Showing posts with label PanDeism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label PanDeism. Show all posts

Friday, October 31, 2025

Pandeism wishes you a Happy Halloween

From all of Pandeism to all of you, Happy Halloween!!

The first holiday of the Holiday Season is here, and on behalf of all Pandeists and our appreciation of a good party, we wish you a joyful night (whether staying in or going out, handing out treats or keeping the lights off).

#Pandeism #Halloween #Happy #HappyHalloween #HolidaySeason

Friday, August 22, 2025

Pandeism 100 video -- Kickstarter launched!!

The @Kickstarter campaign is on for The Pandeism 100: The 100 Most Significant Figures in the History of Pantheism, Deism, and Pandeism!!

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/essays/the-pandeism-100

Get an early reservation of your copy (or copies) of this unique look into alternative religious history!! And if you have thoughts on who belongs on the list (or at least deserves an honorable mention), let us know -- your pick just might make it into the book!!

And thank you again, @mariadellaros!!

#Pandeism #Pantheism #Deism #Kickstarter #ThePandeism100

Friday, July 25, 2025

The Pandeism 100 announcement video


Announcement of "The Pandeism 100" with thanks to our friend Maria Dellarosa!!

Note -- the cover is an early mockup, the complete cover will include Pantheism and Deism.

#Pandeism #Blessings #Love #Pandeism100 #Pantheism #Deism #NewBook #Maria

Transcript:

Hello!! My name is Maria, and I’d like to tell you about an exciting new book that needs your support. 

For thousands of years philosophers have debated the nature of the universe, forming their own universe of ideas about it nature, ideas such as Pantheism, Deism, and Pandeism.

Now, for the first time, a new book will examine and highlight the 100 most important people in the history of these world shaping ideas. 

This book is called the Pandeism 100: The 100 most important figures in the history of Pantheism, Deism, and Pandeism.

Please join me in supporting this project as we journey through the history of ideas. I love you all!!



Friday, April 25, 2025

Pandeism and the Oxford English Dictionary

 This was originally posted on Everything2 in May 2021; I am today (in April 2025) copying to the Pandeism Blog as a backup should Everything2 go kaplooey in some undetermined future.


Welcome to a miscellaneous node of the Pandeism index!!



I hereby dedicate this node and all of its contents to the public domain. Any person may republish any portion, for any reason.

A decade ago I submitted to the famed Oxford English Dictionary the word, "Pandeism," with about a half-dozen references to writings using the word throughout history. The submission was rejected, deemed to not have enough documentation supporting that the word is -- well, a word.


And so I waited for ten years, curating additional uses. And this afternoon, I sent to the good old OED the following:


----


This regards the family of words around the lemma, pandeism, with descendants pandeist, pandeists, pandeistic, pandeistical, and pandeistically, also including hyphenated forms of each (e.g., pan-deism), in theophilosophical discourse. The word may be defined as:


(ˈpændiːɪz(ə)m) [mod. f. Gr. παν- all + f. L. de-us god + -ism.]


The combination of pantheism and deism; and particularly the belief that the creator of the universe created the universe by wholly becoming the universe, ceasing to exist as a separate entity.



The earliest use found thus far of any term falling within this family occurs in 1787, in German:


1787 Gottfried Große Naturgeschichte: mit erläuternden Anmerkungen 323/165. Beym Plinius, den man, wo nicht Spinozisten, doch einen Pandeisten nennen konnte, ist Natur oder Gott kein von der Welt getrenntes oder abgesondertes Wesen. Seine Natur ist die ganze Schöpfung im Konkreto, und eben so scheint es mit seiner Gottheit beschaffen zu seyn. {English translation: In Pliny, whom one could call, if not a Spinozist, but perhaps a Pandeist, Nature is not a being divided off or separated from the world. His nature is the whole of creation, in concrete, and the same appears to be true also of his divinity.}



A cluster of uses is found beginning in the 1830s, one in English and three in Italian:


1834, Filippo Nannetti di Bibulano, in Giovanni Silvestri Sermons and Panegyrics of the Father Filippo Nani of Lojana, p. 286, Sermon XVIII: Miracles. A te, fatal Pandeista! le leggi della creata natura son contingenti e mutabili; non altro essendo in sostanza che moti e sviluppi di forze motrici. {English translation: To you, fatal Pandeist! the laws that create nature are contingent and mutable, not another being in substance with forces driven by motions and developments.}


1838, author unknown, Il legato di un vecchio ai giovani della sua patria (The Legacy of an Old Man to the Young People of his Country). La robusta immaginazione gli fe ravvisare gli effetti come causa, quindi deificando i fenomeni naturali divenne un Pandeista, un istitutore della Mitologia, un sacerdote, un Augure. {English translation: His robust imagination recognized the effects as a cause, then deifying natural phenomena, he became a Pandeist, an instructor of Mythology, a priest, an Augur.}


1838, Luigi Ferrarese, Memorie risguardanti la dottrina frenologica 164/16. ...profana i misteri, dichiarandoli in parte vacui di senso, ed in parte riducendoli a volgari allusioni, ed a prette metafore; costringe, come faceva osservare un dotto Critico, la rivelazione a cambiare il suo posto con quello del pensiero istintivo e dell' affermazione senza riflessione e colloca la ragione fuori della persona dell'uomo dichiarandolo un frammento di Dio, una spezie di pandeismo spirituale introducendo, assurdo per noi, ed al Supremo Ente ingiurioso, il quale reca onda grave alla libertà del medesimo, ec, ec. {English translation: ...he profanes the mysteries, declaring them partly devoid of meaning, and partly reducing them to vulgar allusions and pure metaphors; forces, as a learned Critic noted, the revelation to swap places with instinctive thought and assertion without reflection without and places reason outside man, declaring man a fragment of God, introducing a sort of spiritual pandeism, which is absurd to us and insulting to the Supreme Being, which gravely offends freedom itself, etc, etc.}



A parallel or related coinage as seen in 1838, in English:


1838, Godfrey Higgins, Anacalypsis: An Attempt to Draw Aside the Veil of the Saitic Isis: Or an Inquiry into the Origin of Languages, Nations and Religions. p. 439. ISBN 1-56459-273-1. I am induced to think that this Pandeism was a doctrine, which had been received both by Buddhists and Brahmins.


The author's writings suggest access to previous coinage, and of the root terms from which other coinages appear to derive. Other examples (with meaning becoming more explicit as we move towards present day) include:



1896, Gustavo Uzielli, Ricerche intorno a Leonardo da Vinci ("Research into Leonardo da Vinci"), p. xxxv. Certo è che quel concetto forma una delle basi morali fondamentali di religiosi i cui segnaci sono oltre i due terzi della popolazione del globo, mentre è influenzato dall'indole speciale di ciascuna di esse, cioè da un idealismo sovrumano nel Cristianesimo, da un nichilismo antiumano nel buddismo, e da un pandeismo eclettico nell'incipiente ma progrediente Bramoismo indiano; e a queste credenze che ammettono il principio ideale della fratellanza universale, conviene aggiungere il naturalismo estetico scientifico greco-romano e moderno che inspira, in modo sostanziale, tutto l'insegnamento pubblico Europeo, e contro il quale protestarono sempre e molto logicamente gli ortodossi cristiani, da Paolo II papa a Giuseppe di Maistre. {English translation: It is certain that this concept forms a fundamental moral bases of religious whose cable markers are more than two-thirds of the world's population, while special influence on the capacities of each of them, by a superhuman idealism in Christianity, a nihilism antihuman in Buddhism, and an incipient but eclectic pandeism progressing in Bramanist Indian beliefs; and those who admit the principle ideal of universal brotherhood, it is worthwhile scientific naturalism aesthetic greek-roman and modern inhales, substantially, all the teaching European audience, and against which they protested always very logically and the Orthodox Christians, Pope Paul II to Joseph Maistre}.


1897, Rev. Henry Grattan Guinness, "Missionary Review", in John Harvey Kellogg's International Health and Temperance Association, The Medical Missionary, 1897, p. 126. To her, God is everything, and everything is God, and, therefore, everything may be adored. ... Her pan-deism is a pandemonium.


1898, J. St. J. Higgins, "Deistical Platitude Vamping and "Providence," The Freethinker, 17 July 1898, 461/832. A thing of shreds and patches,/Of legends, tales, and snatches; and for the cognate deistical or pan-deistical emanations of such quasi-theologians as (to take a contemporaneous example) your correspondent.


1906, Charles Norman Myers, "Man of Sorrows," Chattanooga Daily Times, September 24, 1906, p. 5. The man who in exultant faith said "I and the Father are one" was a Pandeist, a believer in the identification of the universe and all things contained therein with Deity.


1915, Louis S. Hardin, Sheffield Scientific School "The Chimerical Application of Machiavelli's Principles," p. 463. We hear men prophecy that this war means the death of Christianity and an era of Pandeism or perhaps even the destruction of all which we call modern civilization and culture.


1941, Charles Hartshorne, Man's Vision of God and the Logic of Theism‎ 360/348. Just as AR is the whole positive content of perfection, so CW, or the conception of the Creator-and-the-Whole-of-what-he-has-created as constituting one life, the super-whole which in its everlasting essence is uncreated (and does not necessitate just the parts which the whole has) but in its de facto concreteness is created - this panentheistic doctrine contains all of deism and pandeism except their arbitrary negations.


1963, Charles Anselm Bolton, "Beyond the Ecumenical: Pan-deism?" Christianity Today, 1963, p. 21. I first came upon this extension of ecumenism into pan-deism among some Roman Catholic scholars interested primarily in the “reunion of the churches”...


1964, Belle Privette, "New Ideologies Sweeping Campus," The Daily Tar Heel, November 17, 1964, p. 2. Vaguely related to Pantheism (or perhaps Pandeism), its proponents have been heard to assert that Jello is the basic substance of the Universe.


1967, Francis E. Peters, Greek Philosophical Terms: A Historical Lexicon 234/169. What appeared here, at the center of the Pythagorean tradition in philosophy, is another view of psyche that seems to owe little or nothing to the pan-vitalism or pan-deism (see theion) that is the legacy of the Milesians.


1971, Rousas John Rushdoony, The One and the Many: Studies in the Philosophy of Order and Ultimacy (1971 2007), Ch. VIII-7, p. 142. The position of Pope Paul came close to being a pan-Deism, and pan-Deism is the logical development of the virus of Hellenic thought.


1974, Bert Beverly Beach, Ecumenism: Boon Or Bane? (1974), p. 259 (quoting George H. Williams, Dimensions of Roman Catholic Ecumenism (1965), p. 31-32). It was felt that ecumenism was being contaminated by “pan-Deist” and syncretistic tendencies.


1989, Liam Rector, The Day I Was Older: On the Poetry of Donald Hall‎ 287/69 (reprinted in 1992 Hayden Carruth, Suicides and Jazzers 242/161). Perhaps we can say that the dominant cultural traits of any era are the diseases of the human spirit which must be accepted and transcended by the writers of that era if they are to succeed, eg Whitman's progressivism and optimism (with which he wrote the greatest elegy in American literature), Pope's rationalism and pan-deism (with which he wrote the greatest mock-epic in English literature), and Dante's Thomistic, not to say Gothic determinism (with which he wrote the greatest humane lyric of all time).


1995, Albuquerque Journal, "Marine's Ballad Honors Soldiers, Trappist Monks" November 11, 1995, B-10. He describes his current spiritual position as pandeism or pan-en-deism, something very close to the Native American concept of the all- pervading Great Spirit.


1997, Bob Burridge, Theology Proper - Lesson 4: The Decrees of God. If God was the proximate cause of every act it would make all events to be "God in motion". That is nothing less than pantheism, or more exactly, pandeism. … The reality of secondary causes is what separates Christian theism from pandeism.


1998, Van Andel, Education Institute K-12 Education: Perspectives on the Future 167/92. Everything is sectarianism with him, except what squares exactly with the notions of Universalists and those who have been absurdly called 'pan deists' and 'theo-philanthropists.


2003, Jon Gee, The Metaphysicians' Desk Reference: Including the Revised Formal System of Metaphysics 528/164 Yet still, should the demigod Pan come to bear, the result will be Pan-deism, the opening of Pandora's Box.


2005, Dan Schneider, Review of Stranger In A Strange Land (The Uncut Version), by Robert A. Heinlein, Hackwriters.com, https://www.hackwriters.com/strangerH.htm. He honestly believes in his own free will, which Mike, Jill, and the Fosterites misinterpret as a pandeistic urge, ‘Thou art God!’.


2006, Charles Brough, Untwisting the Social Sciences 260/220. *FREE THINKERS: all people whose beliefs regarding "spirits" are compatible with modern science. Deism, pandeism, agnosticism and atheism are compatible, while theism is not.


2007, Bruce Parry, quoted in Ed Caesar, "Bruce almighty; He really has been there and done that" Saturday Magazine 11 Aug., 2007. Now, I'd describe myself as pan-deist, reluctantly verging on atheist.


2008, John Lachs, Robert B. Talisse, American Philosophy: An Encyclopedia‎ 847/310. Some pragmatists (such as William James) took a more pantheist or pandeist approach by rejecting views of God as separate from the world.


2008, Dr. Alan J. Lipman, The Impulsively Unreflective Duo In..."McCain Goes Negative!", Dr. Alan J. Lipman's Head of State: Political and Media Psychology, Saturday, October 04, 2008, http://headofstate.blogspot.com/2008/10/impulsively-unreflective-duo-inmccain.html. He is carrying flyers, masking tape; telephone wires are wrapped around his arms hanging in every way; a tattered copy of the book "Accusations of Fascism, Communism, Terrorism, Drug Use, Pedophilia, Islamism, Adultery, Pandeism, Cannibalism, Cubism, Miscegenation, and Spousal Abuse...for Dummies!" is rolled and stuffed in his left pocket, filled with bookmarks...


2009, Peter C. Rogers, Ultimate Truth, Book 1‎ 212/121. This is the key feature which distinguishes them from panentheists and pandeists. As such, although many religions may claim to hold pantheistic elements, they are more commonly panentheistic or pandeistic in nature. (lines duplicated without reference in 2010 Peter Kien-Hong Yu God Is, by Inference, One Dot: Paradigm Shift 196/110).


2009, Sean F. Johnston, The History of Science: A Beginner's Guide 292/90. In its most abstract form, deism may not attempt to describe the characteristics of such a non-interventionist creator, or even that the universe is identical with God (a variant known as pandeism).


2009, Dewayne A. Pattie, in No King But Caesar & The Return of The Melek Tsedek: A Biblical Study on Faith, Religion, and the Antichrist From the Covenant Perspective, September 29, 2009, p. 45. Just as the Pharisee thought he could come before God and present to Him his good works, the knowledge of good and evil literally became the doorway of pan-deism (that is, many ways to God).


2009, Tristram Hunt, The Frock-coated Communist: The Revolutionary Life of Friedrich Engels 442/44. What Engels took from this was an idea of modern Pantheism (or, rather, Pandeism) which dissolved the pietist ethos of religious alienation and, instead, merged divinity and humanity together. God and reason became one in the unfolding of freedom and progress.


2009, Philip B. Corbett, "Metaphor Trouble", The New York Times, https://afterdeadline.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/03/09/metaphor-trouble/. Ex: prenuptial, pandeism, hyperextension, polyamory… These types of words come into the English language by combining a Greek and Latin word to form a new word.


2010, William C. Lane, "Leibniz's Best World Claim Restructured," American Philosophical Journal, January 2010, volume 47, issue 1, p. 76. In pandeism, God is no superintending, heavenly power, capable of hourly intervention into earthly affairs. No longer existing "above," God cannot intervene from above and cannot be blamed for failing to do so. Instead God bears all suffering, whether the fawn's or anyone else's.


2010, Lambert M. Surhone, Miriam T. Timpledon, Susan F. Marseken, Pandeism: Beliefs, Religious, Universe, Deism, Pantheism, Term (Language), Hierarchy, Philosophy 208/1


2010, Allan R. Fuller, Thought: The Only Reality, p. 79. Pandeism is another belief that states that God is identical to the universe, but God no longer exists in a way where He can be contacted; therefore, this theory can only be proven to exist by reason. Pandeism views the entire universe as being from God and now the universe is the entirety of God, but the universe at some point in time will fold back into one single being which is God Himself that created all. Pandeism raises the question as to why would God create a universe and then abandon it? As this relates to pantheism, it raises the question of how did the universe come about what is its aim and purpose?


2010, Ronald R. Zollinger, Mere Mormonism: Defense of Mormon Theology, p. 6. Pandeism. This is a kind of pantheism that incorporates a form of deism, holding that the universe is identical to God but also that God was previously a conscious and sentient force or entity that designed and created the universe.


2011, David Michael Wylie, Just Stewardship, p. 24. This is very different from pantheism and also very different from deism. Compare panentheism and pantheism, pandeism, panendeism. Read Acts 17:28.


2011, Matthew J. Drury, EDEN², p. 229. Were the revolutionary Pandeist concepts of the Third Testament just a bunch of lies invented by a monster? Could the synergy between deism and pantheism championed by Damarus be truly mythical, as Ammold Paramo had advocated?


2011, Alan H. Dawe, The God Franchise: A Theory of Everything, p. 48. Pandeism: This is the belief that God created the universe, is now one with it, and so, is no longer a separate conscious entity.


2011, Bradley Alan Skaggs, "Topic modeling for Wikipedia link disambiguation," University of Maryland, College Park, ProQuest Dissertations Publishing, p. 23. (Images of Light and Shadow from Java's interior) - a four volume treatise written by Dutch naturalist Franz Wilhelm Junghuhn, and considered the first formal articulation of Pandeism.


2012, Donald L. Jackson, Religious Lies - Religious Truths: It's Time To Tell The Truth!, p. 175. Charles Hartshorne introduced his process theology in the 1940s, in which he examined, and discarded pantheism, deism and pandeism in favor of panentheism, finding that such a doctrine contains all of deism and pandeism except their arbitrary negative aspects.


2012, Henry Harrison Epps, Jr., End times Organizations, Doctrines and Beliefs, p. 220. The New Age movement includes elements of older spiritual and religious traditions ranging from atheism and monotheism through classical pantheism, naturalistic pantheism, pandeism and panentheism to polytheism combined with science and Gaia philosophy; particularly archaeoastronomy, astronomy, ecology, environmentalism, the Gaia hypothesis, psychology, and physics.


2012, Ronny Miron, Karl Jaspers: From Selfhood to Being, p. 249. In his opinion, the fear that pandeism or the tendency to reduce faith into the external means by which it is obtained would eventually lead to the viewing of these means as having purely subjective, and also mutable, validity, was behind the Catholic church's emphasis on the objective truth of the symbols themselves in relation to the individual religious experience. 2013, Al Kresta, Dangers to the Faith: Recognizing Catholicism's 21st Century Opponents, p. 255. “New Age” cosmologies reject materialism, naturalism and physicalism. They are commonly pantheistic or pandeistic.


2013, Theodore Schick and Lewis Vaughnm Doing Philosophy: An Introduction Through Thought Experiments, 5th Edition, p. 506, § 6.3, "Faith and Meaning: Believing the Unbelievable," §§ “Thought Probe: James and Pandeism.” The view that the universe is not only God but also a person is called "pandeism." Do you agree with James that viewing the universe as a person would help give meaning to your life?


2013, Michael S. Bruner, John Davenport, Jim Norwine, "An Evolving Worldview: Culture-Shift in University Students", in Jim Norwine, editor, A World After Climate Change and Culture-Shift (Springer, 2013), p. 46. For others, this “fullness” is present in more religious-oriented pantheistic or pandeistic belief systems with, in the latter case, the inclusion of God as the ever unfolding expression of a complex universe with an identifiable beginning but no teleological direction necessarily present.


2014, Peter Moore, Valhalla and the Fjord: A Spiritual Motorcycle Journey, p. 19. The site seems to exude some force, as if there is a multitude of souls in everything around you. I don't know if this is the philosophy of Pandeism or Pantheism, but in the tranquility of the moment, I don't care either.


2014, Corey S. Powell, "Defending Giordano Bruno: A Response from the Co-Writer of “Cosmos”," Discover, March 13, 2014. Bruno imagines all planets and stars having souls (part of what he means by them all having the same “composition”), and he uses his cosmology as a tool for advancing an animist or Pandeist theology.


2014, Joseph Heath, Enlightenment 2.0: Restoring Sanity to Our Politics, Our Economy, and Our Lives, p. 193. The New Age movement includes elements of older spiritual and religious traditions ranging from atheism and monotheism through classical pantheism, naturalistic pantheism, pandeism and panentheism to polytheism combined with science and Gaia philosophy.


2015, Dr Michael Arnheim, The God Book, p. 72. Straddling as he does deism and pantheism, Einstein could possibly be classified as a believer in pandeism, a label indicating a hybrid blend of pantheism with deism, which was well described by Raphael Lataster in 2013.


2015, Douglas MacGowan, Mother Nature Network, What Is Deism?, May 21, 2015. Over time there have been other schools of thought formed under the umbrella of deism including Christian deism, belief in deistic principles coupled with the moral teachings of Jesus of Nazareth, and Pandeism, a belief that God became the entire universe and no longer exists as a separate being.


2015, Colin Cavendish-Jones, "A Weakness for Arguing with Anybody: G. K. Chesterton and Thomas Hardy, Thomas Hardy Journal, Vol. 31, Autumn 2015, pp. 108-129, 126. He likens Meredith to Walt Whitman, praising both, though Whitman was a sceptic and a pandeist , and the frankness about his sexual inclinations in Leaves of Grass can scarcely have been congenial to Chesterton, who condemned Oscar Wilde’s homosexuality...


2016, Graham Ward, How the Light Gets In: Ethical Life I, page 313. Attention to Christ and the Spirit delivers us from pantheism, pandeism, and process theology.


2016, Andrew Gregory, Anaximander: A Re-assessment, p. 100. While some construction using pan-, whether it be pantheism, pandeism or pankubernism describes Anaximander reasonably well, there is one further point to address here.


2016, Douglas M. Stokes, "To the Editor", The Journal of Parapsychology; Durham Vol. 80, Iss. 2, (Fall 2016): 265-270. These experiences may be factors (along with philosophical analyses) that led me to my current view that the universe is based in mind rather than matter and to my embrace of mentalistic philosophies such as idealism, panpsychism, pandeism, and panendeism.


2017, Thurman 'Lee' Hester, Jr., "Native American spirituality", in Graham Oppy, N.N. Trakakis, Interreligious Philosophical Dialogues - Volume 3, p. 46. However, something like pan-deism does to some extent capture the nature of God as I experience it.


2017, Sushma Sahajpal, "Hindu Dharma - Living on the Edge of Infinity", in Pandeism: An Anthology, p. 366. "The key thing with all these forms in Hinduism is a teaching found in Pandeism as well, that Divinity is everywhere, in everyone and everything.


2018, Antonin Tuynman, Is Reality a Simulation?, p. 8. This Anthology with contributions from Technoshamans, Physicalist scientists, Pantheists, Pandeists and Panpsychists will rock your mental foundations, haunt your convictions and put you through the epistemological wringer.


2018, Raphael Lataster, The Case Against Theism: Why the Evidence Disproves God’s Existence, p. 198. For the already-discussed considerations, and also when considering the relative robustness of pandeism, and the potential for fewer contradictions with the actual scenario as explained by current evidence, (4) also favours pandeistic god-models.


2019, Helge Kragh, "Max Weinstein: Physics, Philosophy, Pandeism," https://arxiv.org/abs/1901.11299. This is a brief introduction to the life and ideas of the Lithuanian-German physicist, philosopher and religious thinker Max B. Weinstein, who is today best known for his thoughts concerning so-called pandeism.


2019, Michael Newton Keas, Unbelievable: 7 Myths About the History and Future of Science and Religion, p. 150. He reported that Bruno, in a few of his books, “imagines all planets and stars having souls” and “uses his cosmology as a tool for advancing an animist or Pandeist theology.” Pandeism is a variation of pantheism in which the creator becomes the cosmos.


2019, Hedda Hassel Mørch, "Beyond Physicalism: Philosopher Hedda Hassel Mørch defends the idea that consciousness pervades the cosmos", John Horgan, Scientific American, https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cross-check/beyond-physicalism/. There is a religious view I find interesting, which is pandeism: the view that God used to exist, and be the only thing that existed, and then transformed himself into the universe, and so no longer exists.


2019, James B. Glattfelder, Information—Consciousness—Reality: How a New Understanding of the Universe Can Help Answer Age-Old Questions of Existence, p. 534. For instance, in Hinduism, the notion of lila is akin to the concept of pandeism.


2019, Ralph Lewis, "The Varieties of Mystical Experience," Psychology Today, https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/finding-purpose/201912/the-varieties-mystical-experience. His own beliefs appear to have been closest to pantheism or pandeism (an amalgam of pantheism and deism).


2019, Wook-Dong Kim, Kazantzakis’s Zorba the Greek: Five Readings, p. 120. Scrutiny of Zorba the Greek reveals, however, that Kazantzakis’s ecological view sometimes goes beyond traditional pantheism (All is God) toward either panentheism (All is in God), first coined by the Austrian philosopher Karl Kraus to explain the kind of pantheism expounded by Baruch Spinoza, or pandeism (God is ubiquitous but does not interfere in the operation of the world), as explored by Moritz Lazarus and Heymann Steinthal.


2020, "Deism", Encyclopedia Britannica, https://www.britannica.com/topic/Deism/Deists-in-other-countries#ref1042352 Further, such modern variants as “pandeism,” which attempted to unite aspects of Deism with pantheism, held that through the act of creation God became the universe. ... The American logician and process philosopher Charles Hartshorne considered Deism, pandeism, and pantheism as reasonable doctrines of the nature of God; however, he rejected all of these in favour of panentheism, the belief that God is present in the universe while being greater than it.


2020, Joey Kim, "Perspectives of a Wandering Sexual Artist," in Essays From the Universe Experiencing Itself, p. 43. I can resonate with Pandeism, a philosophy which takes a different approach but still hits on certain of the more positive themes claimed by religions, like acting lovingly towards others.


2020, Md. Monirul Islam, Oriental Wells: The Early Romantic Poets and Their Eastern Musebooks, p. 217. It is customary to read Wordsworth's pantheism, which has also been termed as pandeism or panentheism, with reference to Neoplatonism and the philosophy of Spinoza or Karl Krause (1781–1832).


2020, Harold Bloom, Take Arms Against a Sea of Troubles: The Power of the Reader's Mind Over a Universe of Death, Yale University Press, p. 373. When he died the laureate declared himself agnostic and pan-deist and at one with the great heretics Giordano Bruno (who was a Hermetist and burned alive by the Church) and Baruch Spinoza (who was excommunicated by the Jews).


2020, Ivan Phillips, Once Upon a Time Lord: The Myths and Stories of Doctor Who, p. 232. A cosmogonic myth, almost pandeistic in its implications, this posits a life form that is arguably one of the most conceptually interesting and imaginative in the show's history.


2020, Michael P. Remler, The Mechanisms, Metaphysics, and History of Consciousness in the World, p. 50. The real significance of the symbiosis becomes evident if one considers the radical pan-psych position that every piece of matter has a “psych” property or pan-deist position that some “Consciousness” interacts with all matter.


2020, Max B. Weinstein, World and Life Views, Emerging From Religion, Philosophy and Perception of Nature, Deborah Moss, trans., p. 121. It is thus incorrect to equate the conceptions of the Chinese with those of primitive peoples; they really belong much more to Pandeism than to Pananimism – to a dualistic form of it, to be precise.


2020, Angela Volkov, "Artificial Intelligence: A Vengeful or Benevolent God?", Medium, (October 14, 2020), https://medium.com/predict/artificial-intelligence-a-vengeful-or-benevolent-god-555d8b7b7d33. The best we can hope for is that AI allows us to merge with it, giving rise to a Pandeism of sorts, wherein creator and creation meld into one.


2021, Sherman O'Brien, The Lonely Mind of God, p. 121. The result of combining pantheism with deism is pandeism, where a universe emerges, less as a result of creation than as God choosing to embody or become it.


2021, Sal Restivo, Society and the Death of God, p. 123. In the pandeism argument, an omnipotent and omnibenevolent God creates the universe and in the process becomes the universe and loses his powers to intervene in human affairs.




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Since sending that on, I've compiled even more, some new, some not quite so new but newly found....


Paul Zarzyski, ''51: 30 poems, 20 lyrics, 1 self-interview'' (2011), p. 243-244. Agnosticism, however, doesn’t define my stance, which, if pressed, I’d say is a cross between pantheism and deism—Pandeism.


Randolph M. Howes, ''That Proof of God Thingy: A Novel'' (2012), p. 78. This argument was expounded upon by Scott Adams in the book, God's Debris, which put forth a form of Pandeism as its fundamental theological model.


Andy Ross, ''Philosopher: A Memoir'' (2012), p. 445: More properly, my panpsychism has its ideological correlate in pandeism, not pantheism.


Joseph Heath, ''Enlightenment 2.0: Restoring Sanity to Our Politics, Our Economy, and Our Lives'' (2014), p. 193: New Age movement includes elements of older spiritual and religious traditions ranging from atheism and monotheism through classical pantheism, naturalistic pantheism, pandeism and panentheism to polytheism combined with science and Gaia philosophy.


Jea Sophia Oh, ‎Marilynn Lawrence, ''Nature's Transcendence and Immanence: A Comparative Interdisciplinary Ecstatic Naturalism'' (2017), p. 156. Hartshorne prefers to use the term “transcendental deism” in opposition to pantheism (or what he calls “pandeism”).


Leigh Weber, ''Western Political Thought'' (ED-Tech Press, 2021), p. 37, ISBN-10 : 1788824156. In Refutation of All Heresies Hippolytus says: “What the blasphemous folly is of Noetus, and that he devoted himself to the tenets of Heraclitus the Obscure, not to those of Christ.” Hippolytus then goes on to present the inscrutable DK B67: “God (theos) is day and night, winter and summer, but he takes various shapes, just as fire, when it is mingled with spices, is named according to the savor of each.” The fragment seems to support pantheism if taken literally. German physicist and philosopher Max Bernard Weinstein classed these views with pandeism. Justin Beaumont, ''The Routledge Handbook of Postsecularity'' (Routledge 2018), p. 83, ISBN-10 : 0367732645. I refer here to monodeism as the default standard concept of deism, distinct from polydeism, pandeism, and spiritual deism.


Lisa Case, Between the Sabbats: The Magick and Mystery of the Interpora (2019), p. 50. The last but not least view is Pandeism, which maintains that God or the Creator became the universe and all that we know and hence, does not interfere or interact with us or the universe, save to simply be a silent part of it.


Anthony Stultz, The Three Principles of Oneness: How Embodying the Cosmic Perspective Can Liberate Your Life (2019), p. 170. Pandeism is a most interesting concept and is a theological doctrine that arose in the eighteenth century and holds that the creator deity became the universe and ceased to exist as a separate conscious entity. Collin Booker, English Literature: Eighteenth Century and the Romantic Age (2019), p. 62. Hayden Carruth wrote that it was "Pope's rationalism and pan-deism with which he wrote the greatest mock-epic in English literature."


Steve Madison, Logos: Logical Religion Unleashed (2020), p. 69. We welcome atheists, heretics, blasphemers, unbelievers, apostates, deists, pandeists, pantheists, panentheists, freethinkers, panpsychists, metaphysicians – anyone who is interested in answering the deep questions of existence with recourse to a priori reason and logic alone.


Cometan, The Institutional Dictionary of Astronism (2021), p. 581. Pandeistic divinology: a divinological position postulating that The Divine created The Universe, but then subsumed into The Universe, after which it ceased to exist as a distinct entity; pandeism is presently seeing some support among early Astroists.


Henry Arnold Davis, Gambling With Your Soul: What Is Your Best Bet? (2021), p. 106. The beliefs of individual Unitarian Universalists range widely, including atheism, agnosticism, pantheism, panentheism, pandeism, deism, humanism, Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Sikhism, Buddhism, Taoism, syncretism, Omnism, Neopaganism and the teachings of the Bahá'í Faith.


Rakesh Anand, Is God in Coma? (2021), p. 13. Anyways, I don't want to waste my time here in writing about of the gender, nature, color, number or different conceptions about Gods, such as: Dystheism, Henotheism, Monotheism, Pandeism, Pantheism, Polytheism, and so on.


Brent Price, D.Min., Be Prepared Evangelism: The Personal Evangelism Game Changer (2022), p. 137: A very contemporary deceptive religious concept that targets uninformed and unsaved people is a type of religious belief called Pandeism.


Tariq Goddard, The Repeater Book of Heroism (2022), p. 25: But Bruno was not quite an atheist or pantheist. He most likely followed an apophatic creed (via negativa), making him more of a pandeist.


Ross Thompson, Ten Ways to Weave the World: Matter, Mind, and God, Volume 2: Embodying Mind (2023), p. 30: As its name implies, pandeism is seen as a middle path between pantheism and deism.


Guillermo Kerber, “Panentheism in Christian Ecotheology,” in Luca Valera, ed., Pantheism and Ecology: Cosmological, Philosophical, and Theological Perspectives (2023), p. 219-220: His doctrine has been later labeled as “pandeism” or even “pantheism” and criticized because he didn’t acknowledge the ontological difference between God and creation.


Daniel Cardó and Uwe Michael Lang, ''The Cambridge Companion to Joseph Ratzinger'', (2023), p. 266: Against Bruno, Ratzinger is critical of what other commentators have described as his pandeism.


PGB Galleries, Rare Books & Manuscripts: A PBA Platinum Auction, 2024 (2024), p. 34: Exceptional copy of the author's masterwork, articulating his thesis that there was once a universal religion (which he terms "Pandeism") which morphed into the major world religions, including the Abrahamic faiths and Hinduism and Buddhism.


Travis Dumsday, ''Alternative Conceptions of the Spiritual'' (2024), ASIN: B0D6NPK7F4, p. 98: Likewise, that feature distinguishes panspiritism from pandeism, since, according to the latter, the physical cosmos emerges (by a process of becoming) out of an ontologically prior divine conscious subject. On pandeism, God became the universe at the big bang, and the resultant cosmos may (depending on the version of pandeism on offer) inherit some or all of His divine characteristics.


Martin D. Johnson, ''The Atheist's Survival Guide'' (2024), ISBN: 979-8-218-48431-6, p. 89: Instead of embracing traditional concepts of a humanlike deity involved in the creation and moral governance of the universe, they often perceive divinity as an embodiment of universal laws, a perspective that veers toward pantheism or pandeism rather than classical deism.


Kaziwa Salih, ''Genocide Culture: Cultural Habitus, Ethnic Engineering and Religious Doxa'' (Routledge, 2024), ISBN: 978-1032312583, p. 139: This means that the modern version of deism is pan-deism, a combination of both pantheism (the universe as a manifestation of God) and deism.

Sunday, January 12, 2025

Seen today via YouTube -- Understanding Pandeism: A Unique Philosophical Perspective

This vid, seen today on YouTube, is overall a wonderfully clear explanation of Pandeism, capturing its essence beautifully!! But a nuance worth adding is that insofar as miracles are, in fact, claimed to occur, Pandeism accounts for them through the divine nature embedded in our Universe itself as an underlying force that people may unwittingly tap into. Additionally missing is the profound purpose behind our Creator becoming our Universe -- to understand and experience the vast array of experiences which unfold within it, and amongst discrete lives in being therein. This purposeful journey of discovery and connection is a cornerstone of much pandeistic thought. Blessings!!

Saturday, December 07, 2024

Beauty

'Beauty' is a puzzle. Though it is often framed as being a highly individualistic, 'in the eye of the beholder' sort of impression, experience certainly teaches that there are beauty standards -- things deemed desirable by any given general population. So then, what subtle forces contrive to dictate our deepest emotional reactions to a face, a flower, a painting, a sunset? Why is it that when we meet two people of indistinguishable personality, one may strike a spark in our hearts while the other simply does not register in that way, perhaps simply because of the shape of a chin or the width between the eyes? There are theories for all of these things -- that we have, perhaps, evolved an inclination towards being attracted to those traits or trails which best suit the survival of the species. Our bent, it is proposed, is towards finding lush green spaces beautiful for example because those are likely sources of food (though many would find as much beauty in cracked desert plains and solitary frozen ice floes).

But with respect to the sort of facial beauty which yields a physical, sexual attraction, the road may fall rather more narrowly. Here, the researchers speculate, attraction is all about a nagging desire to reproduce, and to do so in the way which will generate the most advantaged offspring. So here is where it gets interesting. After all, what exactly are the physical features most likely to yield offspring who will live to adulthood and outcompete their acquaintances in the reproduction contest? Why ought an oddly shaped nose or too much of a chin be off-putting in terms of the whole 'survival of the fittest' racket. Well it turns out that what makes somebody attractive tends to be their.... averageness.

Averageness and symmetry, indeed, go hand in hand on that score. Or, to be more exact, what tends to cause somebody to be deemed unattractive is their deviation from averageness and symmetry. Now this tends to be surprising because we often think of 'average' as a synonym for 'plain, but what is average and what is plain are not so aligned as one might think. There's an historical story here intertwined in the history of evolutionary biology. Charles Darwin, you see, was not the only scientifically minded member of family in his generation. Oh, you might think of his grandfather, good old Erasmus Darwin, but Charles had a cousin as well -- Francis Galton -- who invented 'composite photography' (that is, the laying of photographic images over one another to demonstrate a final image averaging the features of the initial ones). And in 1883, Galton set out to employ this technique in what he thought would be a crime-fighting endeavour. Specifically, Galton supposed that by taking many images of criminals and overlapping them, he could ultimately produce the image of the 'average criminal.' This, in turn, he thought would aid society in finding those with criminal features and identifying them before they engaged in nefarious deeds (all of this being in the age of phrenology, when it was believed that the bumps and knots of a person's skull provided details about their personality and characteristic tendencies). But as Galton put together more and more of these faces, he discovered the composite result to be not somebody looking more and more 'criminal,' but more and more conventionally attractive. And, indeed, further experimentation by Galton and by generations of later experimenters has repeatedly confirmed this, that if a random grouping of a few dozen or more randomly picked people from the population are image-composited, the 'average' person's face turn out a beauty.

The simple explanation of all this is that each face deviates from the average in some aspect or another, but most every faces deviates in a different way; and so, as more and more faces are composited together, any especial deviation displayed by one will be subdued by comparison to the others, which are free of that deviation. So, if one face has a very long nose, one too wide a brow, and one sunken cheekbones, the two faces with average noses will subdue the long nose, the two with average brows will subdue the wide brow, and the two with sharper cheekbones will subdue the sunken example. And indeed it goes beyond that, for a dozen faces with too-long noses composited with a dozen faces with too-short noses will yield one face with that perfectly average nose (and approaching perfect symmetry as well, for the same reasons). And in the same breath, since wrinkles and other signs of aging are not equally distributed amongst the aged, a composite of many people (even of many old people) will subdue all of these features, and end up looking youthful, smooth-skinned and vibrant. (Note that this effect is restricted by gender; mixing of genders yields androgynous faces, which are themselves a deviation from gender norms, and have generally been deemed unattractive by those surveyed).

So having gotten to that point, the question returns, what is the advantage of being most attracted to the person with the most average of faces? Well, it is always possible that any deviation from the average evidences a defect, a parting from the healthy biological norm. And so, though adhering to average faces causes the reproducing person to pass upon potentially beneficial evolutionary changes, it does so in the cause of keeping to the safest position, that of reproducing with the person least likely (based on outward appearance) to carry some harmful genetic quirk. And, just to provide an illustration to this principle, I went to faceresearch.org and generated some 'average' faces (try it yourself -- pick the twenty faces from one gender which you would find least attractive, and then see how those unattractive faces average out); and then uploaded those average specimens to morphthing.com, a site which allows you to create composite images of celebrities (and upload your own), and morphed dozens of Hollywood starlets and women similarly considered famously beautiful, and then morphed that into the other 'average' faces; then I put this in Photoshop and tinted the whole thing green for no especial reason, and got this face, for your consideration.

One of the startling discoveries man has made is that in taking a wide variety of faces -- all sorts of faces, the plain and typical and unremarkable, the quirky and unusual and memorable -- and 'morphing' them together to average out their features yields what people generally recognize as a strikingly attractive face. This is perhaps in part a consequence of the averaging out of asymmetry and the gradual elimination over every generation of morphing of every distinctive blemish, every outlier feature.


Consider this woman.  She does not exist. She is instead a carefully constructed average of sixty-four different actresses and models and other famously "attractive" women. Black, White, Asian, Latina, all went into the mix. Confessedly, none of them was green (that element was simply added to further remove the generated image from common notions of "race").

Monday, April 15, 2024

Embrace the Light

This is a new realm of experience for me -- and many others like me. There are now AI websites which allow you to generate music that, with a modicum of tweaking, sounds radio-ready. With one called Udio.com, I made the song below -- outside of any genre I have worked in before (and indeed, I played around with several before hitting upon the central structure of this one, and building out from there)

It it, in a word, transformative. Not the song, especially, but the technology behind it, and more impactfully perhaps, the experience of having no musical skills beyond being able to pluck a few notes, and yet being able to instantiate something like this. And remember, we are at the very beginning of this journey. We are Marconi's first fiddling with radio waves compared to where we will be just a few years from now.

Along the way, enjoy the music!!

#AI #Music #AIArt #AIMusic #TheFutureIsNow

Thursday, March 09, 2023

Record traffic on Wikipedia's Pandeism page, redux

Some three years ago I blogged about record traffic on Wikipedia's Pandeism page -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pandeism -- observing then that the page had hit an all-time high in daily page views at 1,227 (part of a pattern in which several of the highest-viewed days were scattered over a surrounding period of weeks). That spike was a mystery, the previous record of 901 views having been attributable to Pandeism being mentioned in an article in Scientific American.

Well, all that is now water under the bridge insofar as record page view days go.

For on February 26, 2023, a new page views record of 2,231 nearly doubled the old record, and was followed by a day of 1,483 views (itself exceeding the record set in 2020), followed by a day of 1,162 (with this whole run being preceded by a day of 906 views).


Well it seems that all of this is because of cartoonist Scott Adams (@ScottAdamsSays on Twitter) making news (in a very negative way, unfortunately).


You see, one of Adams' more archaic claims to fame is having written the book God's Debris (actually a quite incisive work which I still put forth as recommend reading) describing a school of Pandeism as its worldview. Interestingly, a key point of Pandeism -- that we are all equally fragments of our Creator, and how we treat our fellows is how we contribute to creating the experience of our Creator -- ought to strongly motivate seeking to help all humans to overcome whatever barriers separate us, for the  common achievement of greater joy in our lives.

Now then, I wouldn't especially want the hundreds-of-years-old theological theory of Pandeism to be drawing attention solely due to an association with a person who's in the news for all the wrong reasons. But.... if even a handful of Wikipedia visitors are enlightened by it, well, you know the old saw, The Universe Works in Mysterious Ways. Perhaps one of those mysterious ways is to make a current celebrity act in such a way that they unintentionally draw attention to a theory they espoused in the past perhaps much more beautiful than what they espouse in the present.

Pandeism has steadily been gaining renewed interest for the past decade, so anything which informs people that the idea exists is doing them a service, perhaps offering a light to come out of shadowy events.

Wednesday, August 26, 2020

Kickstarter underway for Essays From the Universe Experiencing Itself

 

Our Kickstarter is underway for our next collection: Essays From the Universe Experiencing Itself.

This is unlike any of our previous collections, as it is not explicitly about Pandeism (though it is explicitly about many other things).


Tuesday, May 26, 2020

Record traffic on Wikipedia's Pandeism page

Recently I noticed that Wikipedia's Pandeism page -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pandeism --  has been seeing record traffic. So much that five of its ten biggest days EVER have happened within just the past thirty days (including by far the single biggest day, the second being in December)



Wikipedia's Pandeism page has been around since 2013, and there are stats for how many times it has been viewed since around mid-2015.... and between 2015 and August of 2019, the most pageviews in a day was 618, in 2017. That number was beaten by about 50 on August 29, 2019.... And then on December 11, 2019, two days after Pandeism was mentioned in an article in Scientific American, the views were 901, a third higher than ever before. But in the past thirty days, there have been pageviews for the day of 533, 548, 618, 638, and 1227!!



The 1227 view day is 1/3 more than the December 11 record, and nearly doubles anything seen for over four years before that, and was itself surrounded by days higher than those usually seen in years before. And unlike the Scientific American episode, there's no clear reason.

For further context, the *average* pageviews per day for Wikipedia's Pandeism page for the period from mid-2015 up to a month ago (April 2020) are around 162-163. In that stretch, pageviews broke 500 only six times (and in fact, only even broke 400 eight times). Contra approximately the past 35 days, in which the daily average has been around 360 views per day, mightily pulled up by those five very high days (not to mention two other days breaking 400).

So I am really baffled and curious -- what is going on with Pandeism and consciousness of it that hundreds, perhaps thousands more people over the course of the past month or so have seen fit to visit Wikipedia's Pandeism page?

I wonder if perhaps the coronavirus situation has people seeking solutions in Pandeism....

Somebody even suggested to me that this could be the result of people not knowing how to spell "Pandemic" -- and you know, at first I took this as a joke, but now I’m thinking people really may well actually be typing in the p-a-n-d-e.... and get that far, and Pandeism pops up as an option, and they wonder, “well what is that?”



.... or perhaps the quarantine-bound are simply on the Internet more.

A mystery, and one I'd love to solve.

Sunday, December 15, 2019

"Beyond Physicalism" from Scientific American

On December 9, Scientific American magazine published a most remarkable article, "Beyond Physicalism: Philosopher Hedda Hassel Mørch defends the idea that consciousness pervades the cosmos." Mørch, a philosopher and associate professor at Inland Norway University of Applied Sciences, was interviewed for this piece by science journalist John Horgan, who asks whether God fits into her philosophical propositions, Mørch answers:

Not really. But there is a religious view I find interesting, which is pandeism: the view that God used to exist, and be the only thing that existed, and then transformed himself into the universe, and so no longer exists. The reason God did this was basically for fun, or to see what happened. And maybe at some point the universe will transform itself back into God—that would be like nirvana or heaven. But then eventually God would get bored again and start the cycle over. As I understand it, this is close to some parts of Hindu cosmology.

Horgan's response? "I like that! I think I’m a pandeist!"

Mørch goes on to explain that the tendency of life to alternate between true pain and the essential pain of pleasure extended to the point of boredom "is also partly why the pandeistic view I just described appeals to me."

Interestingly, in the days following the publication of this Scientific American magazine article, the Wikipedia Pandeism page experienced an indisputable upsurge in viewership -- going from an average of about 175 views per day over the preceding weeks to over 1,600 views over the following three days, with a peak of over 900 views in a single day, an all-time viewership record for that page!!


This more than anything demonstrates the power of conveying information about a rising mode of thought to people, even when buried deep within a scholarly piece of journalism.

Sunday, June 23, 2019

Pandeism, Catholicism, and the Catechism of the Catholic Church

As the next book from the Pandeism Anthology series, Pandeism: An Anthology of the Creative Mind, will come out in August 2019, we are reflecting on a unique aspect of this series -- that we invite people of differing and even anti-pandeistic views to publish their views in our collections. Our first Anthology covered perspectives including Hinduism, Islam, Biblical Unitarian Universalism, and Atheism. Our second has pieces from perspectives including Judaism and Stoicism.

One topic which we intend to cover in a future writing is the interesting relationship between Pandeism and Catholicism. The position of the Church as to Pandeism is addressed to a degree in the Catechism of the Catholic Church, a work intended to be comprehensive, as such things go, in presenting the positions of the Roman Catholic Church on issues needing addressing. Within it, Part 1, Section 2, Chapter 1, Article I, addresses a certain set of philosophies thusly:

285 Since the beginning the Christian faith has been challenged by responses to the question of origins that differ from its own. Ancient religions and cultures produced many myths concerning origins. Some philosophers have said that everything is God, that the world is God, or that the development of the world is the development of God (Pantheism). Others have said that the world is a necessary emanation arising from God and returning to him. Still others have affirmed the existence of two eternal principles, Good and Evil, Light and Darkness, locked, in permanent conflict (Dualism, Manichaeism). According to some of these conceptions, the world (at least the physical world) is evil, the product of a fall, and is thus to be rejected or left behind (Gnosticism). Some admit that the world was made by God, but as by a watch-maker who, once he has made a watch, abandons it to itself (Deism). Finally, others reject any transcendent origin for the world, but see it as merely the interplay of matter that has always existed (Materialism). All these attempts bear witness to the permanence and universality of the question of origins. This inquiry is distinctively human.

Now I do grant that there are a great many metatheoretical theological variations out there, so it might seem unfair to ask that this Catechism cover all of them. But in higher circles of theological thought, both Panentheism and Pandeism are long-standing enough (both coined in Germany by the mid-1800s) and well-enough known that they at least merit passing mention in a work intended or supposed to be comprehensive as to Catholic thought. But perhaps, just as the reference to the 'myths' of those "ancient religions and cultures" is likely intended to encompass Polytheism without needing mention it by name, perhaps it is assumed that other theologies not mentioned by name are encompassed by those that are. There is, after all, commentary upon the notion that "the development of the world is the development of God" parenthesized as Pantheism (one element of Pandeism), though Pantheism alone does not encompass all formulations of this conception. And there is commentary upon Deism (the other element of Pandeism), though many species of Deist would take issue with the summary as eliding the deistic property of a deity discernible by reasoned examination of our Universe, such that even those never privy to one of the claimed divine revelations could discover this possibility.

Panentheism, interestingly, may have gone unaddressed for another reason altogether -- that being that there is often reason to correlate Catholic doctrine with Panentheism more than with pure Theism, as Panentheism pairs the theistic aspects of an overseeing, intervening deity with the pantheistic properties of everything within the Universe itself being "within God." Such assertions have not gone without controversy, as there are those within the Church who dismiss elements of Panentheism, and at the same time fret and grumble when others within the Church embrace those elements and deem them doctrinally sound. But this dissension is mild compared to those "renegade" elements of the Church who decry the movement of the larger body as a shift towards Pandeism itself, and go so far as to accuse Pope Francis of being a secret (or not-so-secret) Pandeist in his own right.

But this modern quandary had escaped mention in the Catechism itself. In fact, the Catechism's dismissal of the parts of Pandeism without considering the whole eerily mirrors that of Richard Dawkins, who otherwise stands quite opposite the Catholic Church in its conclusions. Dawkins put it somewhat more abruptly, even, contending that "Pantheism is sexed-up atheism. Deism is watered-down theism." Reading the Church's summaries of these philosophies, it is hard to imagine that the Catechism's authors would at all disagree with Dawkins' characterizations on this score, and would quite likely agree with whatever characterization Dawkins might arrive at as to Pandeism as well.

Sunday, April 14, 2019

Pandeism and Suffering

What is the purpose of suffering? Of feeling pain far in excess of what is needed to keep us from injury? Many years ago I went on a snorkeling trip to Isla Espiritu Santo out of La Paz, in Baja California. I had too close of an encounter with a patch of fire coral!! The pain was intense and I was stunned to the point that I feared I would drown!! After dragging myself to the surface, I got my friends to pull me over the side of the wooden boat we'd rented. I flopped like a caught fish, gasping from the burning that pulsed through my hands, shoulders, stomach and chest.

I had by then long since settled on Pandeism as my guiding spiritual principle, but as I lay there I wondered, why a thinking, designing Creator -- especially one destined to share in our sensations -- would create a Universe where such pain would be possible. The secretions of the fire coral, though dangerous in large doses, were not so deadly that my body should go so far to warn me away from such contact. The burning persisted for days, gradually declining, but forever marking my memory with that moment.

As I healed I came to realize that some suffering lets us know the blessing of the time when we are not suffering. The Creator that became the Universe did so in order to experience those things that it could not know -- not only pleasure for its own sake, but the pleasure of overcoming pain, even of escaping from suffering in the final surrender that comes with death. I was grateful that, over all those hours that I suffered from the fire coral burns, it touched only one surface of my body. Laying on my back on cool sheets helped ward off the pain.

Many look back on their painful experiences as psychic scars, shuddering to relive them but forever forgetting to cast a relative eye on their current and future circumstances. I revel in the fact that I was burned by fire coral precisely because this was a moment of revelation, a breakthrough. I revel because I healed; those parts of me that were in pain were ultimately at peace. And, I may be grateful to know that I am capable of enduring and surviving such a thing, and doubly that with such pain as I am capable of enduring, I am not now enduring it.

In a short time (compared to the life of the Universe), those who are living in this moment will no longer be, and whatever suffering we know now, will be known no more. And in some time beyond that, we all may return to the oneness which we all first came from, sharing all of these memories and sensations. You, my friends, may know how I felt at the moment I was burned with fire coral in the Gulf of California; and the seeming bliss of cool sheets against my back as I healed; you will know my joy and my peace when the pain had finally passed, and indeed my relative pleasure in all but a few moments of my life. Most parts of most of us rarely suffer, but we do not bother to recognize absence of suffering as a significant benefit. But in the end, the absence of suffering might resonate in our shared experience most resoundingly, for our suffering is fleeting even as joy endures eternal.

Most particularly, we may share the joy of knowing how much better we spent most of our lives feeling than could have been the case!!

Thursday, August 30, 2018

Pandeism: An Anthology of the Creative Mind -- title page

Pandeism: An Anthology of the Creative Mind is coming soon....

Here is the title page:



Authors who have written or released materials for this book include an outstanding group of contributors to a variety of areas of philosophical thought (alphabetically, by surname):


  • Michael Minogue (student submission, Illinois)

  • Amy Perry (transcendental poet, United States)

  • Scott Somerville (student submission, Canada)

  • Jayson X (World Union of Deists, United States)