Pantheism: Encyclopedia II - Pantheism - Related concepts

Pantheism - Related concepts

Pantheism - Panentheism

Pantheism has features in common with panentheism, such as the idea that the universe is part of God. Technically, the two are separate, inasmuch as pantheism finds God synonymous with nature, and panentheism finds God to be greater than nature alone. Some find this distinction unhelpful, while others see it as a significant point of division. Many of the major faiths described as pantheistic could also be described as panentheistic, whereas naturalistic pantheism cannot (not seeing God as more than nature alone). For example, elements of both panentheism and pantheism are found in Hinduism. Certain interpretations of the Bhagavad Gita and Shri Rudram support this view.

Pantheism - Cosmotheism

While the term is rarely used, and is most often simply a synonym for Pantheism, this unusual philosophy has emerged being used rather differently, but in all cases, the feeling was that God was something created by man, perhaps even an end state of human evolution braught through through social planning and eugenics and other forms of genetic engineering.

H. G. Wells subscribed to a form of Cosmotheism, which he called the "world brain" (from a book of esseys by the same name he printed in 1937, one of which details the creation of a Library-encyclopedia hybrid), and detailed even more in his book God the Invisible King (in which he proscribes mankind to set up a socialist system, structuring itself on social and genetic statistics, education, and eugenics, idealy someday equating itself and possibly even merging with and conqeuring the Pantheist god itself. See: Omega Point) and there where also some sections of his great work Outline of History, which reflected this belief and his finding it in the teachings of Jesus Christ and Siddhartha. His book Shape of Things to Come (and the 1936 film Things to Come) also reflects this, in which mankind, surviving a Nuclear war and an extended Feudal period, unites to form a collectivist Utopia.

In modern Israel, Cosmotheism was described by Mordekhay Nesiyahu, one of the foremost ideologists of the Israeli Labor Movement and a lecturer in its college Beit Berl. He felt that God was something which did not exist before man, and was a secular entity which the rebuilding Jewish Temple in Jerusalem has an instrumental role in "invent[ing]" God.

In the 20th century United States, William Luther Pierce, a white nationalist associated with the American Nazi Party and founder of the National Alliance also utilised the term "Cosmotheism". In his eyes (similar to H. G. Wells'), God would be the end result of eugenics and racial hygiene (See: Nazism, Francis Galton and Theosophy).

Vladimir Vernadsky's and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin's "Noosphere" could be refferenced as a description of the Cosmotheist deity, as does Emile Durkheim's Collective consciousness and Carl Jung's collective unconscious.

Arthur C. Clark makes a possible reference to the Cosmotheist Noosphere in his 1953 book Childhood's End, reffering to it as the "Overmind".

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "Related concepts", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki