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Post by Elizabeth on Jul 20, 2019 2:04:28 GMT
What exactly is it? What's the belief? How long has it been around? Etc...
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Post by Eugene 2.0 on Jul 21, 2019 17:22:02 GMT
The view was held by Spinoza, Bruno and many pagans. Literally, it means "everything is God"; a chair is God, or at least a part of Him; an elk is a God, or it has his part; a vowel is a God too, and so on. What do you see, and what do you feel - is merely God.
Usually, a pantheistic view has a logic like this: firstly, it came from a philosophical concept called "a substance". Then, one thinks that everything must belong to a substance, and the substance must have an ability of moving, so it's alive; obviously, such a substance can't be nothing, but a God.
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Grizzly_Recluse
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Post by Grizzly_Recluse on Jul 21, 2019 20:11:10 GMT
"What is pantheism?" evidently is the topic. Glad you asked. It's actually a vast topic. Plotinus, Spinoza, Einstein, vedanta, I quote "Pantheism: (Gr. Pan, all; Theos, God) 1. The doctrine that reality comprises a single being of which all things are modes, moments, members, appearances, or projections. 2. As a religious concept Pantheism is to be distinguished from Immanent Theism md Deism by asserting the essential imminence of God in the creatures. See Monism, Idealism -- W.L." Meta Encyclopedia of PhilosophyIn colloquial english, you could say everything is an expression of God. Therefore, you and I are just the way God wants us. Here's another quote from Plato at Stanford: "Pantheism First published Mon Oct 1, 2012; substantive revision Thu Jul 7, 2016 The term ‘pantheism’ is a modern one, possibly first appearing in the writing of the Irish freethinker John Toland (1705) and constructed from the Greek roots pan (all) and theos (God). But if not the name, the ideas themselves are very ancient, and any survey of the history of philosophy will uncover numerous pantheist or pantheistically inclined thinkers; although it should also be noted that in many cases all that history has preserved for us are second-hand reportings of attributed doctrines, any reconstruction of which is too conjectural to provide much by way of philosophical illumination." .
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Post by Elizabeth on Jul 22, 2019 4:09:39 GMT
So wait...
People are God or just how God wants them to be? And if with either case we have a nice being and then we have a serial killer. Does that mean God is in conflict with himself if he's doing good and bad and if they're just how God wants them to be then does God like having good and bad people?
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Grizzly_Recluse
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Post by Grizzly_Recluse on Jul 22, 2019 5:05:16 GMT
You're asking about the problem of evil. Spinoza does address it but I haven't studied it yet. It's not a doctrine.
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Post by Elizabeth on Jul 22, 2019 5:44:26 GMT
You're asking about the problem of evil. Spinoza does address it but I haven't studied it yet. It's not a doctrine. So you mean it's not typically found with God or in what he created?
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Grizzly_Recluse
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Post by Grizzly_Recluse on Jul 22, 2019 14:03:30 GMT
The question is confused. I can't make pronouncements about so vast a topic, you need to study it.
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Post by joustos on Jul 22, 2019 15:28:33 GMT
Pantheism is expressed in diverse forms (or: there are diverse definitions of pantheism). For example: In the 6th century B.C., philosopher Herakleitos [Heraclitus], in Greek Ionia, spoke of the universe [Kosmos] as ONE: If you listen to the Logos [Reason], you will see that all things are one or, we might say, an interrelated organism. We have our particular Logos; the universe has the cosmic Logos, the power that determines its course and its kinds of things. Thus, the cosmic Logos is like a divine (powerful, conscious) Mind. (During the Renaissance, man was often called the "micro-cosm" the Small Universe, endowed with Reason.) Centuries later, evangelist John (from the same town, Ephesus, as the Ionian Herakleitos) states that God created through the Logos and that nothing is created which is not created through the Logos.(Theologians added that the Logos contains the prototypes of all creatures, or the Platonic Eide/Essences of all things.) On the footsteps of Heraklitus, Bruno in the 16th century, spoke of the One, the Universe which is infinite in time and in space. The universe fashions itself in the course of time; it has the infinite attributes of God and, therefore (we are likely to conclude), the "Logic" Universe is not distinguishable from God. This is a pantheistic position, not a theistic position which distinguishes God and creature.
During the Middle Ages, St. Anselm of Aosta/Canterbury inferred the existence of God from his definition: God is that than which nothing greater can be conceived. Any existing thing is greater than a non-existing thing. Therefore, an existing God is a necessity. Actually one can say that the Universe [the Whole of what exists]is that than which nothing greater can be conceived. "It" is what exists [in infinite time]and may be called God, if one so chooses -- as Spinoza and others have done.
Early in the history of Christianity, Greek theologians described God in terms of philosophical notions, such as Parmenides philosophy. God is Being [To On; To Ti Esti], and eventually Aquinas wil say that God is "actus essendi" -- the act of Being... of anything. This is straight pantheism, but he corrected himself in various ways and wrote specifically "De Ente et Essentia" (About Being and Essence or the Speciation of things, which takes us back to the Logos.....) Obviously the issue is whether God and the Universe are One or Two. Christians opt for dualism, including the dualism of Body and Soul (two types of Essences, which Plato deemed necessary, but not physicists after the discoveries of electricity and of undulatory energy....)
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Grizzly_Recluse
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Post by Grizzly_Recluse on Jul 22, 2019 20:35:49 GMT
Thanks joustos for your erudite post. Very informative. Are you a professor? You write well, very articulately (and I only found 2 typos: "Logos....." should be only 4 periods. "Aquinas wil say." I am a perfectionist about grammar, sorry, not important.)
I have a couple points to make here.
1. Sounds like the idea of the logos was from Greece and got appropriated by the Bible to support anthropomorphism. So John was appealing to current philosophy to promote Christianity, right? You answered that question when you brought up Parmenides.
2. St. Anselm's God is not Spinoza's God. I was studying Anselm recently in an online philosophy class. He's Christian and not a pantheist. He was trying to develop philosophical support for God's existence. I've concluded his argument is flawed because his major premise is a foregone conclusion, he declares "that which nothing greater can be conceived" already exists. It's called a priori, I'm still getting the hang of that term. So the argument is not empirical. But it was not about pantheism anyway.
Pantheism resonates with me more than any other type of philosophy.
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Post by fschmidt on Jul 22, 2019 22:36:37 GMT
The problem with pantheism is that it fails to separate cause and effect. The destroys the basis of morality.
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Post by Elizabeth on Jul 22, 2019 22:58:38 GMT
The problem with pantheism is that it fails to separate cause and effect. The destroys the basis of morality. Can you do an example where it fails to separate cause and effect?
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Post by fschmidt on Jul 23, 2019 10:40:18 GMT
The problem with pantheism is that it fails to separate cause and effect. The destroys the basis of morality. Can you do an example where it fails to separate cause and effect? Obviously in God. In classical monotheism, God is cause but not effect. God causes justice in some form which justifies morality. But if God is both cause and effect, then all evil is part of God and morality makes no sense.
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