happyboy

my my my....i'm gone for a few days, and i find a thread that i inspired. man, i feel good!

i do not believe in Jesus, or the holy trinity, or buddha, or Allah, or any other traditional Deity. for me, the universe itself is something to wonder at, stand in awe of, and learn to love, despite it's harsh uncaring vastness. the universe is more majestic to me than any God or Goddess, or any spectre of the superstitious past. when i die, my molecules will mingle with the cosmos, and i'll become part of something vast and unknowable.

i don't need a heaven or a hell to make me moral. i look to the universe, and i see how beautiful it is, and i want to make it as beautiful as i can, for myself, my loved ones, and for humanity in general. for that, i don't need a Deity telling me to act; i simply understand what is right, and i do it.

scientific pantheism isn't a religion....i thought i made that abundantly clear in my original post on this topic. like someone pointed out to me, religion and spirituality are two very different things. i feel very spiritual when i look out at the ocean, or gaze up at the stars, but i sure as hell don't feel religious about it.

scientific pantheism is a philosophy, a way of looking at things. it will never have a clergy, or temples, or rites and rituals. there will never be a sci-pan Deity, or a sci-pan afterlife. it's just a reverence and love for nature and the cosmos.

happyboy, glad he's back to II

Jobar

I am an atheist.

I am a pantheist.

I am an idealistic monist.

All these things are aspects or facets of a single belief system, as best I can tell.

My pantheism began, sort of, when I was studying nucleosynthesis at Georgia Tech, back in the mid-seventies. When I learned that the elements which formed myself, the world, and all the planets (except for the hydrogen and helium) were products of supernovas, I realized that we quite literally come from the stars. In the words of Carl Sagan, "We are star-stuff." In that sense, there is no way to deny that we are unified with the vast cosmos around us.

Physics is well on the way towards describing the entire universe, and perhaps even some vast multiverse beyond our present comprehension, with a single equation or set of equations- the Grand Unified Theory. Indeed, for nearly a century we've known that matter and energy are equivalent, by Einstein's famous formula. (What isn't clear yet is just how the gravitational force is equivalent to the electroweak and strong nuclear forces.)

This tendency towards unifying our understanding of all existence parallels ancient philosophical/theological systems- Taoism, Vedanta, Buddhism. The languages and means of investigation are vastly dissimilar, but the ideas are, when properly understood and translated, extremely similar- so close that IMO they are identical.

As many here know, I have written a lot on the topic of pantheism and its points of similarity with our modern scientific understanding. Here's a partial listing of some of the threads:

Here
here
here
here
and here.
Oh, and this one is particularly good, I think.

I hope one day to write a book about the unification of atheism, theism, pantheism, realism, and solipsism- and the heart of this unification is found in one of the most ancient philosophical works of the human race.

"The Tao which can be talked about is not the Ultimate Tao."