long weighing 600 pounds.

This, for the uninitiated, paraphrases a line from one of Ramis' most famous collaborations, Ghostbusters -- in the film, Ramis' character, the brilliantly named Egon Spengler, was estimating the amount of psychokinetic energy hovering over New York (as compared to its regular Twinkie-sized Twinkie amount). Historically and recently, a number of meganerds have posted blogs or comments to the effect that a 35 foot long Twinkie would actually weigh way more than 600 pounds.*, *, *, * But their projections are all based on the presumption that the 35-foot length of this Twinkie would correlate with a proportional increase in diameter. In fact, the correct question to be asking is, "If a Twinkie is 35 feet long, and weighs 600 pounds, what would be the diameter of this Twinkie?"

Assuming for simplicity that a regular Twinkie is 10 cm and weight 36 grams, a proportionally expanded Twinkie being about 10.66 meters would be 106 times as long as the norm, and indeed weigh as much as 1.2 million regular twinkies, i.e. 96,000 pounds. But to achieve a Twinkie of that length which in fact weighed 600 pounds, one would simply need to make the Twinkie's length much greater than its proportional increase in diameter. We would need to specifically make it's diameter somewhere between one twelfth and one thirteenth the normal proportion. I'm being a bit rough here, but I believe a Twinkie is about an inch and a half or so in diameter -- and yes, I know that Twinkies are not perfectly cylindrical (nor in a vacuum for that matter). But approximating them to be, we may confidently retort that Egon spoke of a Twinkie 35 feet long, and about eighteen inches in diameter down it's length....

And, yes, that's a big Twinkie -- and a heavy load of grief, appropriately carried for the passing of such a bringer of mirth.

....I Ain't Afraid of No Ghost....

And by the way, I don't mean here to dwell on whether Pandeism is specifically consistent with the spirit-filled world of Ghostbusters, which is after all only a fragment of Ramis' work. But, yes, I do confess that I've been asked more than once: as a Pandeist, do I believe in ghosts, spirits, communion with the deceased, and such? Is there room in such a theological theory -- founded on logical and reasoned examination of the proof available in observing our Universe -- for the historically (if anecdotally) widely-believed phenomenon of ghosts? And I would answer that if there are such things as ghosts, these too are simply manifestations of our Creator in the same way that we are ourselves such manifestations.

But at the same time, I must speak for the moments of the proof from my own perceptions. I have certainly been in the presence of what I would call residual spiritual energies. I have a theory in mind that if a person has habitual behaviours, then there may exist some energy of the person which has a certain memory for pursuing those behaviours. I have never had a two-way conversation with a "ghost," but if I did I'd account for that pandeistically!!

....So I Got That Going For Me, Which Is Nice....

But the real point here is how Pandeism would view the whole of the body of work left behind by Harold Ramis -- Animal House, Meatballs, Caddyshack, Vacation, Back to School, Groundhog Day, Analyze This. There were some flops as well, but I'm only looking at the hits here, and for good reason, a reason that gets right down to the core of Pandeism: because they bring people joy. And isn't that really what it's all about? Or, at least, what it ought to be?

If it just so happens that we are, indeed, all part of our Creator, and our Creator is experiencing existence through us, is it not obvious that we ought to strive to have the most joyful experience of existence? It seems odd in this respect that many religions seem to have no room for the kinds of experiences which bestow unto us fullthroated, rib-shaking laughter. There is precious little that is intentionally funny in scripture. Theologian Alfred North Whitehead wrote that "the total absence of humour from the Bible is one of the most singular things in all of literature," and the Qu'ran is not much funnier. The Old Testament for example offers such advice as:

Sorrow is better than laughter,

for by sadness of face the heart is made glad.

The heart of the wise is in the house of mourning,

but the heart of fools is in the house of mirth.

It is better for a man to hear the rebuke of the wise

than to hear the song of fools.

For as the crackling of thorns under a pot,

so is the laughter of the fools;

this also is vanity.

Ecclesiastes 7:3-6. But one must wonder, what would those folks think of the "was it over when the Germans bombed Pearl Harbor" speech in Animal House or that scene in Meatballs where the basketball team loses "with self respect" by pulling down the pants of their opponents and fleeing in the ensuing chaos? The men who penned the instructions, "let there be no filthiness nor foolish talk nor crude joking," Ephesians 5:4, would they scoff in derision at the classic candy-bar-in-the-swimming-pool scene in Caddyshack? Consider the hilarious comeuppance, in that very film, of the priest who golfs in the rain and takes the Lord's name in vain when he misses his last shot, only to be struck by lightning -- and who later turns up drunk and muttering "there is no God." And the bit in Groundhog Day where reporter Phil, stuck reliving the same day over and over again goes through a stretch of increasingly bizarre trysts with a local women. (One clever fellow has calculated that Phil spends in total over thirty-three years reliving that day).

But I propose that if our Creator shares in our experiences, then that includes every last guffaw of our laughter. Man was meant to laugh, and not only to laugh at highbrow things, but to laugh at fart jokes and awkward sex misadventures, at the mockery of stiff-shirted priests, at a series of cartoons making fun of a possible gay Jesus and Mohammad, and certainly of the story of the Buddhist asking the hot dog vendor, "make me one with everything." Harold Ramis had the wit to relay a story of a golfing Dalai Lama not paying Carl Spackler for his caddying in money, but instead with the promise that on his deathbed, Spackler would have total awareness.

And so, far from having words of condemnation for the varying degrees of irreverence with which Harold Ramis brought us to our knees with laughter, Pandeism would laud what Ramis gave so many, to share with one another and with our Creator -- the wonderful experience of laughter, the greatest gift one human can give another (except, naturally, for orgasms).

A Pandeist responds to John Oakes' "response to Pandeism"

From time to time, people do come along and write things like this "response to Pandeism" put forth by noted Christian apologist John Oakes. And, well, such things as these, I must answer.

Defining the Problem:

Oakes begins his "response" complimentarily, at least, offering that "Pandeism is an interesting philosophy," and observing that "it is not a religion, but a philosophical/worldview perspective." Additionally he qualifies at several points that he is "far from an expert on this philosophy" and has done "little research" on it. As to his critique proper, Oakes actually begins by launching a volley against Pantheism, describing its premise that "God fills up the universe and the universe is, essentially God", but noting as well that "if God is, essentially, the universe, then the universe cannot have been created." But, Oakes continues:

This is a big problem for pantheism, because science tells us that the universe is not eternal, neither can it be eternal. The universe was created about 13.5 billion years ago out of nothing. It is not an oscillating universe. The second Law of thermodynamics tells us that the universe cannot be eternal. Where does this leave the thinking pantheist? Classical pantheism cannot be supported in view of clear cosmological evidence. Pandeism comes to the rescue.

Now, this is an interesting critique coming from a Christian apologist, in that it inherently throws out the timeframe of the Creation story of the Judeochristian Scripture (a sore point for fundamentalists, who require the story of the Garden of Eden and Adam and Eve with the apple to set up the notion of original sin). In so doing Oakes at least hypothetically ought to be allowing for a Creator who has set forth a wholly evolutionary Universe (verily, as Pandeism does). But Oakes eschews this logical step; instead he retreats to his premises and simply describes Pandeism as an "ad hoc and a weak marriage" of deism and pantheism:

The marriage seems to be, as it appears, at first glance, to be self-contradictory. The deist believes in a Creator who created the universe but who is not personally invested in the universe. This Creator does not intervene in the universe. The Creator is not personal but rather impersonal and, obviously, distant. An impersonal universe is certainly consistent with pantheism, but pantheism has an eternal, uncreated universe. The pandeist proposes that there was an impersonal Creator who, after the creation, allowed himself to be absorbed into the Universe. To the outsider, this seems like a patch-up to save pantheism in a world in which creation is clearly implied by the data. What is the nature of this Creator? How can the Creator become the creation? This is hard to explain.

Part of Oakes' problem may lie in his fundamental misstatement of what Pandeism is. For he is hardly the first to mistakenly claim that the pandeistic Creator "after the creation, allowed himself to be absorbed into the Universe" when in fact Pandeism makes no claim of absorption into an already-created Universe, but of the quite distinct act of Creation itself being the singular act of our Creator wholly becoming the Creation itself.

It worth asking, as well, if "creation is clearly implied by the data," ought we not to dispose of all belief systems which fail to follow what is implied by the data? Ought we not dismiss all faiths inconsistent with a Universe "created about 13.5 billion years ago"? And if we are to follow what is implied by the data, ought we not to build our theological model by first examining all available scientific date, and then extrapolating from that the set of logically consistent theological models?

As to Oakes' difficulty with the notion of a Creator able to become its Creation, perhaps this ought to be 'hard to explain' to an atheist, but one would think that a theist would readily acknowledge that their Creator had the power to do such a thing. Indeed, a Creator creating from its own substance, and not needing to exercise an additional power of ex nihilo Creation, is the simplest kind of Creation which can be. If it is indeed "hard to explain" such a thing, then it must be an especially weak and incapable Creator which Oakes would take in place of one which has the power to have set forth our Universe pandeistically.

Argumentum ad populum:

Oakes is additionally quick to raise an argumentum ad populum, contending that "this esoteric philosophy is not held to by any world religion," and to note his knowing of "no influential philosophers or teachers who have publicly called them selves pandeists." As to these propositions, I can only suggest that Oakes make a more searching reading of the Bhagavad Gita. Though Oakes seems content to pigeonhole Eastern faiths generally as pantheistic instead of pandeistic, it is immediately apparent in a full reading of that seminal work, and in others along its same lines, that many strains of Hinduism and other Eastern religious philosophies envision a Creator-deity who has in fact become our Universe, and revels in the sharing of the experiences of lives arising within it.

In fact, many faiths have scriptural passages which may be so interpreted. And, many have sects or scholars which have expressed such interpretations quite explicitly (though perhaps Oakes was looking for somebody to declare "I am a Pandeist," as though the name of the theory invoked some special significance). We need not stand on such ceremony in philosophy -- Benedict Spinoza is universally acknowledged as one of the originators of Pantheism, though he never uttered that word because it had not yet been coined when he set forth his ideas.

An Anthropic Critique:

Back to the critique, Oakes states that "this philosophy was created purely from human thinking in order to solve a perceived rational problem with both deism and pantheism." Yes, but so is all religion. So is theological thought generally. And indeed, so is Oakes' Christianity, and every other theism. But theistic faiths cannot fathom the human capacity for inventing religions except to have faith that their own is true and to propose as to all others that deity-made evil spirits have broken loose and run amuck amongst us dispensing theological falsehoods. And yet Pandeism fully accounts for theistic faiths without making any such contorted assumptions.

It is the honest forms of theology which admit that they are products of human reflection, that there is no reliable proof for a universally true revelation or scripture, and that what theological truth there is must be what can be gleaned and extrapolated from a logical, reasoned, scientific examination of our Universe itself. And Deism and Pandeism happen to accord with scientific knowledge without needing to mutilate facts to meet ancient accounts, nor to posit a deceiver deity who makes things appear other than as they are, or makes and sets upon us superpowered evil spirits capable of effecting this deception by proxy.

A Straw Man in the Mirror:

Oakes closes with the assessment that Pandeism is "self-contradictory," and "a patch-up, created to solve a logical problem, rather than based on any evidence for the truth of the philosophy." But, again, he has early on disclaimed actual knowledge of Pandeism, or study of it, and so apparently speaks in ignorance of what proof is claimed to support Pandeism, and indeed of what Pandeism actually is all about. At the least, he makes no effort to summarize this proof and address it with specificity.

And so, the contradiction that Oakes believes he finds in Pandeism is a straw man born from Oakes' own misunderstanding of what Pandeism actually contends. It is not the sort of contradiction embodied in the claim of an all-powerful, all-benevolent intervening deity who nonetheless watches placidly while children are tortured to death and wars are fought by competing claimants to its name, for Pandeism makes no such claims, and bears no such contradiction.

And, lastly, as to Pandeism being "a patch-up," such evaluation mischaracterizes a genuine reconciliation of coherently compatible elements of systems as to which each is partially explanatory. One might as well call any modern computer "a patch-up," because it combines various pieces of technology initially invented for different reasons into a whole more useful than any one of the things for which such technology was first developed. Perhaps a better example of a 'patch-up' would be a religion built on bits and pieces stolen from other, more ancient mythological traditions -- a flood myth here, a virgin birth there, any number of returns from death elsewhere.

A Closing Suggestion:

Oakes' conclusions need not be further addressed, because his premises are simply entirely wrong. His conclusions simply cannot be reached. I would only suggest to Oakes that, in the future, if he deigns to take on such a topic as Pandeism, he ought to actually study it enough to know what claims are made by it, and what the history of it is, before proposing reasons for which to dismiss it. And, naturally, he ought to take care that what criticisms he gives are not those which are more powerfully directed at the beliefs which he would uphold in the place of his target.

A Pandeist response to Sacerdotus

Recently I came upon a rather old blog post from one Sacerdotus, titled From Atheist to Catholic, huh? How that happen?!? The post delineates the author's claim of dabbling in various beliefs (and nonbeliefs) until converting to Catholicism-- seemingly largely on the strength of an incidence where a woman mysteriously referred to him as "father" whilst they happened to be in the vicinity of a Catholic Church, and thereafter the author's feeling of peace upon worshiping therein.

To Sacerdotus I reply: It is unclear from your description whether you even considered Pandeism (if not, fair enough, it is esoteric enough a theological model that it takes some searching to even come to it), or, if you have considered it, that you have given it a fair shake. Let me point to two aspects of Catholicism -- the cover-ups of child-molesting pedophile priests, and the quixotic condemnation of the homosexuality of consenting adults. It is clear that the hiding and shuffling about and protecting of child molesters was orchestrated from the heights of the institution, and from the very same heights from which unscientific and untenable homophobia has spewed. This bespeaks corruption from crust to core, hardly characteristic of an institution bearing an underlying truth. Indeed, quite the opposite of it.


But let us compare the philosophy of Pandeism. All things are part of and within our Creator, which has wholly becomes our Universe, a Universe designed to give rise to intelligent life, most probably so that our Creator can experience from the vantage point of such life, and learn what it is like to live so. Now, this fully accounts for the lives of all the towering figures of theological history, of Arjuna and Buddha, Moses, Jesus, Mohammad, Joseph Smith, Gandhi. For all are themselves part of our Creator, and some surely may have had some special talent for touching upon a fragment of its incomprehensible underlying presence, and take from that some modicum of truth, some snippet which was but a molecule of it, and yet was overwhelming to any human mind.

And so Pandeism fully accounts for all theologically significant experiences, for miracles, and things experienced by their limited human recipients as revelations and visions and prophecies, egrigores and spiritual encounters or emotions or notions. This fully accounts for your own "father" experience and your feelings in going to this especial church, a bow to the ego, a flash of energy from an underlying and nonintervening being not directed towards you, but created by you-- in your unknowing capacity as a fragment of our Universe's Creator.

And returning to the problems of Catholicism (even ignoring its enslavement of tens of thousands of Irish women in the Magdalene Laundries until only a few years ago, its science-defying discouragement of condom usage in nations with AIDS epidemics, and its politically shrewd but morally weak passivity during the Holocaust), it is simply not a universal truth. It is not something which a person born in a remote time or place could come to realize, absent some external intervention, and so most people who have lived and died on this Earth have done so without ever knowing enough of the religion to consider it.

Not so with Pandeism, which can be reached by logical contemplation no matter when or where the starting point, and which is hampered only by attachment to unreason (both on the part of the religious and the atheistic, who stake an absolute position where no absolutes can rightly be known).

And as to the problems mentioned before, Pandeism properly avoids any hierarchical structure, any of the sort of 'organized religion' which would even enable a body to become corrupted, to become a haven for pedophiles and an enabler of their crimes. And, understanding that all things are part of our Creator, and that each person has a duty to prevent those instances which are rationally discernible as causing suffering, Pandeism could have no irrational doctrine of homophobia. It is the very impossibility of such things within an understanding of pandeistic truth which sets it morally above any "organized" structure susceptible to corruption and to hijacking in favor of bigotry and biases.

Of Chrislam and Xtianity

There has been for some time an idea that eventually Christianity and Islam would put aside their differences and merge into one super-religion, pulling up aspects of each and perhaps dominating the Earth. It has been suggested, even, that the somewhat more polytheistically inclined Hinduism could absorb both, and what the heck, throw Judaism and Mormonism and Sikhism into the mix, thus creating for the first time in recorded history a single religion commanding the fealty of a majority of the world's population. The idea is given to several different authors, who have taken different angles -- Arthur C. Clarke for example writes in his 1992 The Hammer of God (not to be confused with the Led Zeppelin biography Hammer of the Gods) of a not-so-far-future fictional Earth where "The sudden rise of Chrislam had been traumatic equally to Rome and Mecca...." growing swiftly to a hundred million adherents, abetted by cultural and economic difficulties squeezing the parent faiths.

But as a matter of practical experience, consolidation is an unlikely path for any major faith; each is more likely to split into multiple smaller sects, and any reconciliation between sects of different faiths will tend to be far outside the mainstream of beliefs falling under the umbrella of the faith. And so, even as there are conciliatory voices today who would claim that all these different faiths are simply different paths to the same Creator, (indeed a position held, if somewhat more obliquely and indirectly by Pandeism), the greater tendency amongst the faithful is to ramp up greater indictment against beliefs discordant to their own. Even if, it turns out, those faiths fall under the broader ends of the umbrella of their own religion.

There is in fact, by the way, a faith group operating under the name 'Chrislam' and purporting to carry out the idea discussed here, attempting to meld assertedly reconcilable elements of Christianity and Islam. Or, actually, there are two groups. Both are in Nigeria. Oh, they started out as one, but had a schism somewhere along the way and are now, if not bitter enemies, passing acquaintances who don't pass up an opportunity to snipe at one another's divergent doctrines. Ironically, if unsurprisingly, this is what Arthur C. Clarke forecast for his fictional version as well. This, before a later inevitable eventual turn to a world where the only divide was between proponents of Atheism and Deism (presumptively including Pandeism).

Naturally, we might abbreviate this to Xlam (or perhaps Xslam?) by using the conventional substitution of the 'X' for Christ. People typically imagine that this arose with the intention of insulting Christians, but really the origin of the X as a substitute for Christ in Xtian, Xtianity, and, naturally, Xmas, is something of a mystery -- it might indeed have been intended by non-Christians in a derogatory sense, but it just might, as well, have been a Christian connivance. One perhaps intended simply to abbreviate, or perhaps complexly to obfuscate. The X is after all something like a leaned-over t in its resemblance to that most deathly of reminders, the cross. In some fonts (and in the multiplication sign) the lines are in fact perpendicular. And, even more interestingly, in ancient times, Jesus Christ was sometimes abbreviated by Christians familiar with the Greek alphabet with a symbol combining the letters "Chi" and "Rho" -- roughly represented in the Latin alphabet by X and P, respectively. It is very easy to see how those earnestly and noninsultingly referencing Jesus might have whittled their representation down to the point where X marks the spot.

But then again, if X means Christ, doesn't that mean our X chromosome is the Christ chromosome, the X-Acto knife is the Christ-Acto knife, and the Uncanny X-men are really the Uncanny Christ-men?

----

Further reading:

"Signs of Xmas" in Changing Signs of Truth: A Christian Introduction to the Semiotics of Communication, by Crystal L. Downing, pages 89-90.

Pandeism and the world of Sherlock Holmes

What can the fictional world of Sherlock Holmes possibly have to do with the theological theory of Pandeism? Well, really the question is, is this world consistent with Pandeism, and the answer: why wouldn't it be?


Unlike the magical world of Harry Potter and the alien-filled science fiction realms of Star Wars and of Star Trek, the world of Sherlock Holmes is utterly mundane. Like the earlier Scooby-Doomysteries, every mystery has as its resolution purely human activity -- and, indeed, even those cases brought to Holmes under the pretense of supernatural activity -- ghosts, curses, demonic possession -- are inevitably shown up as man-made manipulations of mind and matter. And so, to speak of the theological model underlying that world is to speak of a world with no especial metaphysical activity ongoing. We might just as well be speaking, then, of any such mundane world, of that of adventurers like Tom Sawyer, actioners like James Bond or Jason Bourne, the mundane mysteries of CSI and Law & Order, or any other sort of media in which things simply happen, without second thought, in accordance with the laws of physics and without any appearance of divine intervention or other metaphysical causation (or, at least, without any such appearance not ultimately debunked as being of human manufacture).


This is not to suggest that these sorts of media are absent of displays of religiosity, for they depict the real and present world, and naturally people in this world have religious beliefs, all sorts of them.

Religion, as she is depicted in the stories of Sherlock Holmes:


In the course of the Sherlock Holmes stories, there are references to Jews and Gypsies, Muslims, Hindus, and various denominations of Christians. Perhaps the most famous treatment of religion in the Sherlock Holmes canon is to be found in A Study in Scarlet, one of only four full-length Sherlock Holmes novels (the remainder of the literary contributions being short stories). It is eventually uncovered in the story that the mysterious deaths being investigated are of Mormons against whom the killer was taking revenge, for years before their community had kidnapped his love and murdered her father, forcing her into a marriage which resulted in her own death a short time later (the story attributes the girl's death to a broken heart, but implies that she was ill-treated by her forced husband, who ultimately seemed more interested in inheriting what had previously been her father's land). The treatment of Mormonism generally is of a dangerous cult which exercises rigid control over its members and condones lawlessness against outsiders, who are distrusted. Author Arthur Conan Doyle is claimed to have later privately apologized for this depiction, though this report is itself somewhat dubious.


But the general treatment afforded to religion by Sherlock Holmes and his compatriots is apathy. In one story, Holmes dismissed knowledge of astronomy as useless to his work; doubtless he would have so opined on theological questions. Holmes occasionally uses idioms incorporating religious terminology (as in, "my God" and "for God's sake," or suggesting that a doomed man is bound "to meet his maker"), and one story mentions Holmes as being on his way to a chapel (for reasons not specified). But on no occasion is Holmes shown to attend a purely religious service, utter a prayer, or explicitly voice a belief in any higher power. Indeed, in one of the earliest stories -- The Sign of the Four -- Holmes commends to compatriot John Watson a book titled The Martyrdom of Man by one Winwood Reade, which as it happens incorporates a secularist and materialist antireligious examination of world history, especially in depicting Jesus as delusional. And yet, Holmes calls this work "one of the most remarkable ever penned," which would in that day be tantamount to endorsing atheism, as much as if somebody modernly were to declare Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion to be amongst the finest books ever written.

Sherlock Holmes contemplates the meaning of life:


But even Holmes waxes morosely philosophical from time to time, as depicted in the 1892 story, The Cardboard Box:

"What is the meaning of it, Watson?" said Holmes solemnly as he laid down the paper. "What object is served by this circle of misery and violence and fear? It must tend to some end, or else our universe is ruled by chance, which is unthinkable. But what end? There is the great standing perennial problem to which human reason is as far from an answer as ever."

Similarly in The Retired Colourman, Holmes decries, "But is not all life pathetic and futile? We reach. We grasp. And what is left in our hands at the end? A shadow. Or worse than a shadow -- misery." And in The Veiled Lodger Holmes declares, "The ways of Fate are indeed hard to understand. If there is not some compensation hereafter then the world is a cruel jest." Such contemplations suggests at the same time a wish to find a larger purpose to our Universe, even while rejecting all the explanations which have been considered up to that time. Holmes is equally dismissive of supernatural explanations for mundane crimes, refusing to contemplate for example the proposition that The Hound of the Baskervilles is anything but a flesh-and-blood beast, rejecting the possibility of unearthly agency again in The Adventure of the Devil's Foot, and commenting in the late-written story, The Sussex Vampire, "But are we to give serious attention to such things? This Agency stands flat-footed upon the ground, and there it must remain. This world is big enough for us. No ghosts need apply."


The television and film adaptations of Holmes' stories have tended to remain faithful to general irreligiosity of the character, or more likely to have ignored theological questions altogether. In the first Robert Downey Sherlock Holmes film, Holmes dismisses, and later disproves, an apparent miraculous resurrection from death; in Young Sherlock Holmes mystical explanations are similarly disproved as Holmes discovers hallucinogenic drugs to be responsible for seemingly supernatural experiences (and the villains are attempting to perform an ancient Egyptian ritual to boot); in the modernly-set BBC reimagining Sherlock, the character is if anything more scornful of religious beliefs and explanations.


Could the world of Sherlock Holmes occupy a Pandeistic Universe?


But all of this relates to what Holmes believes, perhaps to what Arthur Conan Doyle believes -- which is, in the larger scheme of no matter. Were Holmes depicted as a devout Christian or a devout Muslim, or a Jew or a Sikh, such depiction would not work to make real the religion believed. There may be a billion devout Christians in the world (Christians will claim there are more, but that requires some sleight of hand with who they would call 'devout') but that has never operated to convince Hindus, Jews, or Mormons of the truth of Christianity; and the same can be claimed of the comparable number of Muslims, or of Hindus, or most any denomination. That it is believed simply proves that it is believed, not even that it is rationally believable, much less true. So, whatever the religion of Sherlock Holmes or James Bond or any other figure existing in a nonsupernatural world, from Robin Hood to Rocky Balboa, the question remains whether the world which they inhabit isconsistent with a pandeistic Universe.


And the answer in all of these cases is indeed that it is. For, although Pandeism fully accounts for miracles and other apparently metaphysical or supernatural events, and so would account for the magic of Harry Potter's world, the Jedi powers exhibited in the world of Star Wars, and the superpowered and telepathic aliens often encountered in Star Trek, none of these sorts of things arerequired in Pandeism. They are simply accounted for, if they exist.


It is entirely possible to conceive of a world -- indeed, of this world -- where no miracles, no telepaths, no supernatural events of any sort exist, where all reports ever made of such are theconsequence of coincidence, mistake, hallucination, imagination, or deception, and yet where the fundamental explanation for the existence of our Universe, at all, is pandeistic Creation. Even if all other religions are disqualified in such a world, where all of their reported miracles and wonders and fancies are by default simply false, Pandeism may yet be true.


In the final analysis (and in the world of Sherlock Holmes, there always is a final analysis), it is even somewhat surprising that Sherlock Holmes, to whatever degree he speculates on religious questions, has not come to contemplate at least Deism (which was well known in his day), if not the more obscure Pandeism, or some comparable variation of Pantheism. But, then, if the orbits of the planets are of no matter to Holmes, perhaps these even greater orbits would be of even less interest.

Answers in Pandeism: Part IV: Looking Back to Christian Deism

As I have mentioned in past posts, a while back I received this email:

Hello,

I am a 17 year-old that has been thinking about becoming a Pandeist for the past few days. Currently, I am a Christian and come from a background of Christians. I have read a lot on Pandeism recently and have a basic understanding of it. I share a lot of similar beliefs, but I just have a few questions:

Do you acknowledge the existence of Jesus?

Do you pray?

What do you do as a Pandeist? Do you congregate (as in a church or synagogue)?

If I change to Pandeism, how should I approach my parents about not being a Christian anymore?

If I convert, what is some advice for beginning the conversion from Christianity to Pandeism?

I have answered some of these questions here before, and today I address this one:

If I change to Pandeism, how should I approach my parents about not being a Christian anymore?

Now that is indeed an interesting question. One thing about Pandeism, it recognizes that we each inhabit our own lives, and so each of us knows ourselves (or is capable of knowing ourselves) better than any person outside ourself can. That is indeed one of the very points of our existence, that we each generate our own unique set of experiences, which we (being a part of our Creator) contribute to the whole of the experience of our Universe. You know your parents, possibly better than anybody else in the world; how will they react to one approach or another? What purpose is served by 'approaching' them at all? And indeed in some sense the question ought to be, if Pandeism presents a more logical and reasonable approach, how can Iteach my parents about my understanding of Pandeism? How can I bring them around to understanding the logic of the position (even if they are perhaps unable to break faith with the psychologically comforting beliefs of their ancestors).

And as to the question of not being a Christian anymore -- well, is that so? Who decides that? I know some who consider themselves Christian Pandeists on the strength of their faith in the correctness of the peace and love and tolerance taught by Jesus, and not at all in mythic aspects such as the virgin birth, or the resurrection tale, or of casting body-possessing evil spirits into pigs. This descends, indeed, quite directly from Christian Deism, a tradition which long ago embraced the values and non-mystical teachings of Jesus. An example, possibly the most famous, wasThomas Jefferson, an avowed Deist who spoke of 'nature's God,' and produced for himself the "Jefferson Bible" -- a Bible from which Jefferson had cut out all reference to revelations and miracles, aspects which he rationally deemed to be later human inventions or incorporations designed only to deify one man, instead of elucidating all men.

No contradiction, no paradox, extends from adopting certain of the values and ideals claimed to have been espoused by Jesus, and yet believing in a deistic theological model. Let us examine this. One of the earliest mentions of Christian Deism dates from 1737, where one Thomas Morgan wrote:

For God, according to these Philosophers, makes and governs a natural World that is capable of governing itself, and that might have made itself as well, had they not pass'd a needless and insignificant Compliment upon, the Creator. But I hope they will mend their Scheme, and compound this Matter for their own Honour, and not pretend to fay, that God has made a necessary World, or a self-existent System of Creatures. Yet this is the philosophical Scheme of Atheism, which its Patrons would fain call Deism, and in which the Christian Jews or Jewish Christians assist them, by joining inadvertently in the fame Cry. But if this be not a fine Scheme of Philosophy, let Christian Deism stand for an odd Sort of Religion, and let the Christian Jews be for ever orthodox, and be allow'd as the only religious Men in the World. It is certain, that if God governs moral Agents at all, he must; govern them by Hope and Fear, or by such a wise and suitable Application of Rewards and Punishments, as the different Circumstances of Persons, and the Ends of Government require. And these Rewards and Punishments must be such as are not the natural, necessary Consequences of the Actions themselves, themselves, since every one must see that this would be no Government at all, and that the Case, in this Respect, must be the very same whether we suppose any rectoral Justice, or any Presence or Operation of God in the World or not. And yet this which is really no Government at all, is all the general Providence which some seem willing to allow. But since those Gentlemen are all deep Philosophers, and above the gross Ignorance of the common Herd, I would here only ask them, What are the Laws of Nature ? What is the Law of Gravity, the Law of communicating Motion from one Body to another by Impulse, and the Law of the Vis -Inertia of Bodies ? Are these natural, essential and inherent Properties of the Bodies themselves, or are they the regular Effects of some universal, extrinsick Cause acting incessantly upon the whole material System, by such and such general Laws and Conditions of Agency?

The moral philosopher: in a dialogue between Philalethes, a Christian deist and Theophanes a Christian Jew. By Thomas Morgan, 189-190, 1737

And then a bare two years later, one John Leland wrote:

This may give the Reader some Notion of this Writer's Candour and Sincerity, and what we are to think of his pretended Regard for Christianity, which in Effect amounts to this: That the Christianity revealed in the Writings of the New Testament is Jewish Christianity; that is, Christianity corrupted and adulterated with Judaism, which according to him is the worst Religion in the World. But the true and genuine Christianity is Christian Deism, to be learned not from the Writings of the New Testament, but from the Volume of Nature, from every Man's own Breast, from the Heavens, the Earth, and especially the Brute Creatures,the genuine uncorrupted Instructors in our Author's Christianity. So that the "Gentlemen that assume to themselves the Title of Deists, seem resolved that for the future they only shall be called the true Christians too. Those that look upon the New Testament to be divinely inspired, and receive it as the Rule of their Faith, and take their Religion from thence, must be called Christian Jews, who only put a strange Mixture of inconsistent Religions upon the World for Christianity : whereas these Christian Deists teach it in its Purity, and in order to propagate pure uncorrupted Christianity they do their utmost to discard.the Writings of the New Testament, that Is, the Writings that give us aft Account of the Doctrines taught by Christ and his Apostles, But since these Gentlemen will not allow; us the honourable Title of Christians, it is but fair that they should leave us that of Free-Thinkers, to which I really think the Advocates for the Gospel Revelation have a much juster Pretension than they.

The divine authority of the Old and New Testament asserted. By John Leland, viii-ix, 1739

Now, firstly I do not mean to at all impugn Judaism by quoting accounts which suggest it to have 'corrupted' Christianity, for really any theistic influence is bound to be just as corrupting of efforts to achieve truth through reason. Consider Buddhism -- the founder of that faith, the Buddha, denied being at all 'divine' and dismissed the idea of the existence of divine beings who were any more in control of their ultimate reality than man. He would have absolutely laughed at the objectively ridiculous idea that bowing to a statue of himself would be thought to bring about luck for people living many centuries later -- and yet this is modernly precisely what many Buddhists do, venerating the man at the expense of the message, and attributing miracles tointervention resulting from prayers to the Buddha. (And, as I have discussed elsewhere, Pandeism accounts for the experience of efficacious prayer.) And it may seem strange as well to those inculcated with theistic traditions to speak of Deism as an 'uncorrupted' Christianity, but some fundamental ideas remain -- the idea that what we do unto our neighbours, even unto 'the least of' our neighbours, we do to our Creator; not that doing bad to our neighbours is simply condemned, but that we are actually doing it to our Creator, that our Creator is physically and emotionally experiencing through us all we do, and all that is done to us.

And so Pandeism leaves room for reverence for a human Jesus, even for Jesus as a sort of naturally occurring divine figure, akin to the Buddha as a mystically gifted product of the rational processes of a rational Universe. And really, it is this view in which Pandeism places a higher veneration on men like Socrates and Jesus, Mencius and the Buddha, and more modern men of holy bearing, such as Gandhi. For it is no great boon to deem a man to be 'God' -- for Pandeism, through logic and reason, explains that all man and all things are equally part of our Creator. It is the knowing of this, and the consequent understanding that we must love and respect each other as the pieces of our Creator we are, which is the most remarkable achievement attainable.

So, taking this back to the original question, are you telling your parents that you are "not being a Christian anymore," or are you telling them that you're simply no longer the kind of Christian who venerates the mythic aspects of ancient books over their metaphorical import? And, to bring this back to one additional level of depth of thought, since Pandeism teaches that we ought to strive to minimize negative experiences in the world (so far as we have control over them) and maximize positive experiences (all such experiences after all being the experiences of our Creator as well), if such a declaration will lead to grief and conflict, why must you tell anybody especially what reason dictates to be your inner beliefs?

Superstition

I have at times lamented that while far too many songs vainly repeat the theological conditioning of their originating cultures, precious few recount any sort of freethought -- and of those, fewer still which could be deemed downright funky. True, John Lennon enabled us to "Imagine" no religion, and Rush invited us to exercise Free Will. But it was not until I entered the lyrics catalog of Stevie Wonder that I discovered the perfect freethinkers song sitting there all along under my nose -- and it is a funkalicious song, and it has an awesome message.

The inspiration:

It all began in 1972, with the then-22 year old musician seeking to step out of the shadow of Ray Charles, whom he had been cast by the music industry as a younger version of, partly for his sound and undeniable talent as both a pianist and a singer, but mostly for his coincidental blindness. In a jam session with Jeff Beck for the production of what would eventually be Stevie's starmaking album, Talking Book, Beck came out with a novel drumbeat, immediately inspiring Stevie's writing of a bass part, to be played on his "funky, dirty, stinky, nasty instrument" -- the clavinet. Other musical elements followed, the rise and fall of the trumpets trumpeting notes, sometimes stairstepping, sometimes flowing close to free jazz until all come winding together in a chaotically, beautifully layered ending.

The Execution:

Here is an original studio-recording version:



And here's a later, faster version:



The song launches itself with what has become one of the most iconic bass lines known to music, a variation of a conventional run up and down the pentatonic scale made wild by the interspersing of ghost notes between the scale notes. This is shortly joined by a small but potent section of brass instruments. And then Stevie starts singing, tearing into lyrics, "Very supersititous, writing's on the wall," which give the song meaning above and beyond the greatness of the music itself. Now, Stevie could've taken this masterfully funkalicious tune and turned out a song with lyrics on most any subject, for example those most ubiquitous themes of the genre, love, sex, and just plain partying. But he instead chose superstition as the theme, excoriating by name irrational belief in such fanciful flights as bad luck from walking under a ladder ('ladder's 'bout to fall'), triskadekaphobia ('thirteen month old baby'), and breaking of mirrors ('broke the looking glass'), the last event being followed by 'seven years of bad luck, the good things in your past'.

This overall sentimentation is then most powerfully reflected in the repeated refrain:

When you believe in things
That you dont understand,
Then you suffer,
Superstition aint the way

An almost primal singing scream is arced by double-tracking over the words, 'then you suffer,' almost a lamentation of suffering on its own. In the next verse, he interestingly includes 'wash your face and hands,' though not typically a superstition, certainly something done to a superstitious degree by some, especially germaphobes and the OCD-stricken. This line may be read to suggest a biblical reference as well, as does the earlier line 'the writing's on the wall. After another refrain comes something else which seems telling about the song as a whole; mixed in amongst all the other beliefs dismissed for their harmful nonsensically, in the spot where the falling ladder stood in the first verse, is the comment, 'devil's on his way'-- the inescapable implication being, the devil is simply yet another silly superstition, a falsity as with all the rest.

The Contemplation:

In an interview on the release of the album, Stevie waxed lyrical in speaking of the superstition decried in the lyrics: "The worst thing is, the more you believe in it, the more bad things happen to you. You're so afraid that something terrible is going to come up, that you are much more vulnerable."

Superstition is the funkiest song on the album, indeed the only one which aims for funkaliciousness. It took a while for the ambition of the song to sink into the music market, with the song reaching the Pop and R&B number one spots some three months after its release. And it is the only song directed toward a seemingly antireligious theme. Now, I won't pretend to have any inkling of Stevie being anything but a traditional theist. He had earlier recorded gospel numbers as well, and has had no dearth of references to theistic beliefs in later songs. And it may well be that Stevie was excluding his own beliefs from the condemned categorization, possibly even considering the superstitions addressed as counterclaims to his religion.But whether he intended or not, this song tells a good part of the story for those who have broken the bounds of theism altogether and leapt into the sea of other possibilities.

It may be that other listeners don't get this out of the song, we humans being adept at reading the validation of our own desires into the things we see and hear and feel. And, most assuredly, it is the music as a whole, rather than the message, which made this song the hit which it was and is. But even as the song contains one of the funkiest baseline/horn combos ever belted out, it unquestionably conveys one message vital to the philosophy of freethought: the irrational belief in superstitious leads to suffering of the funkiest kind.

The Legacy of Antony Flew

The death of Antony Flew in April of 2010 set off a firestorm of debate over his legacy and who, in the end, he was, philosophically. Biographically, there's no question that he was a mid-1920s London-born son of a Methodist minister who began to drift from Christianity as a teenager -- he was at one point, while a student at Oxford, in a Christian group led by noted apologist C. S. Lewis, but though he thought Lewis to be the most effective apologist, he ultimately found the position as a whole unconvincing.

And so Flew grew to be a leading philosopher of the school of evidentialism, endlessly strictly demanding that belief ought to follow the evidence, and ruthlessly weeding out claims of faith which were not founded on insurmountable logic (which, for the most part, discounted all forms of faith for him). Flew's primary position was that atheism ought to be presupposed until testable, empirical evidence of a God (or comparable metaphysical entity) should arise -- he rejected out of hand the notion of any God which could or would make itself untestable, characterizing such propositions as simply meaningless. Likely his most famous contribution to philosophical dialogue was the no true Scotsman fallacy, a proposition that focused some light on the problem of dissenting voices within a group being characterised by their opponents as simply not being members of the group.

But late in life, Flew's discernment of where the evidence led caused him to undertake a rejection of atheism itself, in favor of the position of Deism. An elderly Flew wrote -- with the assistance of another philosopher, Roy Abraham Varghese -- a book confrontationally titled There Is A God. The clincher for Flew was the plethora of fortuitous circumstances in our Universe, from constants of physics to the peculiar dual dance of DNA and RNA which Flew saw as a form of code requiring, at least obliquely, a code-writer. Flew's death not long after caused 'followers' in three camps to advocate for specific aspects of his work.

Atheists who had long rallied behind Flew's actively and eloquently antitheistic writings insisted that Flew's late-life conversion had been brought about by confusion and deception as to what science could answer about the origin of life; it was hinted without subtlety that senility had played a role (and, indeed, this argument was made even while Flew still lived). Some proposed that Flew had experienced something of a death-bed conversion brought about by fear of afterlife consequences, a proposition Flew flatly scotched with the assurance that despite coming to believe in a designer, he continued steadfastly rejecting the notion of an afterlife. But most of all, the atheists sought to dismiss Flew's late-life deistic turn as an anomalous period in the life of a tried-and-true atheist whose great bulk of work was uncompromisingly atheistic. The work, they contended, spoke for itself, and itself overpowered the arguments upon which Flew later came to rest.

Theists, on the opposite tack, sought to extend Flew's views into territory which Flew himself expressly continued rejecting, begging the possibility that Flew's ascent to Deism placed him on the path to accepting some brand of Theism, much as a man who walks up from a valley to the top of a mountain before dying might afterwards be described as having been on a path to walk right on up to the moon. To read obituaries produced by some theistic publications would be to conclude that Flew had indeed approached becoming a deity-worshiping believer in literal theistic scripture, replete with an angry, jealous, haphazardly intervening Creator, and stone-age creation myth. Such representations optimistically ignored that Flew's views had actually become even more hardened against theistic contentions as he entered into the realm of deistic thought. To Flew, the very possibility of a noninterfering deistic God rendered unnecessary and absurd the claims of the bother of a theistic tinkerer-deity. In 2006 an evangelical university had given Flew an award for his freedom of thought (presumably for shifting from atheism to Deism), though Flew himself had not wavered from what he'd announced in a 2004 interview:

I'm thinking of a God very different from the God of the Christian and far and away from the God of Islam, because both are depicted as omnipotent Oriental despots, cosmic Saddam Husseins.

Flew, rather, compared his Deism to the position of Thomas Jefferson, declaring:

While reason, mainly in the form of arguments to design, assures us that there is a God, there is no room either for any supernatural revelation of that God or for any transactions between that God and individual human beings.

And, at last, there were the deists (including pandeists), the small but enduring group of adherents to the position to which Flew ultimately did hew, declaring himself to be "quite happy to believe in an inoffensive inactive god." As followers of precisely this view, they defended Flew's final writings on the contention that these ought to be taken for the value of what they set forth, without consideration of the author's life external to his work. The deist, then, was tasked with combating barbs hurled both from the side of the atheists who dismissed Flew's post-atheistic writings on the grounds of deceived and diminished faculties; and from the theists who misrepresented Flew's end-of-life philosophical evolution as endorsing their view. In a sense, deists were tasked still with countering Flew himself, for though his potent antitheistic arguments were most squarely directed against theistic beliefs, elements of them could be read as antideistic and antipandeistic as well. There are indeed legitimate questions raised as to whether Flew did truly fully grasp the science of genetics which played a large part in his late conversion, and indeed it is hardly an article of faith amongst deists that the code of life requires a direct author at all, if a Universe might be designed which authors such things incidentally. But further back from that, the notion of authorship may not be withdrawn, for Deism fathoms the ability of a Universe itself to give rise to such a complex code as evidence of a complex design.

But whatever else may come from the late-life conversion of Antony Flew, it surely succeeded in drawing new attention both to his antitheistic life's work, and to the deistic ideas which were his final ideological resting place.

Pandeism versus the wars and violence of Theism and Atheism

All music is an original creation of the YouTube PanDeism Channel, and may be reused for any purpose of the YouTube PanDeism Channel is rightly given credit. All images are public domain or self-made.

One need not venture deeply into the realm of theological discourse to discover atheists and all kinds of theists arguing endlessly over which faith is responsible for the most wars, oppression, violence, and deaths.

Christians:

The Crusades, the Inquisition, European wars from the Dark Ages right up through the Twentieth Century, including the English Civil Wars, Napoleanic Wars, the Pogroms, the Holocaust, Witch burnings, Genocide against Balkan Muslims, and the new Twenty-First Century Crusades.

Muslims:

Wars of conquest, the Armenian Genocide, invasions against Israel, Islamofascist regimes, Terrorism, 9/11, 7/7, theologically based execution of gays, and virtually enslaving women through denial of rights....

Jews and Palestinians:

Generations lost to unending oppression, strife, and recalcitrance in Israel, the Gaza Strip, and the West Bank

Hindus and Muslims:

Unending strife between India and Pakistan; many wars and acts of terror....

Shintoism:

Religion of Japan, authors of Nazi-allied World War II aggression

Even Buddhism:

Religion of the Vietnamese, both North and South, who used brutal tactics in Vietnam's Wars.

And too many tribal and folk religions to count having blood, murder, and war on their hands as well....

Atheists:

The deadly regimes of Stalin and Mao and their totalitarian successors, including persecution of those wishing to exercise religion.

Arguments fly back and forth over which despots and killers were of what faith and how much every one amongst them was motivated by religious beliefs.

But then we come to Pandeism

No nation has ever been stirred to war by Pandeists. No government has ever sought to justify oppression or tyranny with Pandeism. No pandeist has ever sought to force another person to change his practices or beliefs through threats and torture.

And why not?

Perhaps because violence and oppression are the means left to those not having the whole of the truth on their side. But, as well, because pandeists believe that we are ALL part of our Creator, and so to do harm or injustice to another person is to inflict the same harm or injustice upon our Creator; and, ultimately, upon ourselves!!

Pandeism: A Philosophy of Peace!!

Donkey Cocks and the Judeo-Christian Bible

Oholah and Oholibah, revisited -- and illustrated!!

Existential relevancy, and other theological lies

I have of late noticed the same lengthy theological exhortation being posted in forums and discussion sites all over the internet, as if with each posting it was a new and spontaneous pronouncement -- it begins by posing the question (or pretending to answer the question, posed by someone else), "With all of the different religions, how can I know which one is correct?" The tract then launches into what would seem to be, actually, a promising discussion, insisting, "How do we arrive at the truth about God? We use a systematic methodology that is designed to separate truth from error by using various tests for truth, with the end result being a set of right conclusions." It therefrom deigns to outline characteristics which a theological model must possess to pass the sort of scientific muster contemplated by the tract.

So the piece begins by setting forth that a "true" faith must evince

1. Logical consistency—the claims of a belief system must logically cohere to each other and not contradict in any way. As an example, the end goal of Buddhism is to rid oneself of all desires. Yet, one must have a desire to rid oneself of all desires, which is a contradictory and illogical principle.

Now it is surely true that that which is determinable to be true must be logically consistent, for that is itself one of the chief ways we are able to test truth -- all else ultimately falls to gibberish, belief for the sake of believing something no matter how irrationally held. How sad then that this author misunderstands or chooses to misrepresent Buddhism in so doing, for any person knowledgeable enough to speak competently on the subject would know that the goal of Buddhism is to rid oneself of only those desires which stand in the way of enlightenment!! Naturally, it is not to rid oneself of the desire for enlightenment itself, though in the end the enlightened soul, having achieved this final thing, is indeed shed of all desires.

Let us consider a comparable misrepresentation which could be made against the deity popularly presented by the Abrahamic faiths (Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Mormonism). That deity is claimed to command its adherents to rid themselves of sin. But disobedience to this deity is a sin, and since it is claimed to be an all-knowing Creator which knew all of the outcomes each of us would come to even before we were born -- including all expressions of the sinfulness with which we were made -- then attempting to change the outcome which such Creator has foreseen for us is a form of disobedience, and so we sin by seeking to rid ourselves of sin. Whether ignorant or deceitful, precisely such an error made as to Buddhism bodes ill for any wisdom coming from this source. But we continue.

And so the tract goes

2. Empirical adequacy—is there evidence to support the belief system (whether the evidence is rational, externally evidential, etc.)? Naturally, it is only right to want proof for important claims being made so the assertions can be verified. For example, Mormons teach that Jesus lived in North America. Yet there is absolutely no proof, archaeological or otherwise, to support such a claim.

Again, the author identifies, in empirical adequacy, a necessary element in at least measuring the probability of a possible truth. But again our author ignorantly or for malicious purpose misstates the teachings of an example faith. Mormons, as it happens, do not teach that Jesus "lived" in North America, but rather that Jesus simply appeared for a time before the people living in the unidentified settlement described by their scripture. While it is true that Mormons traditionally assign such a geographic identity to this settlement, empirically it may as easily have been South America or Australia or Indonesia, and so far as the message of the scripture is concerned the location is irrelevant. And, as to our tract author's exemplar objection, wherever it is that Jesus may have appeared, it is an absurd stretch to suppose that men would find archeological evidence of the transitory appearance of one such as Jesus in this settlement, where there is no more determinative archeological evidence of Jesus' presence in the Middle East, where it is claimed he was born, traveled, and was buried.

But thus far, we have been presented with rational requirements of a religious truth; it is only the examples presented which have been in error. So the truly shocking error, the one which even runs against and overcomes the first two points (which, at the least, identify true elements of a logical examination) is

3. Existential relevancy—the belief system must conform to reality as we know it, and it must make a meaningful difference in the life of the adherent. Deism, for example, claims that God just threw the spinning world into the Universe and does not interact with those who live on it. How does such a belief impact someone in a day-to-day manner? In short, it does not.

This is a lie. A clumsily hidden one, for it begins with the reasonable observation that "the belief system must conform to reality as we know it," which verily simply repeats the "empirical adequacy" standard enunciated above it, and has naught to do with "relevancy." But as for the rest, it presents the wishful thinking fallacy in its most naked and adulterous form, and so it vitiates the whole of the lengthy and tedious argument to follow. Our Universe and all of its contents may be logically and empirically explained by a theological model which makes no "meaningful difference in the life of the adherent." To contend otherwise reveals a rather vain self-serving bias (unsurprisingly the most well-reported--and hardest to shake--of the cognitive biases, as it feeds directly into the very defensive human ego). Any further contentions based on such a deeply flawed supposition must be rationally disqualified, for this proposition contends, in sum, that a God is not allowed to exist unless it exists for our sake, to get on its knees and service our spiritual desires.

Now, as with the other examples, the author fails to understand Deism, or simply lies about it as well for reasons so fundamental that it would take another essay of this length to explain just how wrong it is. But as a beginning, Deism proposes that our Universe was set forth by mechanisms capable of bringing about all we now observe without need for intervention beyond the moment of Creation. It is true that classical Deism has been criticized for not encompassing an explanation of why such a Creator would create, but this critique is answered by variations such as Pandeism and Panendeism, which account for this by incorporating concepts from Pantheism, discerning a Creator who becomes our Universe to experience existence through the lives of the beings which come to inhabit it. But though this understanding and its implications indeed is attested to provide a meaningful difference in the life of Pandeists, this is the pure meaningfulness of a truth perceived absent the need for the deity to serve human interests. Nevertheless, whatever sense of satisfaction may be derived from a deistic or pandeistic model, these factors have no bearing on whether a theological model is rational.

Unlike the objectivity inherent in logical consistency and empirical evidence, "meaningfulness" is a bucket of mush, utterly subjective, immeasurable and unquantifiable. If meaningfulness must be universal, then it disqualifies all visions of God, for there is no vision for which some portion of persons will find that that enunciation is simply not meaningful to them. Naturally, it is conceivable that some person adhering to some faith (or knowing of none, even) might find that no theological model makes a "meaningful difference" for them unless it justifies abhorrent behavior--in which event, this proposition essentially forces the God it envisions to be the justifier of such.

And it is for this reason that the assertion of this element as a necessary, or even as a reasonable part of the enquiry is, in no uncertain terms, a lie. As for the religion which the unknown author of this deceitful propaganda piece purports to to boil out of its nest of lies and fallacies--well, I will spare it the shameful association with a hit piece like this, though some faiths are, obviously, absolved of suspicion by the very fact of the attacks slung against them in the essay. But, I will comment that any faith whose followers so naturally fall into reliance upon fallacies to sell itself ought not to be given much serious standing in the quest for truth.

Wishful thinking on Pandeism and Barack Obama

Second-tier "social conservative" political blogger Mark Finkelstein recently wrote a blog where he suggested (more or less) that Barack Obama's "true faith" is Pandeism.... I say more or less, since it becomes quickly obvious that Finkelstein really has no idea what correct definition of Pandeism is.... the blog critiques a New York Times column by Gail Collins, which is why it is titled "Happy Pan-Deism Day From Gail Collins".... Collins, so Finkelstein observes, noted the coincidence of Easter and Passover falling in the same week (hardly a surprise since the crucifixion itself was timed from Passover), and quotes the observation from Collins that "Americans with less religious inclinations can look forward to the upcoming Earth Day celebrations, when the president is planning to do something as yet unannounced, but undoubtedly special, and Arbor Day, when rumor has it that he will not just plant a tree, but personally reforest a large swath of the nation of Mali".... following from this Finkelstein relates that "environmentalism has essentially become a religion, and Earth Day effectively a religious holiday. Yesterday's pan-deists, who worshiped trees and brooks, have become members of various environmental groups doing much the same thing.  People like Al Gore others, and perhaps the reforesting Obama, have become their latter day shamans."

So, in short, what Finkelstein is saying is that Obama (and Al Gore, and other environmental group members) are pandeists -- and based on his political pedigree, it's pretty clear he means that as an insult (his next comment is "These are the same people who tend to demand the strict separation of church and state. Yet they would have teachers indoctrinate children in their modern-day Church of Gaia in our public schools").... This is irksome on a number of levels.... first off, Finkelstein gets it wrong on several fronts, reducing the reasoned and logic-derived belief that the Creator became the Universe entire to 'worshipping trees and brooks' -- which is in fact doubly wrong.... for one thing, pandeists do not "worship" anything; if we are all part of the Deus, then is useless to worship because the deus is unconscious and wouldn't respond to worship even if it was conscious; and since we are the Deus too, we'd only be worshipping ourselves, which is silly.... and second of all, what we do express a spiritual sentiment of awe towards is not limited to things in Earth's nature, but to the entire Universe, and the delicate balance of physical laws and forces that underlie the greatness of the whole of it.... and yes, we do appreciate trees and brooks, they are often lovely things, and the world would be worse off for their absence from it!! I imagine Finkelstein picturing pandeists joyously dancing naked around a campfire in ceremonies intended to invoke some ancient pagan gods (perhaps even that Greek god, Pan).... well I can assure you, when we do joyously dance naked around a campfire, it's for the inherent fun of it, not to invoke any sort of mythical being, whether the mythology is Greek or Christian.

Now Obama, naturally, is no pandeist.... I seriously doubt Al Gore is either.... it would be great if either of them was, despite my own political differences with both of them, since that would perhaps influence their thinking more in my direction, and more importantly that would bring some much deserved public attention (and no doubt some support) to a belief system that has long been discussed mostly by philosophy professors (and in Germany at that!!), and even among them, often only at the highest levels of the discipline.... I can't tell you how many times someone has described their belief system to me and made clear that Pandeism was what they in fact have long believed without ever knowing it had a name and a community behind it.... more likely, there has never been a pandeist in any high political office -- sure, many among the founding fathers were Deists, the scientific knowledge that justifies Pandeism had not yet been developed and Deism and Pantheism were thought to be philosophies at odds with one another....

Worst of all, and more so than the obvious misconceptions, is the tone which suggests that Finkelstein intends to insult Obama by call him a Pandeist, as though this is some contemptible faith to hold.... I find this odd coming from someone who begins his blog by speaking of the Seder that he will be attending -- after all, why does Finkelstein choose to reject the "divinity of Christ" which marks the mindset of most who share his political orientation? Does he not find the idea of God sending his own son to be sacrificed to absolve mankind of sin (but only those who accept said divinity story) to be equally silly? Does he agree with Ann Coulter's assessment of Christians as 'perfect' and Jews as 'needing to be perfected'? I see now how annoyed Muslims must get when Internet chatter labels Obama a secret Muslim, as though that faith by itself is a shameful thing to belong to.... unreasonable, perhaps -- but shameful? No more than being a Christian, at any rate.... ;)