Thread: Extended Discussion 2009 Religious Affiliation Census

Originally Posted by Black_Eagle

There's really no gray area. It's either you believe in him or you don't.

But I don't really know if I don't believe in him or not.

Then you, sir, are indecisive.

Originally Posted by slayer

But I don't really know if I don't believe in him or not.

Atheism = Irreligious. You are an indecisive atheist.

You could call me a potential Scientific Pantheist, except I definitely believe there is something after death....and I think it's either you live within your memories of what you expect/believe, or the plane/density concept is true( 8 densities of reality, with our reality being in the 3rd density, and the 8th being completely at one with the Universal Mind/Cosmic Consciousness with no ego )


I think the Law of One is very interesting, that everything in existence is God, the Divine...everything is part of a Universal Mind or Cosmic Consciousness. God is you and me..with no ego. I believe consciousness IS a soul. and the universal mind is like a giant self-transcendent machine, a cube that encompasses all of creation: every world, every reality, every dimension. It holds within it every concept, every idea, every being ever created or that will be created, every dream, every thought.....it IS the singularity and nothing exists outside of it.




I think the Ancient Egyptian Religion was pretty cool, it made sense if you take into consideration spirituality( the God's they worshiped, such as Ra- the sun God, or Thoth, or Pharaohs) were actually spiritually enlightened beings and were immortal through Kundalini awakening. Hence the snakes coming out of the Pharaoh's head.





By immortal I mean living for an extended life span rather than regular human life span.

Can't stand pantheism. It's the ultimate in superficial delusion.

If the whole universe and God are identical then the entire religion is completely meaningless. It doesn't say anything about reality. It just gives the universe another name... it's no more profound than calling the universe 'apple pancake'. What do you learn from doing that? Nothing.

Originally Posted by Xei

Can't stand pantheism. It's the ultimate in superficial delusion.

If the whole universe and God are identical then the entire religion is completely meaningless. It doesn't say anything about reality. It just gives the universe another name... it's no more profound than calling the universe 'apple pancake'. What do you learn from doing that? Nothing.

It depends on how you interpret it I suppose. The way that I interpret it, it is a word game that collapses in on itself if you poke it too hard and I've never once explicitly used the word god to describe the universe but I very much like the fact that it essentially posits that "spirituality" can emerge from cold hard facts with no need to fudge them with new age garbage. It's completely interchangeable with atheism and my answer to the question largely depends on my mood.

My favorite example is Dennett's assertion that even though our consciousness is nothing but an emergent phenomenon of neural networks, we can still, in a meaningful sense, regard ourselves as having a soul. He gets called a Darwinian Fundamentalist all the time, so you know he's a stand-up fellow.

It also encapsulates a certain sense of wonder that some people are inclined to have towards the universe. It surely doesn't include any sort of worship or prayer though.

Granted, there may be some crazy people that can't tell the difference between relativity and quantum mechanics that claim to be 'Scientific' pantheists and then spout off a bunch of non-scientific, new age garbage in the next paragraph without even catching the irony but I think that they just do it because they like the name.

EDIT: Put another way, "spirituality" (whatever that means) seems to be a fundamental aspect of the human animal and I see no reason why the theists should have a monopoly on it.

I have the same stance really. Using pantheism to mean 'the universe is mysterious enough to not require unfounded mystical elements' is all good; the problem is of course that the majority of self-proclaimed pantheists have no such stance but rather, as you say, are just full of New Age delusions and sentimentalities.

I don't think the former really warrants a distinct religious category though... most atheists would say that such a philosophy is encapsulated in theirs.