paul-harrison.com

Faith in modern usage has three major meanings which often get muddled up.
One is trust in a person. That’s usually a fairly empirical thing - you trust people who have given you good reason to trust them.

I believe the word faith is misleading if we use it for any aspect of naturalistic pantheism.

On our Facebook pantheism page I posted a video of Richard Dawkins reading from “The God Delusion,” the section where he talks about how atheism, pantheism, deism, and theism relate to each other. I commented that what he said there was fairly accurate.

Of course he oversimplified. Of course his line “pantheism is sexed-up atheism” is just a quick attention-grabbing slogan that says very little. However, what it does imply (which he may not have intended) is that Pantheism is more appealing than straight atheism. Coming from the world’s best known atheist, that is a useful endorsement among a large and growing segment of the population - many of whom may be looking for something beyond your basic stripped down atheism.

For me the difference is like this:
Atheism describes what I do NOT believe.
Pantheism describes what I DO believe.

Atheism covers a limited area of one’s beliefs - all it means is that you do not believe in a Creator God, and most especially not in a mental entity that’s watching every one of us and will judge us all when we die.

There are some extra things that nearly always go together with atheism which are more significant that just that one basic disbelief.
Usually atheism indicates that you are an independent-minded thinker who refuses to accept claims of special authority without carefully investigating them.
It usually implies that you don’t believe in supernatural forces, realms, beings or afterlives.
It probably also implies that you place a high value on empirical evidence and logic.
It probably implies that you believe that humans choose their own ethics, and/or have certain social ethics built into their evolved genotype.
All of the above things are important. They are not at all trivial matters.

However, beyond these, atheism leaves you on your own.
On your own in finding answers to many of life’s most important questions.
On your own in the face of an immense Cosmos that - without some extra framework - can seem meaningless, absurd or hostile.

Atheism gives you no guide framework at all on ethics.
You can be Hitler or Stalin, or you can be Warren Buffet or Bill Gates with their immense philanthropy.
You can think humans are the greatest animals on the planet - or the worst.
You can be a nurturing carer, or a homicidal egopath.

It gives you no framework about what to value in life.
You can love life, or hate it.
You can love getting out in the wilds, or you can live all your life in bars or playing computer games with your curtains drawn.
You can revere the Cosmos as a creative force - or regard it as a destructive presence that could easily wipe the Earth and everything on it.

Pantheism offers a positive framework, probably the most positive of any spiritual path.
The naturalistic version of World Pantheism shares with atheism the disbelief in a Creator or judging God, in supernatural forces, realms, beings or afterlives. It shares  the rejection of scriptural authority, the respect for empirical evidence and logic, and the belief that human choose their own ethics.

But it goes far beyond that:
It loves and cares for Nature and reveres the Cosmos as a creative dance.
It respects and promotes the rights of humans and other living things.
It encourages people to love their life, in their physical bodies, and to strive to be active and fit.
It considers this life as the only heaven and Earth as the only paradise.
It values life but accepts death as natural.
It stresses memories, deeds, creations, genes and the recycling of elements as the only forms of afterlife we have.

Anonymous wrote, on Omninerd:

“After all, just saying “Nature did it” does not explain anything,
predict anything, nor does it resolve the question of How it was
accomplished.”

I find it amazing that theists who advance this argument are unable to see that the statement “God did it”
equally “does not explain anything, predict anything, nor does it
resolve the question of How it was accomplished.”
It just shifts the explanation problem from the visible world, to this
huge invisible creator entity about whom there are any number of
questions:

Where did God come from?
Did he just pop out of nowhere or was he always there?
What’s he made of?
What’s he up to?
How did He make all this?
What from?
What will he do next?
Where is he?
Why can’t we see him?

And that’s all before you even start on the generic theist questions like why does he allow evil?

And the questions for each specific faith like why would allowing a bunch of humans to murder Him (in the guise of his son) suddenly save humans from death and Hell?

You just end up with a pile of additional – and unanswerable – questions, on top of the existing ones about Nature.
Much easier to stick with what’s in front of our faces: Nature – at least we can see that.

As a boy I was reared on meat and two veg and ate a lot of sweets and had most of my teeth filled.
As a young man I ate a lot of fried fish fingers and canned peas, and canned minestrone soup with so much grated cheese that my spoon would stand up in it.
I started eating healthily round about 1970 when a raw food cafe opened near the newspaper where I worked.

Over the years my diet has got healthier and healthier and my taste buds have adapted. These days they seem to like only what’s healthy (it helps now that red wine, chocolate and coffee have been declared as health foods!).

I dislike and avoid sugary sweets, cakes and cookies. I avoid animal fats. My sole weakness is cheese – I am a cheesaholic and have to have cheese - parmesan or Swiss - once a day. Low fat cheese doesn’t do the trick.

My partner Sheila and I follow the multi-color system where you get good helpings of different colored fruits and veggies. That makes things more interesting visually and taste-wise.
Each major color marks a different type of phytonutrient. Purple is usually rated the healthiest – so we also eat purple cabbage, purple onions and (when we can get them) purple potatoes.

Here’s our Santa Monica Mountains “wonder breakfast” which is also colorful and incredibly tasty.
GRAIN BASE
Rolled Oats, Rolled Durum Wheat, Rolled Rye, Oat bran, Flax seed, 7 grain breakfast mix
FRUIT
Dried: raisins, prunes
Frozen: dark cherries, wild blueberries, fancy berry mix (incl raspberry blackberry & strawberry)
Fresh: pineapple, papaya, mango, or whatever is around
SPICES etc
Cinnamon, ginger, Trader Joe’s Very Green Powder, local pollen from Fillmore.
JUICES etc (all from Trader Joe’s)
Green Plant Juice
Triple berry – blueberry-pomegranate-cranberry (ditto)
Mango – passion fruit with apple & grape juice base
Low fat probiotic yoghurt.

I once checked how many different ingredients there were in this, the total is 38. The Japanese government once recommended that everyone eat at least 30 different foods a day (so you get a wide range of nutrients) - this breakfast more than covers you in just one meal!

Mix the night before to let them all soak together. It takes about 10 minutes for two people.
I keep the grain base and the frozen fruit ready mixed.

Most of the ingredients are bought at Trader Joe’s, one of the greatest chain stores on the planet. They are owned by German chain Aldi, so there may be some UK/European equivalent.

We also have a regular multi-veggie fry-up in olive oil with garlic and dill, which we eat with red and wild black rice or wholemeal couscous. We have meat or fish maybe once or twice a week.

For lunch we often have V8 with a nut and seed mix consisting of roasted peanuts, walnuts, almonds and cashews, with pumpkin seeds and sunflower seeds.

I hope nobody does a food-miles analysis of this. However, I believe we need to take much more into account than just food miles. To make a truly informed decision one would need to know how intensive the local farming was compared to the distant farming - taking all the factors into account it may not always work out that local foods are the most climate- or environment-friendly. Eg, stuff grown in semi-arid Southern California where I live is very energy and water intensive, and the water aspect of that is definitely not sustainable.

The cliff swallows are back, from the south of Latin America, to their nests in the eaves of my townhome in the Santa Monica Mountains. Their nests are about seven feet from where I sit, right outside my office window on the third floor - it’s high up so it feels safe to them. One of them is peering down at me right now.
In the winter before last, one of the nests broke away and fell, and in Spring, an enterprising couple took on the task of rebuilding it. I removed the fly net and took pictures and was a witness to the whole process. Here’s a photo of the couple almost at the last stage.

There are many awesome things about these tiny neighbors of mine. Their migration route covers more than 5,000 miles and spans the Andes mountains, the Amazon basin and the volcanoes of Central America. Their building skills are not based on a fixed blueprint - there are all shapes of nest just in this one complex - so each pair is adapting to the … Read Moreparticular spot they have chosen. Then there are their skills at speedy flight and capture, their mating rituals, their child-rearing skills. All this with a brain not much bigger than a pea. Let no-one use the term bird-brain as an insult!

Last evening before sundown I hiked down to Century Lake in
Malibu Creek State Park. The flowers are varied, but sparse after
the driest winter for many years – purple nightshade, western
wallflower, light and dark purple phacelias, California poppies,
bush lupines and monkeyflower, Indian Paintbrush, verbena.

The lake sits in an enclosed valley with willow and tall pine
trees, nestled between steep hillsides cloaked in sages, laurel
sumac and white and blue flowered ceanothus, with jagged and
pitted volcanic rock cliffs as backdrop. Here you feel you are in
wilderness. The valley bottom is shielded against all noises
except those of nature: bird calls, bullfrogs, breeze in the
leaves, and the sound of water lapping or flowing over the dam.
The western end of the lake is secluded by trees and reedbeds and
is barely visited. As I push through an overgrown trail to the
bank, a blue heron startles and graciously wafts to a new perch.

Male red-winged blackbirds clutch the reeds, leaning forward
and spreading their wings, displaying their crimson epaulettes
fringed with yellow, making their sonorous and resonant calls and
clicks. Sometimes they fly up and gather in a flock, and veer in
a curve towards the crowns of trees, where they settle, testing
their mettle against each other.

While the males play competitive games, the camouflaged and
rarely seen females get on with the real work of gathering straw
to make nests and brood chicks. Their colors are designed not for
show, but for hiding: dark mottled brown with light eyebrows and
a beak that looks blue in the dusk light.

Clouds of gnats hover in the air above the water. Cliff swallows,
returned for the breeding season, are swooping across the lake in
criss-crossing flight paths, sometime skimming the surface to
take a water strider or a mosquito larva. High in the air above
the lake, they swirl in a mass aerial display at many different
levels, sometimes interlaced with the flights of blackbirds.

It was a dizzy, exhilarating spectacle of motion and music.
I stayed entranced for an hour and walked back at dusk.

Best wishes,
Paul

In the deepest probing of the Universe to date, a new composite
image from the Chandra and Spitzer telescopes has revealed a vast image
of Jesus’ face, stretching across billions of light years in the constellation
of Virgo. The likeness, striking in its accurate anatomical detail, cannot be
seen in the visible range of the spectrum. The unique combination of X-ray
and infrared imagery brought it into focus for the first time.

Made in the run-up to Easter, the image is already being hailed as the clearest proof
of God’s existence ever found. “I always wondered why God showed himself only
through images on burned tortillas or toast,” Pope Benedict commented. “Now I
know why: He was preparing us for the ultimate revelation.”

At the opposite end of the size scale, scientists at Fermilab have produced quantum
interference using Buckyballs - the largest objects at which quantum effects have
been detected. The balls were passed one by one through double slits. Astonished
scientists watched as the interference pattern on the detection screen built gradually
into a shape that experts identified as Maitreya, the next incarnation of
Buddha. Believers are claiming the discovery as definitive confirmation of
their faith. “The Cosmic Jesus is just an illusion,” said Rishi Gan
Rinpoche. “Of course we are too sophisticated to believe that this is actually
Maitreya sending us some kind of message. But it does confirm the fundamental
reality that nothing exists except the Buddha field. It’s official.”

Skeptics are already mocking these discoveries, saying they are typical
of the distortion and misuse of science to back up scripture-based and
supernatural beliefs. “It’s a Rorschach, you see what you want to see,”
commented John Pullone. “These are nothing but chance line-ups and
projected wish-fulfilments.”

Meanwhile thousands of faithful Jews, Christians and Moslems are already
gathering on the summits of the Mount of Olives and Mount Sinai, while
Hindus and Buddhists are assembling around Mount Kailash, confidently
awaiting the end of time.

We each have a basic emotional mindset, positive, negative or neutral: optimism versus pessimism, views that the majority of humans are fundamentally good versus fundamentally bad.

The rational approach at all times would be to assess every situation on the evidence, but I think we approach all life’s novel situations with prior expectations. These are based on our disposition, on our previous experiences going back to childhood, and on whether we have depression or not.

These days our picture of what the world is like is influenced a lot by what we see in the media, and what we experience via the Internet.

The media are always full of war and violent crime - yet the world is not typically like that. The incidence of civil and international wars has declined by almost three quarters since 1990: see the University of Maryland’s Peace and Conflict report 2005.

That contrasts with my direct personal experience. I have travelled a lot in some of the poorest countries on earth and the poorest communities in those countries. I have wandered through slums and villages with expensive cameras hanging round my neck, I have clambered with all my luggage into rickety pickups crammed with dirt-poor people. Yet I have only once, from a distance, personally witnessed an act of violence, never been robbed, and only twice been badly cheated (on both occasions by New York taxi drivers, once for $5 the second time was just an attempted cheat for $14!). My London flat was burgled once in 25 years. Maybe I have been incredibly lucky, or maybe that’s not untypical. In other words, unless you live in some gang area somewhere, the media create a seriously distorted view of the world and many people buy this picture despite their own personal experience.

  I believe that the vast majority of people in the world are decent and honest. Even if only 1 per cent are not, the Internet gives these folk access to every other human on the Internet, so instead of being limited to burgling their neighbors, they can invade the screens of ever person in the world with an email account.

I guess I have always had a positive outlook and an empathy for others. This stance may be the reason why I like pantheism, and why I abhor the view that the earth is just a transit camp, and humans are infected with original sin like some kind of sexually transmitted disease.

The pantheist emotional stance towards the world is affirmatively positive. The world is good, even with all its faults, and when the faults affect us, pantheism helps us cope. I know that when I have personal troubles, as everyone does, pantheism is a great help. A walk in nature or a look at a Hubble image of a galaxy places all my personal problems in perspective.

The water in Malibu Creek flows all the year round and has bass, rainbow and steelhead trout and crayfish. Blue, green-backed and night heron fish here, along with great white egret and pied-billed grebe. Hooded meergansers and ospreys are rarer visitors.

The blue heron fishes the whole length of the creek, sleek and elegant and mysterious. In flight her wings look like the huge wings of angels in Christian paintings.

I learn from the quality of her attention. She stands perfectly still for minutes on end, observing. Often she tilts her head to one side. Sometimes she raises her crown feathers to shade her eyes from the sun. When she moves she does so slowly and sinously, curving her neck into a perfect S. She waits and waits. Then suddenly her focus will sharpen, and she will tense in readiness, and lunge, and emerge with a fish.

And so, standing still for minutes on end, in the shade of oaks buzzing with bee colonies, with my camera and telephoto set and ready, I wait and watch her patiently, then suddenly tense, sharpen the focus and shoot, and emerge with a photo.

I am only present in that moment, I am nowhere else.

All worries and concerns have long evaporated. All sense of self has dissolved. I fuse with the scene, I am what I see.

A camera is optional for this exercise, all that is needed is a body and eyes and brain and memory on which to record the instant.

Every instant is as precious as a fish or a photograph.

Pantheism is continually distorted in critical comments. Here’s one from someone wondering what their religious orientation is:

Perhaps I’m a Pantheist, a spiritual individual who is so blown away by the magnificence of the universe, and feels so
small in the presence of such wonders, that he cannot possibly imagine anything more insignificant than himself.

It’s true that pantheists are blown away by the power, the beauty and the mystery of Nature and the Universe. But it doesn’t follow that we are small and utterly insignificant.

I see the Universe as a community of beings, of which I am one. Everything is significant, that is, it is a presence and a thing of value. And that includes each of us as individuals.

Pantheism is affirmative and leads to a positive joyful and accepting way of life.
It’s rather theism that tells us that we are utterly insignificant in comparison with God.