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.

Pandeism Fully Accounts

I have posted this before, but it's so far buried in past posts that I thought I'd simply bring it to the fore once again....

Answers in Pandeism: Part I: Did Jesus exist?

Recently 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?

Well, those are some good and important questions, and so (having obtained the permission of their asker) I aim to give them as full and serious thought as  can and answer them in a series of blog posts, beginning with this one:



Do you acknowledge the existence of Jesus?  

I don't pretend that there is a uniform Pandeist position on that question, Pandeism being a theory for which the existence or nonexistence of Jesus would not affect its general applicability. But for me personally, I think it is surely absurd to deny that Jesus, the man, existed -- that he was born in the Middle East around the beginning years of the First Century, that he spoke publicly and gave wise lessons to his fellowmen.  For me, the most compelling proof is actually the suggestion that Jesus, in his young adulthood (the so-called 'missing years' of the Bible) travelled to India and learned firsthand lessons of Buddhism and Hinduism, a proposition which exhibits startling concordance with the substance Jesus' teachings (so far as their recounting may be taken as accurate).  And I believe as well that much of what Jesus taught (as much of what the Buddha taught) is consistent with a pandeistic model (for example the idea theretofore unknown in Judaism that harming one's fellowman was directly and actually harming one's Creator).

The idea of Jesus travelling to India seems generally scoffed at by mainline Christians, though it is supported by village traditions of the places in India where he was believed to have studied under the Hindu or Buddhist masters of the day. Such scoffing is somewhat adverse to the desire amongst Christians to prove that Jesus existed, for it seems like useful proof to show that places in a region of the world which served as a common trade destination of the day claim relics and stories of his visits there, and that his philosophy upon returning contains elements of the philosophy which he would have learned had the journey been truly undertaken. But it seems that the desire to put forth logical proof of the existence of Jesus wanes in the face of the desire to maintain the extremely profitable franchise which derives from the prevailing narrative, as it was constructed a few decades after the death of Jesus.

It is, naturally, important to recall that Pandeism holds that, all of us being within and of our Creator, all miracles, prophecies, revelations, scriptures, and so on from all religions are accounted for as simply manifestations of the unconscious underlying power of that Creator. And so, were we to presume that every miracle and prophecy and revelation actually happened exactly as relayed in the portions of the Bible claimed to have been witnessed by its authors (which is essentially the happenings from the time of Abraham on), including the accounts relating to Jesus, these things are still fully accounted for by the pandeistic model, as are similar accounts relayed in Hinduism, Shinto, Islam, even Mormonism and Ba'hai and other more recent formulations.


We observe in our lives, there are certain people who simply have a talent for something which surpasses everybody else in the field. Almost anybody may do math, or strum a guitar, or shoot a basketball, but there are precious few mathematicians like Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein, or guitarists like Jimi Hendrix and Carlos Santana, or basketballers like Wilt Chamberlain and Michael Jordan. People like Jesus and Buddha might have been all of them rolled into one when it came to spirituality, having the talent to explore the presence of our Creator as aware fragments of itself, and possibly to translate the power of our Creator into miraculous acts. And because Jesus and Buddha were in touch with the presence of the Creator, they understood our position in our Universe, and the destiny to which we were headed — that we are the Creator’s experience, so to do harm to another person is truly to do harm to our Creator, and to create an experience of harm which will be carried into the next world when we all share in every experience which has happened in the existence of our Universe, but with particularity on the experiences for which we were responsible in our own lives!!

Simply being part of Creator doesn’t mean that any one of us can perform miracles, even if we are fully aware of this status — just as a man may love music and be fully aware of it as a subject of theoretical study, and yet never pick up the ability to play at any more than a child’s level on a piano or a guitar. But every once in a long while comes that Michael Jordan, or that Stephen Hawking, that Mozart, that Jesus, that Buddha.  It is easy to see how somebody with an exceptional talent in touching the presence of God within us might be mistaken for a God endorsing the views and biases of an idolizer of that exceptional person (for we like to imagine that those who we idolize would share our views on things).  It is even easier to see how somebody with that talent and a glimpse of a true understanding of the nature of a pandeistic Universe might have great difficulty explaining this concept to others who lacked that vision, but who were instead so used to the concept of anthropomorphised tribal gods that they would reject the complexity of Pandeism.  And so, in actuality the perception passed down is more likely that of the followers who misunderstand the message and set their own biases into its retelling!!

Pandeism fully accounts

What is it that we, as pandeists, mean exactly when we claim that 'Pandeism fully accounts'?

That Pandeism is meticulous as to the miraculous and provides profundity as to prophecy; that it is a revolution in revelation; and a vision as to oracles. To give the quick summation, the theological model of Pandeism combines the coherently reconcilable elements of Pantheism with Deism, attempting to answer open questions left by each with aspects of the other -- concluding that experience demonstrates elements of both are likely correct, that our Creator did set forth our Universe, but that it did not "leave it" but instead completely became the energy of which all things are made and the unconscious governing dynamics by which all things are able to operate.

This pandeistic model accounts for the state of our Universe with the fewest assumptions required of any theological model. Derivable from First Principles, the whole of the set of assumptions necessary for Pandeism are:

• that ours may be a Created Universe, and if this is so, then our Creator necessarily possesses these characteristics:
  



• 
  
  

  
  
  

  sufficient power to set forth the forces of which our Universe is
  composed

  
  
  

  sufficent intelligence to set forth the governing dynamics guiding those
  forces into the states which we observe

  
  
  

  rationality, for ours is a rational Universe, consistent in the application
  of those governing dynamics

  
  
  

  a rational motivation to create such a Universe as ours.

Pandeism fully accounts for every claimed miracle, revelation, scripture, prophecy, vision, dream, oracle, sign, egrigor, spiritual activity, spiritual emotion, etc, and it does so for all faiths. For if any of these occur at all, then they are simply explicable as manifestations of the power of our Creator unconsciously underlying our Universe, as unwittingly misread through the biased minds of human observers.

Imagine for a moment, if you were able to travel back in time to a much earlier point in human history, and were there able to show a select handful of pre-civilisation homosapiens perhaps a ten-minute vid of vital images which accurately laid out the history of our Universe and our planet only to that point. Understanding that you would not be able to communicate anything with them verbally for lack of a common language, how do you imagine they would interpret what they saw? The Big Bang, the massive cycles of starbirth and stardeath necessary to generate heavy elements which permit the existence of our world at all. The violent geological activities, periods of evolution, the strange eras of prehistoric beasts which necessarily preceded human existence, even the seemingly sudden leaps in human technology (from nothing to the lever, wheel, inclined plane, fire, axes, and such) -- if the primitives with whom you shared these images then felt the need to relay that vision to others, using what limited language and symbology as was then available to them, would they not couch it as a series of miracles, creditable to the intervention of inscrutable metaphysical forces such as a deity?

And yet, if our Creator because our Universe, if we are of our Creator in this fragmentary sense, wafting on the winds of its unconscious sustainment despite our illusion of concreteness, then all of our religious visions represent such manifestations, glimpses of the commonalities well known within the unconscious mind of the metaphysical progenitor of which we are so stunningly a part. Our world glitters about us with the promise of a similar oneness of being, a potential to be whatever world we wish it to be -- if we wish it.

Under the pandeistic model it need not be assumed that our Creator is a conscious and active deity who chooses to act or not act, and is opposed by some evil entity -- presumed to have been created by it as well, either errantly or as part of some complicated scheme for which additional levels of excuses and assumptions must be made. For our Creator need not continue to interfere in our Universe, judge or condemn, send seeming conflicting messages to prophets of various faiths, nor need it to create or permit any other spiritual forces to contend with man. Pandeism avoids the traditional response to the multiplicity of claimed miracles, revelations, prophecies, and so forth supporting irreconcilable differences of faith, which has been the invocation of the agency of evil spirits. Such assumption is itself deeply irrational, for it is simply impossible for there to be an evil spirit from whom 'miraculous' results emanate for the affirmance of other faiths. All laws of nature, and the laws of physics among them, these are necessarily the laws of our Creator, and all things are bound by them except (and only except) as allowed by the power of our Creator; put otherwise, even were we to impose upon our Creator the additionally assumed characteristics of consciousness and a need to intervene, our Creator would nonetheless be the force sustaining our Universe. It would be impossible for anybody, any entity, to violate the laws of physics except by using such Creator's own power to do so. And if there is proposed to be a conscious Creator, this simply means that nothing miraculous may occur except as done by that Creator.

In the pandeistic model, our Creator unconsciously underlies existence, and so what miracles occur (if anything is not susceptible to naturalistic explanation) do so because that power is manifested by the fragments of our Creator which constitute all of existence. And, as importantly, no good and wise Creator would grant free reign to an entity sufficiently powerful as to undermine the ability of other entities to make informed decisions, if reward or punishment hinged upon such decisions. If so powerful an entity were deemed to exist, it would immediately render fatally suspect any widely held belief, as any one of us could have lived our entire existence in an illusion generated by it to secure our falsity of beliefs. If an 'evil spirit' exists at all, and is so successful as to be responsible for all the religions with which one disagree (though others adhere tightly to them) then it is overwhelmingly likely it is equally responsible for that last faith with which one does agree. And, in fact, whatever the 'truth' is, would then most likely reside only in a minor and obscure and generally ignored or even reviled group, whose few members display impeccable morality.

Another benefit of the pandeistic model is that it equally accounts for all scientific discovery -- all that is discovered by science as to how our Universe operates simply is an uncovering of the governing dynamics set in motion by the Creator in the moment of creating/becoming of our Universe. If science reveals our Universe to be billions of years old, it is so, and is because the rational goal sought by our Creator was one which required our Universe gestating through billions of years of natural development to give birth to its desired set of information. If science reveals our descent from a Universal Common Ancestor, it is so, and is because our Creator set forth a Universe capable of giving rise to sufficiently complex life through a simple process of evolution by natural selection.

And, lastly, this model contains a remarkable powerful basis for morality, as it proposes that all things are part of our Creator, and that our Creator experiences through us the consequences of our actions. We ought therefore to be motivated to act in ways which avoid causing suffering and harm, because in so doing we would simply be inflicting these things on our own Creator -- and, in a way, upon ourselves. And indeed, such raises the Golden Rule from good advice to universal law, for that which we do unto others, we may thusly veritably do unto ourselves!!

And so, because the pandeistic model fully accounts for all of the proof generally presented in support of both faith and science, it is presumably true against any theological system which requires additional assumptions to account for the same proof -- and especially against any system which fails to fully account for contradictory beliefs and the manifestations of the miraculous claimed to support those beliefs, and for contradictory scientific discoveries.