A preliminary introduction to Neopantheism
Neopantheism is my coined term for the religion I adhere to. Unknowingly many atheists and not only few theists already believe in its basic tenants.
But before we get to my first attempts at formalizing definitions and descriptions of it, some notes have to be made.
Since it is hard for me to write down clearly yet exhaustively a system of thought that has percolated in my mind for more than 15 years, I would like to ask you for forgiving me any incomprehensibilities but instead of skimming over them with nothing more but a raised brow or frown on your forehead, please point them out to me. Only by getting pointed to what is unclear about it, can I try and improve the comprehensiveness and comprehensibility of my writing about it.
What is a religion?
The word religion is etymologically derived from the Latin word “religare”, which means “binding back to”. Therefore, I take everything to be a religion that provides humans with something to attach themselves to mentally and/or behaviorally. Be that a specific worldview, a cultural practice, a community or a cause.
Religions, per this definition, do not have to entail a metaphysical attempt at explaining the origins and influences that shape the world we live in. Most often they do though, because humans crave a coherent explanation as to why things are the way they are to quench the existential angst every not comprehended unknown causes and to have a firm basis of understanding as to how they are supposed to act appropriately in any given circumstance.
Many people these days say “I am not religious, but spiritual”. What does that mean?
Religions have fallen out of favor for many in the people in the western world. The falsification and unfalsifiability of many of the world religions’ claims as well as historic moral inadequacies makes people abandon them in spades and has less newcomers fill these empty seats. Probably as a substitute to the religion-shaped hole, quite a few modern people seem to claim some sort of spirituality to take a varying quantity of space up in their internal processes. Despite not binding back to some institutionalized dogmatic worldview and set of cultural practices and despite disbelief in the mainstream portrayal of God,Allah,YHWH, they know one spirit from experience – their own. Every person has an immaterial reality to themselves. A mind, consciousness, soul or spirit – whatever you want to call it. While presumably the living beings they are encountering on a daily basis have a similar or same spirit underneath their surfaces, something obviously made the world and makes it tick. Hence, the spiritual is not denied.
The old religions of pantheism, polytheism, monotheism and atheism
Up until recently, it was commonplace to culturally convey varying sorts of worldviews to make sense of how existence came about, how it currently works and how one should interact with it. The oldest one of these were pantheistic. Everything in nature was explained to be a creative individual divine force. Pantheism was constructed around deities of rivers, thunders, rain, fire, wind, war, etc. pp. They were the first cultural attempt to make sense of how the world we inhabit turns out to function.
Then evolved polytheistic worldviews, often anthropocentric, explaining in stories the forces within our souls through stories of the deities of hedonism, love, hate and co. Due to the control over their circumstances and some parts of nature, humans have developed this anthropocentrism, leading to the deities of these times to reflect as central guiding forces the human emotions, instincts and other proclivities.
Monotheism conveys in slight variations the explanation of one specific force/being to be the cause for existence and its overseer. Through growing understanding of the natural world and observing the limits of human capabilities, monotheism was a useful attribution of all unexplainable influences to one causative and interactive entity.
A presumable deviation from this course, yet in actuality a return back to the beginning of that loop, is the dominance of atheism. The unified force/being got rejected but instead a modicum of individual forces of nature has been identified and quantified. When humans could simulate the origin of the universe, predict how atoms interact with each other with infinite practical purposes, both God,Allah,YHWH and the deities of thunder, fire, etc. were made superfluous. When we started to understand more of the workings of the brain and mind, no more Aphrodite, Zeus and Ares seemed necessary to convey why we do what we do. Because so much of what makes reality what it is became explicit, predictable and controllable, the stories and placeholders that used to be deities seemed to have become redundant. The defragmentation that was monotheism got rejected, because too many of its constituent elements became better understood and therefore the idea of that one force/being got dismissed wholesale.
But the lack of a coherent complete structure of thought has left a hole in the humans’ soul.
In school we learned to calculate how quick an apple falls from the tree and pop-culture let us know that everybody feels love and anger in some way or another. But even though we know there is an explanation for practically all material and psychological processes, it has not been put into an encompassing satisfying framework. Hence, the notion of “I am spiritual” means nothing but “I know I exist and the world around me does too” while displaying the massive gap between the understanding of HOW it exists and WHY it exists. The loop of pantheism, polytheism and monotheism has not been closed by atheism telling the population that there is no force/being as the cause and at the core of existence. There are still too many phenomena not explained by bullet-proof theoretical models that allow not only for a comprehension but also manipulation of our existence. The easiest example is the origin of our universe. While the big bang can be somewhat simulated in theory, there is no candidate for a consensus on what made it happen. And only a tiny fraction of the matter and energy that pervades objective reality is directly detectable, let alone explainable. Humans have come to a point of understanding quite a lot about existence but there is an unfounded arrogance, or maybe ignorance, with regard to how much is not yet under the umbrella of scientific obviousness.
Enter Neopantheism
I intend to provide with Neopantheism a framework to help bring different schools of thought into alignment. There is no claim to completeness in it and nothing dogmatic about it. It is a blueprint to rearrange existent worldviews into a coherent harmonious structure. Scientific facts and the scientific process are placed at the basis of it in such a way that the ancient stories of all religions can be an addition to that incomplete picture, not a contradiction.
Neopantheism is a religion based on facts, not on faith. Whole volumes could be written about the merits and shortcomings of faith. Everybody can keep their individual or ideological faith while adhering to Neopantheism. But Neopantheism itself is only about facts and/or logic. As said in the beginning, religion is a system of binding back to something. A system of anchoring the mind in a coherent guiding structure. Neopantheism is asking of humans to bind back to objective reality. But it will also aim to provide guidance on how to make sense of subjective and intersubjective reality. (See: The Four Realities)
The only nonexistent thing Neopantheism asks you to believe in is the future.
The God/Allah/YHWH of Neopantheism, a matter of definitions
It’s always funny when a person says: “God does not exist”, because by saying that they make it exist. God is a word. Saying it shows it’s real. Of course, I understand those people. They just clumsily express that they “Don’t share the belief in the anthropomorphized deity that is described by the ancient texts of monotheistic religions, which they never read, thought about or simply misunderstood”. (Also see: The Likeness Fallacy) But that word has a very easy to grasp meaning:
It is that which has caused everything to exist and is the sum of all influencing factors.
Claiming that this does not exist is impossible, else nothing would exist, and everything would be without any influences.
It is a matter of definition. I will now coin a new definition for a term, which some people might not appreciate. The word is “Gay”. It used to have two definitions. One is that of “same-sex attraction”, the other is simply “happy”. I will from hereon out use the term Gay as an abbreviation for God/Allah/YHWH. On the one hand because it best captures that I am talking about the monotheistic deus, the important reality of which has just been stated and therefore of course also applies to Neopantheism. It saves me from having to reiterate those three words in a row all the time, which I would otherwise see as necessary due to the term God having too much baggage and the requirement for me to include the Islamic and Jewish theological basics into it for the purpose of completeness. On the other hand, it lightens up an otherwise overly serious topic. And it weeds out people who are unable to comprehend a concept because it is has an ambiguous term that in one case, they associate with something demeaning (which homosexuality isn’t, you bigots) while it can just as well stand for a positive emotional state. People incapable of rationally digesting a presented concept because of the dual or triple meaning of a word will be getting hindered by their closemindedness to read on. Fuck them.
The Gay I am talking about is, according to the previously mentioned definition, undeniable. Gay is that which has caused everything to exist. Gay is the summation of all the forces currently influencing any aspect of existence. There will soon be attempts of me to explicate more aspects of Gay but for now it should be stated that there is no ideological baggage to be associated with that term, both in its previous meanings and its new theological application. As said before, the reader is not asked to belief in anything except the future.
Unknowns and logic
Neopantheism attempts to provide an encompassing framework for thinking about the existence we find ourselves in. Within that it can of course not provide the definite answers to everything. Since it is fact-based but not all facts are known to us, there still has to be left wiggle-room for the unknown. While previous religions used to just put a deity as placeholder in that position and requested their followers to simply accept any dogmatic interpretations associated with that, Neopantheism suggests two main varieties for going about unknowns. The first is that of simple acceptance and humility with regards to what cannot yet be fully explained and also allows for using Gay as a placeholder, just without moral or ideological faith-based associations. Being able to proclaim “The manifestations of reality are such and such, but we just don’t know how it comes about” is a sign of intellectual health. The term Gay can still be applied to any of these instances, but it should be warned that only as little convictions of causation and mechanisms as possible should be added to that, otherwise it might lead to dead ends in reasoning. The alternative to intellectual humility (= “I don’t know”) or using a placeholder is the application of logic to the best of one’s abilities with the best available foundational theoretical resources. As an example, a few hundred years ago creationism was used as the origin story of humanity, based on the only available foundational explanation publicly available, because Darwin had not yet made the scientific community aware of evolutionary theory. In the 21st century, epigenetics has vastly expanded the basis for thought about how organisms come about. The current optimal way of thinking about the origin of humans is a marriage of these two proven theories of genetic selection and heritable intragenerational adaptation.
Neopantheism is a framework for trying to understand the world that perpetually asks of its adherents to adapt their hypotheses of the world to the best available proven theories. Any hypotheses about things that have no foundation in theories that meet the criterion of being scientific consensus or that have no proven basis at all are supposed to have a disclaimer pointing to that fact. The value of intellectual honesty cannot be overstated.
Summary
As the title says, this is only a preliminary introduction to Neopantheism. There are many aspects to explore, which is not an easy task for a novice writer such as me. But I’ll try. To sum up those few aforementioned puzzle-pieces of Neopantheism:
-it is religious in that one binds back to reality
-it is a framework for coherent realignment of attempts at understanding the world
-facts come first, proven theories are second, logical hypotheses third
-introducing Gay as the abbreviation for God/Allah/YHWH, defined as “that which has caused everything to exist and is the sum of all influencing forces”
-anyone may keep their faith, if they wish to do so
-any explanation of the world has to be adapted when better info comes up
-the value of intellectual honesty and humility.
Lastly (for now): Why is it called Neopantheism?
Pan means “everything”. Pantheism used to be the attribution of creative forces to natural phenomena. Neo (=”new”) updates this to the current and future understanding of these natural phenomena.
Therefore, Neopantheism is the religion of using the most recent and best available explanations of the creative forces of everything in their unified totality to form an updated coherent worldview both for the understanding of reality and for how to interact with reality.
A request to you, dear reader
We humans, to which I count myself despite often writing about humans as if I were an outsider, suffer from the tendency to not see the forest for the trees. You would do me a massive favor if you could point out to me any apparent logical inadequacies in my writing, of which there probably are plenty at this stage. Formulating these ideas does not come to me easily after having imprisoned them in my mind for over 15 years. Any requests for clarification would be of tremendous benefit to me. Thank you in advance for taking the time to send them my way. Further questions as to how this religion of mine applies to different aspects are also of great help. I will in the future explore many of these, but any primers alleviate me from the burden of having to decide on where to start.
Thank you very much for taking an interest in this issue and being so openminded as to read up until this point.