Quotes About Pantheism

Johnny Appleseed was revered . . he was . . . an evangelist (of a doctrine veering perilously close to pantheism).

There is no more fatal fault in the reading of history, nor any illusion to which the human mind is more prone. To read the remote past in the light of the recent past; to think the process of the one towards the other inevitable; to regard the whole matter as a slow inexorable process, independent of the human will, still suits the materialist pantheism of our time.

In this book, I have tried to reveal her other Nietzsche as really the central Nietzsche in Zarathustra by firmly linking his mysticism to Spinoza's pantheism.

In contemporary practice, a pagan is someone who follows a polytheistic/pantheistic spiritual system.

While a case can be made for intelligent design, I can't figure out why some Christians are so thrilled about that possibility. First of all, it doesn't prove there's a God. If anything, intelligent design lends support to some form of pantheism that defines God as immanent within nature.

Sikhs, however, should not allow the belief that God is immanent within humanity or nature to become pantheism or to say that any created being is God.

Pantheism identifies man with Nature. whether its visible appearance, or its abstract essence. Personalism isolates, separates him from Nature; converts him from a part into the whole, into an absolute essence by himself.

Up is infinite. Down is infinite. Pantheism, dualism, pluralism!

The Stoics were essentially pantheists, since they maintained that as there is nothing better than the world, the world is God.

This almost pantheistic identification with the universe is expressed in his "Song of the Creatures," or "Canticle of the Sun," one of the greatest poems ever composed.

surprising as it may sound, pantheism is not really all that different from materialism. It is the flip side of the same coin. Materialism states that everything consists of material stuff. Pantheism states that everything consists of spiritual stuff. Both are non-personal. As a result, both worldviews fail to account for human personhood.

neither materialism nor pantheism is up to the task of accounting for the origin of human beings.

In their original historical context, these verses were astonishing. In the ancient world, virtually all the major "isms"—Platonism, neo-Platonism, Gnosticism, Manichaeism, Hindu pantheism—taught a low view of the material world. In these philosophies, salvation was conceived as a complete break between matter and spirit, a flight from the physical world. To make that break, adherents adopted a regimen of asceticism to suppress bodily urges and desires.

It was a question of steering Christian dogma between the Scylla of pantheism and the Charybdis of materialism and its logical conclusion, scepticism.

Pantheism believes that all things are linked in a profound unity. All things have a common origin and a common destiny. All things are interconnected and interdependent. In life and in death we humans are an inseparable part of this unity, and in realizing this we can find our joy and our peace.

The polytheism of the popular Hinduism[38] is practically a pantheism in which the various deities are regarded

Pantheism is atheistic towards the gods of all traditional religions. It does not believe in any separate creator, or in a personal judging God. Many pantheists of a physicalist bent agree with atheists that all phenomena are a part of nature. They do not believe there are any supernatural beings or spirit realms, and that if any currently unexplained phenomena such as extra-sensory perception should eventually be established as real, they will operate through natural physical forces.

For pantheists, evolution is a universal force that works even on nonliving things. From the very first instant of our universe, every individual thing has existed in the midst of other things, and has had to adapt to the community of beings in which it finds itself. Evolution is at work even in the realms of mind and of society. Ideas, scientific theories, technologies and products are tested against each other and the most effective survive.

True Pantheism has rarely been recorded in Christianity, for the very good reason that until the late seventeenth century it would have been punished as profound heresy. The few pantheists who did stick their necks out often paid for it with the burning of their books and often with excommunication and death.

The Tao te Ching never speaks of a transcendent God or God. Its central focus is the Tao or Way, conceived of as a mysterious and numinous unity, infinite and eternal, underlying all things and sustaining them. But there is a profound religious reverence and respect for the Tao, and an acceptance of the need for human submission to the Tao. In this sense the Tao is discussed much in the same spirit as Pantheism discusses the awesomeness of the Universe.

The pantheist "God" is the community of all beings. It is not a He, or a She, or an It. It is a "We," and a we in the broadest and most inclusive sense, embracing everything from rocks and algae, through butterflies and humans, to suns and planets.

Toland was the first modern pantheist to combine a religious reverence for the Universe, with respect for science, and a belief that everything is made of matter. A pantheist, he wrote to the German philosopher Leibniz, was one of those persons "who believe in no other eternal being but the universe." When asked for a brief statement of his credo, Toland replied, "The sun is my father, the earth my mother, the world is my country and all men are my family.

The most influential of all early modern pantheists was the philosopher Benedict Spinoza (1632-1677). Born into a family of Jewish refugees from Portugal, Spinoza was trained in Talmudic scholarship but soon developed an unconventional theology of his own. When this became known, he was summoned before a rabbinical court and even offered money to recant. When he refused, he was excommunicated. He earned a humble living as a lens-grinder, and died of consumption in 1677.