Pantheism Watch
Get a load of this:
We need a place for our spirituality, and a Creator God is one such place. I hold that it is we who have invented God, to serve as our most powerful symbol. It is our choice how wisely to use our own symbol to orient our lives and our civilizations. I believe we can reinvent the sacred. We can invent a global ethic, in a shared space, safe to all of us, with one view of God as the natural creativity in the universe.
[…] If we are members of a universe in which emergence and ceaseless creativity abound, if we take that creativity as a sense of God we can share, the resulting sense of the sacredness of all of life and the planet can help orient our lives beyond the consumerism and commodification the industrialized world now lives, heal the split between reason and faith, heal the split between science and the humanities, heal the want of spirituality, heal the wound derived from the false reductionist belief that we live in a world of fact without values, and help us jointly build a global ethic. These are what is at stake in finding a new scientific worldview that enables us to reinvent the sacred.
Stuart Kaufmann, Reinventing the Sacred. Who needs God when you’ve got a ‘sense of’ God? Quite a pitch from a man who dares to quote Kierkegaard and Nietzsche. I’d like to think that this effete, onanistic approach — which replaces sacred nouns with adverby adjectives ascribing ‘sacredishness’ — could only appeal to academics of a certain sort. But of course it appeals to lots of people in a democratic age, because it offers the most abstract-yet-comprehensive appeal around. If Jonah really wanted to get some traction out of his criticism of the cult of unity, he’d dump the fascism thing, crack open his Tocqueville, and talk about how liberalism has fallen so captive to the democratic ideology.
I’m always amused by folks who think we can “reinvent” even our “sense of God,” as if people’s views of God were just an engineering problem.
— Michael Simpson · Apr 23, 12:57 PM · #
Do you actually think Goldberg would be able/willing to engage you at this level of discussion? He’s as likely to crack open Tocqueville as he is to take the Hitler mustache off the paperback edition of his book.
— Matt S. · Apr 23, 01:37 PM · #
…a new scientific worldview that enables us to reinvent the sacred.
Lots of luck with that.
— Jim Manzi · Apr 23, 01:40 PM · #
His book should be called “preserving the mystery” rather than “Reinventing the Sacred”. His arguments about quantum decoherence and biological emergence certainly accomplish the former.
— JA · Apr 23, 01:53 PM · #
I’m always amused by this as well, but for a different reason. It points up the basic absurdity of the entire concept of god. The most amusing aspect of this whole phenomenon is the tongue-clucking from those who think they’ve got the “sacred nouns” figured out.
— JB · Apr 23, 02:06 PM · #
Once you’ve abandoned the idea that any particular religious tradition has unique access to God or the sacred, this kind of thinking is inevitable. But I don’t see anything particularly worth preserving in that idea anyway.
_ It points up the basic absurdity of the entire concept of god_
Of course, there is “basic absurdity” in a great deal of contemporary science. But then applying criticism with anything approaching consistency or equity has never been a strength of atheists.
— Freddie · Apr 23, 02:19 PM · #
I love how mr. Poulos and the commenters here seems so sure that their conception of god is the corrrect one. The venom and the scorn…. excellent.
— cw · Apr 23, 04:00 PM · #
Actually, cw, I think you’re missing the point. JP and the commenters don’t have a conception of god—they have the real god. The whole notion of “conception of god” is an idea that occurs only to those who don’t know the real god.
— Steven Donegal · Apr 23, 07:13 PM · #
In a further twist, a conception of God is itself already a million light years away from a sense of Him… Her… It… Us… whatever.
— James · Apr 23, 08:07 PM · #
“Actually, cw, I think you’re missing the point. JP and the commenters don’t have a conception of god—they have the real god.”
They are certain that they have a real god and they scorn those who have something different.
— cw · Apr 23, 09:06 PM · #
It’s not necessarily scorn: it just comes across as scorn when you’re missing vocal tone, attitude, inflection, emphasis—each other’s company: I’ll bet if we were all sitting around drinking our beverages of choice and discussing these things in person, we’d be less offended. Whether you believe in God or not, my suggestion for a divine experience is (consumption, Freddie) to buy all of John Michael Talbot’s CD’s and all of Loreena McKennit’s and play the albums, alternating, until you can’t stand it and you have to go pound a nail into the wall, or some other really practical activity to bring you back to Earth.
— Joules · Apr 24, 05:12 PM · #