Answers in Pandeism: Part II: Prayer

I noted in my previous post having 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?

Here I will answer as to prayer -- and indeed, I have been asked by several people in recent memory: "Do Pandeists pray?"


Well, prayer means different things to different people. Satirist Ambrose Bierce defined the word to mean: "To ask that the laws of the Universe be annulled in behalf of a single petitioner confessedly unworthy." And indeed, to most prayer probably connotes speaking to some external entity, separate from themselves and from our Universe (but having immense power and likely conceived as our Universe's Creator), and asking of that entity that the course of existence be altered in some way to suit the desire of the asker. There is, one must admit, an oddity to this concept. For, if ours is a deterministic Universe, with an omniscient Creator which already knew all the outcomes before the Universe was created even -- indeed if ours was a Creator which had an infinite number of Universe-unfolding options before it and the power to choose whichever one fit its plan -- then all prayer (answered or not) would simply be part of this predetermined effort.

But suppose our Universe is not predeterministic? Well then we must consider the Butterfly Effect. Meteorologists using computer models were once stunned to discover that, if a butterfly in the Amazon flaps its wings one time, instead of sitting still for that one time, this extremely minor disruption of the atmosphere is enough to begin a snowball effect. That tiny flap nudges a tiny bit of air which would not have been nudged; that tiny bit of air impacts the flow of larger whisps of air. The perturbations continue expanding upward and outwards until they effect the entire ecosystem, until for example atmospheric currents are affected such that a hurricane which otherwise was going to hit Houston instead hits New Orleans. A different set of people are maimed or killed, a different set of properties are destroyed. The course of the entire world, ultimately, is affected.

The popular science fiction depiction is of time itself simply healing over these wounds to continuity; that if a future spaceship crew were to travel back to our time and change a few things here and there, things would still end up pretty much as they were. Worse yet, there is often the depiction that events and circumstances have changed but the people have stayed the same.  A cardinal example of this is in the Back To The Future movies. Marty McFly goes back in time and briefly interrupts his parents from getting together, jeapardizing his existence; but in the end not only does he reunite them, they end up living a much more fulfilling life than before. But, despite their lives being now utterly different lives, Marty McFly is still born!! His parents still have the exact same children (all three of them), meaning that whatever other upheaval has been caused to their lives, they still ended up getting the exact same sperm (itself unaltered by intervening changes in diet and other habits) fertilizing the exact same egg at what was thusly necessarily the exact same time. Simply put, this is an impossible outcome (especially given how Marty's interference with the past affected so many other people whose lives intersected with those of his parents, with for example everybody at that high school dance experiencing a set of musical timing different from what they would have experienced but for his being there. In fact, due to any moment of his interference at all, he still would never have been born; his parents would have produced a different genetic combination in their offspring, different looks and characteristcs and interests.

So what has this to do with prayer? Well, most any 'answered' prayer would be a pretty big perturbation in existence itself, it would essentially have an outflowing effect which altered the entire future, who would even be born. If a hundred years ago some prayer for a recovery from an illness for example, or for a team to win a ball game, were granted by the typically imagined external force, no person alive today (including you and I) would exist; a completely different set of people would populate the space, born at different times and with different stories. Oh, we'd likely have the same nations and cultures and so forth, but different people would have been born into them and promulgated them.  So, you see, there is some science fiction to the idea of the answering of a prayer, especially where it is at the same time supposed that, for example, certain sperms are supposed to meet certain eggs, and so certain people are especially destined to have been born.

But aside from the questionable logic applied to the effects of answered prayers in a deterministic or nondeterministic Universe, Immanuel Kant more seriously and pointedly declared:

"The wish to talk to God is absurd. We cannot talk to one we cannot comprehend — and we cannot comprehend God; we can only believe in Him. The uses of prayer are thus only subjective."

This is a point closer to the concern of Pandeism.  Now, naturally, Pandeism logically deems our entire Universe (and all of our lives) to simply be fragments of our Creator, existing within its continuing unconscious exertion of the sustainment of existence. The pandeistic Creator has thusly temporarily (for a few hundred billion years, which for it pass essentially instantly) ceded its ability to have any sort of prayer-granting power. Nor would it make any sense for it to grant prayers if it retained such power, since our existence more likely serves to answer the very question of how a Universe turns out absent its ability to interfere. But it must be acknowledged as well that Pandeism accounts for things such as miracles, prophecies, and yes, the appearance of eficacious prayers (as experiences across all faiths) as manifestations of the unconscious power of our Creator. It would anecdotally seem that for some few, 'prayer' brings results. But these results are not occurring because our Creator is listening and wish-granting, but instead because we are part of our Creator. Like many an athlete who spends countless hours training in his sport, and then credits God for his good performance, we are simply failing to recognize where we might be responsible for generating our own effects, good and bad.

Before I go any farther down this road though, this is not 'The Secret'; this is not 'The Law of Attraction.' Pandeism does not propose that any person may through the power of positive thought alone 'attract' success or experience the effects of answered prayers. Indeed, Pandeism does not require that efficacious prayer really exist as a phenomenon at all, it simply accounts for if it so happens that it does exist. Pandeism first and foremost demands a logical approach; it demands recognition that the vast majority (possibly all) of efficacious prayers are simply coincidence. If nine out of ten people die from a given disease and ten out of ten pray to recover, then the one out of ten who does recover will be one who prayed for it. If a hundred thousand fans watch a sporting event and are evenly divided in allegience to the teams, about half of the praying portion of that fandom will get what they sought. And if an athlete works diligently at his sport, he will likely see his prayers for victory answered, even as an opponent's prayers go unanswered. What Pandeism explains, then, is that if there is any such thing as an 'answered prayer' (as many faiths and cultures contend) this phenomenon will be best accounted for by the pandeistic model.

So, getting at last to the long-about answer to the question, "do Pandeists pray?" -- no, not 'pray' exactly. I think Pandeists are likely to engage in very deep and meaningful meditation, to seek to feel connected with our Universe both at as broadly and at as many levels as we can. Certainly Pandeists will be inclined to have gratitude towards our Creator for our existence, and will seek to demonstrate that gratitude by engaging in that best sort of 'prayer' of all, the one where you put your hands to work doing things that will help reduce suffering and increase happiness in the world. And, at last, Pandeists will seek self-understanding and self-betterment, for if we are all part of our Creator, what better way to seek its assistance than to seek the aid of the part of our Creator that is ourselves?

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!!

Response to a counterargument from another blog

A counterarguer has raised some issues in response to another blog against a previous post in this one, Reply to artistdude2's Thketch 001; and this counterarguer complains of this blog's post thusly:

He quickly disqualifies the Bible as having any role in the debate, leaving it at the level of competing assertions. Yet if true, the biblical record quickly answers a lot of his points/objections. The reality that God has self revealed in a direct way and His interventions in history — especially at the incarnation — are huge. Jesus is not just a bridge like a Buddha. He is God in flesh, uniquely conceived, and not just an avatar. This concept is not even minimally discussed.

But there is a reason that the validity of scriptural/revelational assertions are "not even minimally discussed" and it is simple and straightforward. It is that all of them are fully accounted for, and so superseded by, the pandeistic model itself. Naturally it could be claimed that the Old Testament, or the Qur'an, or the Vedas, Book of Mormon, New Testament, Popol Vuh, any one of those would be "huge" and would answer this question or that "if true" -- but this is where Pandeism rises above all of these, for Pandeism answers those questions no matter whether any book is true, and it does so for all the books out there.


Now, I take it as a given that were there empirical truth in any one scripture, this would be perceptible to the truth-seekers abiding in any corner of the world. If for example the Vedas were objectively "true" then all rational people to whom this was explained would quickly come around to believing in the truth of the Vedas; and the same holds true for the Bible and Qur'an and the Book of Mormon and the rest. But, obviously, none of these books is true enough to persuade any substantial number of adherants to any other of them.


And so you have Muslims and Hindus who've studied the Bible and find it unpersuasive; Jews and Mormons who believe parts of the Bible but find the NT account lacking in some respect; Christians and Hindus who've studied the Qur'an and found it unpersuasive. All of which undergirds the proposition that each of these traditions offers something only partial, a glimpse of a higher connecting truth but never that truth itself. And this eventuality is entirely consistent with all scriptures and revelations and visions and oracles and prophecies spiritual dreams and so on and so on simpy being unconscious manifestations -- even as extremly complex and involved as they may seem to our comparably limited minds -- misinterpreted and miscomprehended through the narrow, biased funnel of the human brain.


And that is how Pandeism fully accounts.

Some Pandeism resources

Here are some members of the burgeoning family of Internet resources providing information, insight, and debate on Pandeism:

Main sites:
Institute for Pandeism Studies
The YouTube PanDeism Channel
Everything2's Pandeism Index
Pandeism Wiki by Wikia
The Pandeist Theorem by Robert G. Brown (excerpt from A Theorem Concerning God)

Blogs and other things:
A Pan-Deist Point of View (blog on various perspectives of pandeistic thought)
Pandeism with Rusty Nails (old, dormant blog on the theory)
PanDeism: What the Heck is That? (by Dean Snyder, another interesting blog)
What is The Nature of Reality? (by Bill M. Tracer in Philosophy, May 18, 2011, with a good bit on Cosmological Pandeism)
Various Theological positions described and evaluated (from Radical Apathy, another interesting blog)
Do we need God?, from Pandeism Hellre kontroversiell än snäll (another blog)
RationalWiki's Pandeism Page
Thelemapedia's Pandeism page
VisWiki's Pandeism page
Keywen's Pandeism page
Wikipedia's Pandeism page
Wiktionary's Pandeism page
Wikiquote's Pandeism page
The Parallels of Pandeism by Bernardo Kastrup, Ph.D.
Encyclopedia Britannica's page on pandeism -- Alex Ashman, BBC News
"Metaphysical Isms"
Useful Notes on Pandeism from TV Tropes
LiveJournal Pandeism group
The Pandeism Channel Twitter feed

Buddhabrot

The Buddhabrot is a kind of Mandelbrot Set, an image created by graphing the full extrapolation of a simple and essential mathematical function. In this case, the image generated by running the numbers for the set is strikingly similar to the iconic image of the Buddha, seated in lotus position, encased in a halo of light. To the informed eye, the image offers cues including, for example, intersections seemingly closely aligned with the seven traditional chakra points; the appearance of not only a figure seated in the traditional position, but having hair bound up in a tight topnot, and a central heart with two great arteries twinned forth from it.

The formula is actually quite simple:

z_n+1 = z_n² + c

(*for all sets for which z₀ = 0 does not tend to infinity)

As the number of iterations increases, and the depth and detail of the image are enhanced, it seems to become possible to see cosmic architecture within the calculations, to see our Universe. Its diverse worlds, its stars, its galactic clusters and gaseous clouds, become apparent within the form of the Buddha. This occurrence presents great affinity to Pandeism, for the Pandeist, too, sees mathematical formulae embedded in the truth of our Universe, and our Universe expressed in mathematics underlying all physics, all design.


Confessedly, the image is short enough on detail that some disagreement is possible over things such as the placement of the arms and hands. And it only presents the iconic view from the zero rotation, with the image 'on its side' from how it would initially be graphed at that rotation. From a sidereal rotation, it seems more like a slightly bent two-headed pancake. But the iconography of the essential image could not be more fundamentally presented, this being the most natural presentation of any asymmetric Mandelbrot set appearing to be stacked upon a single broad base.


And so, to a devout Buddhist, it might well seem that the incidence of this mathematical as if our Universe itself were tugging at our sleeves and declaring, 'hey, check this out.' One can only imagine how representatives of other religions might behave if mathematical formulae unexpectedly produced imagery of their symbols or favoured characters. But they don't so we may never know.

Pandeism and Science

I mean to state this proposition with great care and specificity: Pandeism has no conflict with science whatsoever; indeed, Pandeism embraces the scientific method and the awesome nature of scientific discovery, and as with religion, Pandeism fully accounts for science. This is not to suggest that the means of accounting are the same -- for Pandeism accounts for religious experiences -- to the extent they exist as something more than coincidence or psychological phenomena -- as manifestations of the underlying unconscious power of our Creator, often denoted by Pandeists as the Deus. But neither does this mean that Pandeism assumes generally that religious experiences are, in fact, anything more than coincidence or psychological phenomena. After all, one man's vision or revelation is another's hallucination; one man's prophecy is another's clever use of vague wording and exploitation of biases of  memory and expectation; one man's miracle is another's parlour trick.


And What Is Science?


Let us step back a moment and remember what Science is, and what Pandeism is. Science is at bottom not simply a set of beliefs about the nature of the world, but a method of arriving at principles. This method generally involves the specific steps of developing a theory which accounts for especial observations, of developing an experiment (or a series of them) which would serve to falsify the theory based upon contrary results, and performing this experiment. A rock bottom concern of such endeavours is the replicability of the results. That is, if one man conducts an experiment in Kansas City to determine the effect of mixing one enzyme with another, or of colliding two particles of matter, or of teaching a crustacean multiplication, then a counterpart in the field in Boston or Berlin or Bangalore ought to be able to sit down with the same materials at the same starting point, and achieve the same result. It is in this way -- by studying the means by which a proposition is tested, and replicating outcomes, that scientists gain confidence that the outcome is valid.


Confessedly, there are some fields wherein that sort of experimentation is not so simple a thing to engage in, either because of the scale or complexity of the elements involved, or the time frame over which results may be gleaned, or both. Cosmology and evolution offer examples of these problems. We might over a billion years observe two stars developing in different ways based on predictable differences in their known compositions; we might in that same period of time evolve a sea cucumber into a wombat and back again; but the human life span simply does not allow for observations of such periods. Naetheless, we are able to observe many billions of snippets of the evolution of stars and of life, and to make predictions which may be tested by examining stars and life forms known to be at certain stages in these processes. And so, science may equally gain confidence that even these more difficult areas (so far as experimentation is concerned) have provided for valid scientific outcomes.


And What Conflict Does Religion Raise?


A traditional and historic difficulty arises with theistic religions, for these tend to present their own theories about how things came to be, with specific ideas presented as to the time frames, order, and means. And theological accounts tend to be based not on observation or experimentation or verification, but simply on a claim that somebody wrote down in the distant past, almost invariably asserted to have been communicated to that writer by their deity. Religion comes with several built-in defenses to the scrutability of these claims. One is, when somebody comes along and observes for example that the Earth goes round the Sun despite religious authorities teaching otherwise, to kill that person and burn their documentation of the fact; or to at least beat them up, or threaten them with torture, so that they recant the claim and cause others to cower from making such claims. Indeed, recantation of scientific claims is thusly accorded great weight in religious circles, there being no end to the assertions that Charles Darwin recanted his theory of evolution. But recantation is meaningless in science, where replicable experiments by one scientist, even an opponent of the recanted theory, can produce documentation of the truth of that theory. Darwin's recantation held no more power to change the facts observed than did Galileo's or indeed than would a recantation by Pythagoras of the Pythagorean theorem.


But religious literalists have no choice but to soldier on, attempting to prove for as long as possible that the Sun orbits the Earth, that animal species are not related by common descent, that rocks in the ground are thousands rather than billions of years old, that homosexual couples raise maladjusted children, that illnesses are caused by evil spirits, or that the lights in the night sky are pinpricks in a great blanket. The next option is to deem the scientific results to be a test, or a creation of an evil spirit designed to fool us. It is, they might imagine, an evil being who put those strange skeletons in the ground, and who made it appear to us that light was coming from stars millions of light years away. A final defense is to effectively rewrite the scripture so as to cast accounts which contravene science as simply metaphors for the actual scientific results, or to simply pay them no mind at all and focus on those things which are yet claimed to be beyond the ken of science.


And How Does Pandeism Reconcile Science and Religion?


Pandeism need raise none of religion's defenses. For, to the Pandeist, who believes that an intelligent Creator set forth our Universe, logically needing do no more than provide its energy and establish the governing dynamics which guide its behaviour, science is precisely the practice of discovering those very governing dynamics. Gravity, electromagnetism, radioactive decay, evolution, these are not things to be disputed or explained away, but discoveries which take us ever closer to fully knowing the measure of our Creator's design. If the scientific method indicates that our Universe is 13.72 billion years old, then that soundly indicates that our Creator set forth our Universe 13.72 billion years ago. If the fossil record and DNA combine to indicate a common ancestor for man and apes, then that soundly indicates that our Creator set forth a Universe wherein evolution by natural selection would likely lead to some branches of life evolving the capacity for intelligent thought (and in every instance where this is so, it follows that the branch so evolved would have a similar branch lacking such capacity as its closest evolutionary relation).


And, returning to the proposition that Pandeism fully accounts for both scientific and theological evidence, these things are made complementary through it. As a theology of reason, Pandeism does not assume that theological accounts are true, but firstly notes the proposition of David Hume that in order for a miracle to be credible, the documentation supporting it must be such that it is more likely that the miracle occurred than that those purporting to have witnessed it are lying, or were mistaken, or were deceived. A plausible scientific explanation for a perceived miracle would render mistaken the belief that it was miraculous. The possibility of a scientific explanation, or of a simple misreporting or misunderstanding of what was observed, raises a substantial, though perhaps not impenetrable, barrier to the assumption that any recounted miracle is indeed a true account.


It is only if that barrier to believability is overcome that Pandeism need provide a metaphysical accounting for the miraculous thing, and this is fully accomplished -- for all faiths -- by the pandeistic model of an underlying unconscious sustaining power. And no science yet known to man can provide evidence contravening the possibility that such is the nature of what is fundamentally responsible for the Creation and sustainment of our Universe in being.

Pandeism and Sexual Pleasure

When the impact of religion on sexual freedom is considered, it most generally is a strongly negative one. For it is the gist of religions that sex is either highly regulated by suppressive divine decrees, or that it is at least some sort of inherent flaw, distracting men from the path to enlightenment.

The most typical restriction imposed by religion is that sex must be restricted to married couples -- which, in this day and age oddly juxtaposes secular government giving its stamp of approval on a piece of paper, without which it matters not what the couples' religious advisers contend, nor what their congregation would have. It seems these days no one is married until the government puts in its two cents. As to actual sexual activities, the 'marriage' requirement effectively precludes threesomes (and foursomes, and fivesomes, and I think anything above that would qualify for general orgydom). Polygamy (and polyandry) might ameliorate this a bit, but both are becoming rarer and less acceptable amongst the religious, even amongst those whose doctrines once lauded the practice -- and to the nonreligious, they have little relevance because marriage itself originates as a religious institution, and outside of that life is the free-for-all.

Religious mores may require the wife to be submissive (and note, it is always the woman whom religion puts down; and with all that submissiveness implies); may limit sex to purposes of procreation (which cuts out a great many activities and endgames); and may bar masturbation, oral sex, anal sex, homosexuality, partner swapping, and all other activities consensually maximizing sexual variety. Theistic adherents may contend that they are able to find sufficient sexual release within the constraints of their own beliefs, though this is hardly a justification for wishing to will others sexual rights away.

But Pandeism takes quite a different approach. So much so that it may well be claimed to be the most sex-positive of all religious beliefs. Indeed, the sacredness of sexual pleasure is consistent with the core of understanding and practice of Pandeism, and one reason why it might modernly be enjoying greater popularity as it receives wider exposure to open-minded persons of a spiritual bent. Recall that Pandeism is the belief that our Creator not only created the Universe, but in fact ceased to be a separate entity and instead became our Universe in order to experience existence through the experiences of the Universe (and thereby to learn what it was like to face obstacles and limitations unknowable to a deity). Pandeism teaches therefore that our Creator shares in and learns from all of our experiences, and thus our positive experiences, including our consensual and mutually enjoyable sexual practices, must be no less than a gift to our Creator!!

Now it must as well be further recalled that Pandeism holds our Universe and our experience of it to be essentially natural phenomena, existing in accordance with the governing dynamics designed by our Creator and actuated in its becoming of our Universe. But within that scheme, our ability to experience pain and pleasure, joy and sorrow, are not intentional bestowals from a Creator using such things to test or control us. They are evolved capacities. True, they have come to pass in accordance with our Creator's physical laws, but not as part of a specified plan. They are instead happenstance outcomes, outpourings of the randomness with which our Creator imbued our Universe, so that it might generate a useful variety of experiences. Thus, there is no 'wrong' in receiving pleasure sexually, any more than in receiving physical pleasure through other natural functions such as eating, drinking, or basking in a cool breeze on a hot day or a warm spot on a cold day. In each of these instances we may be assured that nature rewards our essential enjoyment of them because they in some way tend towards the benefit of our progression as a species -- a progression which is itself surely appreciated by our Creator.

In this light, there can be nothing immoral about any consensual act between persons who are competent to make decisions for themselves. When a man and woman (or two men, or two women, if so inclined) find mutual attraction in a smoky bar, and hasten to release their desires in a one-night-stand of passionate pleasuring in multiple positions, our Creator necessarily shares in each moment of pleasure, for they are of our Creator. When one person contracts with another to be brought to orgasm with the other's mouth, our Creator experiences the wonder of orgasm (and perhaps the prostitute ought to rejoice in giving to our Creator that wonderful experience); when one is privileged to participate in a menage a trois with two sensual specimens of the opposite sex, who pleasure the lucky third with their fingers and toes and multiple orifices, perhaps even their elbows, our Creator shares equally in this arousal. Our Creator must delight in the pleasure of those moments as much as either of their human actors; and when a man (or woman) sits alone in front of the tv or computer screen or simply a magazine and masturbates while viewing the topography revealed by pornography, our Creator experiences the enjoyment of that orgasm as much as its recipient.



There can be few better lives lived than those in which the experience of giving and receiving pleasure is maximized by the sharing as great a variety of sensual joy with as many people as possible!! So long as this is done honestly and consensually, it is no harm but a positive good to share sexual pleasure with others, and reap the same for oneself, to be shared among all in the end.

It is true, naturally, that sex may be used to inflict suffering, which imposes suffering upon our Creator -- and in the end we will perhaps share in this suffering as well -- and the responsible party will have the most poignant experience of the suffering he has caused. There may be no question that to force sex on another, through brute strength or through more subtle emotional or financial extortion is still an immorality!! Although I lauded the gift of the prostitute before, if that person is not acting of his or her own free will, but instead out of a compulsion to feed a terrible drug habit or provide for an abusive pimp, so would our Creator experience the deprivations of such a condition. And further, some consideration must be given to the suffering that even consensual sex can cause to the spouse who finds him or herself cheated on, to the parent who fears their offspring's loss of 'innocence,' even to the complete stranger who is distressed that sex is happening at all. But these feelings must be taken with a grain of relative rationality -- consider the racist or the homophobe, who is angered by sex between people of different races, or of the same gender -- this act does him no harm, so his 'suffering' is irrational, a self-inflicted bogeyman; it may only be in another next life, when he shares in the pleasure of these experiences (which he may have denied himself in life) that he will realize what a gift he was receiving when these objectionable acts were carried out, and how thoughtless was his disdain for the experience of them!!

So let us not disgrace our Creator by denying ourselves the wonderful gift of sexual titillation, the pleasures of sensual play, and the ultimate joy of a rain of orgasms!! An understanding of Pandeism opens our eyes to the possibility that such denial is the greatest immorality!!