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With respect, the feeling is simply trite and entirely misleading ... a bit like when you first go to bed with someone you just met that evening and think you're in love for the rest of your life. Yeah, there is 'something bigger', but in truth that 'something bigger' is entirely indifferent (it doesn't give a stuff about you or I) and we do NOT belong to it in some mystical isn't-it-wonderful way, but rather in a very literal and trite sense: we are assembled from parts of it and the atoms of our bodies are recycled within it when we die (indeed, as we live). Carl Sagan said we are literally made of stardust. Well, yes, it's an incredible factoid, but it's not worth feeling religious over. I should revere the Universe because I'm part of it, or because there are some really big numbers involved? Don't think so. Even folk-wisdom theism makes more sense than that ('better be good or God's gonna give you a whuppin'!' ... at least the conclusion follows from the premise).

Whenever I contemplate pantheism seriously, the thing I find really, really impressive about it - ironically, a sentiment which 'pantheistic reverence' glosses over entirely - is its utter, utter indifference to human concern. Get your head around that, even for a split second, and you will be seriously awed ... but it isn't a nice, warm, fuzzy type of awe at all. A serious pantheism - a pure form of it - should stress not reverence, but indifference and insignificance. Those are the realities of our relationship with the Universe. The 'awe at something bigger' is, in my view, simply a projection ... as I might love the whole world and forgive it everything simply because I spent the night in the arms of someone nice.

by wing26 on Thu Jan 10th, 2008 at 08:34:07 PM EST
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I appreciate occassionaly entertaining a mythical perception of reality for reasons of aesthetics and personal ethics. I do not expect everyone to do likewise. For my part, I would say that you might be missing an element of experience that I personally find fulfilling, but I do not know you, and cannot presume that it would work for you.

What irked me was your (and Dawkins') intolerance for pantheistic reverence, which is after all a largely personal affair; at least you do not see me, Einstein, Spinoza or Hawking, and I'd guess at edwin, proselytising.

You can't even talk about the concept of significance from a non-personal perspective. Your interpretation of how pantheism should be interpreted can only reflect your own and other people's infusion of meaning into it. Indifference and insignificance, in the human mind, cannot be mere absences, just as atheism cannot be a mere absence (as I will explain in my longer answer to Ted which is still in the making). They are active stances, imbibed with meaning, which is how you can question the ethics they would lead to.

In that sense it is, indeed, projection.

Now I find that occassionaly entertaining the thought that I, and all mankind is, in the larger scheme of things (as a metaphor, I don't think there actually is a "scheme" of things) ... insignificant, to be helpful. It helps me modify the more hubristic and overly rationalistic tendencies of humanism, and it helps me to keep in mind that meaning is only found/created/mutually constructed in personal interaction.

by nanne (zwaerdenmaecker@gmail.com) on Fri Jan 11th, 2008 at 06:57:50 AM EST
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