I can understand dislike for the first; I cannot understand presuming to judge upon the second.
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.
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.
