Isn’t pantheism the same thing as atheism?

[Ferrocyanide]

Did Augustine of Hippo read the tanakh? There is nothing wrong with slavery according to that book.

I think you may be glossing over the Jubilee and other dispensations afforded slaves in the tanakh.

Are you talking about Jubilee as in a period of jubilee or are you talking about the book of Jubilees?
Does the Book of Jubilees state that the jewish god is against slavery?
Then, there is the problem of the jewish god follow up book (or just various papers), which is called the New Testament in which Jesus is shown to be pro-slavery.

--Ferrocyanide

---

If a person on a bus desires cabbage, it would be incorrect to say "the bus desires cabbage."

The pantheist is focused on the unitary cause of things. For the pantheist, it's just as problematic to see the desire as having its cause in an individual person. That would be just as erroneous as ascribing the desire for cabbage to the bus.

There are lots of causes for the cabbage-desiring in a given person. His mother used to make him cabbage, and so he acquired a taste for it. It is a New Years tradition to eat it in his country, so that got him thinking about cabbage right at that moment. His prior meal that day left him craving whatever nutrients are found in cabbage.

The desire for cabbage can scarcely be contained within a bus really... you need something bigger to contain it. If you wanted to find the first cause of  the cabbage-desiring, it'd take you all the way back to the big bang. Its history would involve Earth's formation, supernovae, and may even require quasars to fully explain.

That's how a pantheist thinks of things. And it isn't an altogether false way of thinking. It's very accurate. In a way, more correct than our notion that the desire for cabbage just sort of "randomly comes forth" in a person or is encompassed only within them.

The desire for cabbage can be found at the Big Bang moment 14.7 billion years ago?
I’m not sure I understand how that is going to work out.

If desires, thoughts, logic, happens in our brain and memory is stored in our brain, we need to understand how it functions.
The brain is just an organ.
It is made of about +65 billion neurons and a large number of interconnections. If you take these apart, there is no longer a thinking machine and no memories.
So, at that point, your desire for cabbage is lost.
If you take the neurons apart further, there are various molecules. If you take it apart further, you have carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, phosphorus, sulfur, etc.
You can take it apart further and you will never find desire.
This is because desire is a high level thing. The components don’t contain it. It only arises as a group behavior of a large number of neurons.

You can probably take all those atoms and reorder them and you end up with a book called the Bible.
Then, you can reorder them and end up with the Book of Satan.

Atoms are just lego pieces. They don’t contain high level designs like a brain, a porsche, sheet metal.

--Ferrocyanide

[vulcanlogician]

If a person on a bus desires cabbage, it would be incorrect to say "the bus desires cabbage."

The pantheist is focused on the unitary cause of things. For the pantheist, it's just as problematic to see the desire as having its cause in an individual person. That would be just as erroneous as ascribing the desire for cabbage to the bus.

There are lots of causes for the cabbage-desiring in a given person. His mother used to make him cabbage, and so he acquired a taste for it. It is a New Years tradition to eat it in his country, so that got him thinking about cabbage right at that moment. His prior meal that day left him craving whatever nutrients are found in cabbage.

The desire for cabbage can scarcely be contained within a bus really... you need something bigger to contain it. If you wanted to find the first cause of  the cabbage-desiring, it'd take you all the way back to the big bang. Its history would involve Earth's formation, supernovae, and may even require quasars to fully explain.

That's how a pantheist thinks of things. And it isn't an altogether false way of thinking. It's very accurate. In a way, more correct than our notion that the desire for cabbage just sort of "randomly comes forth" in a person or is encompassed only within them.

The desire for cabbage can be found at the Big Bang moment 14.7 billion years ago?
I’m not sure I understand how that is going to work out.

If desires, thoughts, logic, happens in our brain and memory is stored in our brain, we need to understand how it functions.
The brain is just an organ.
It is made of about +65 billion neurons and a large number of interconnections. If you take these apart, there is no longer a thinking machine and no memories.
So, at that point, your desire for cabbage is lost.
If you take the neurons apart further, there are various molecules. If you take it apart further, you have carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, phosphorus, sulfur, etc.
You can take it apart further and you will never find desire.
This is because desire is a high level thing. The components don’t contain it. It only arises as a group behavior of a large number of neurons.

You can probably take all those atoms and reorder them and you end up with a book called the Bible.
Then, you can reorder them and end up with the Book of Satan.

Atoms are just lego pieces. They don’t contain high level designs like a brain, a porsche, sheet metal.

--Ferrocyanide

It's not so much that the desire for cabbage can be "found at" the big bang. It's that the causal chain of events that led to the desiring of cabbage began at the big bang. Everything has a causal history. The big bang is where the causal history of any present phenomenon BEGINS.

In my post, I was being highly reductionist. At the end of the day, the brain is comprised of quantum particles, and these particles interact with one another the way they do because of the laws of physics. End of story.

But studying the interactions of quantum particles is NOT how we understand brain functions. It would be tedious and impossible to do neuroscience that way. So we look at larger structures like neurons. But at the end of the day, it's all just atoms moving the way the laws of nature say they should move.

I think your concern derives from the fact that what we know about the brain and how it works is understood as an emergent phenomenon. As a rule, speaking of brain functions as emergent phenomena is more concise. But speaking of them as reductive phenomena is ultimately more correct.

[Ferrocyanide]

I'm not sure I understand.

It seems to me that people who assume a pantheistic God would think like people aren't yet taking the "pan" part of the definition seriously enough.

A pantheistic God, if I'm understanding right, includes everything in the universe, and is coterminous with the universe. This is different from the standard Catholic God, who includes everything in the universe... plus infinity. 

So if God includes everything in the universe, it doesn't think about objects in the same way that people do. 

For example, if a person knows something, there are two separate items: the knower and the known. If I know your phone number, that's two things. I could forget your phone number, but it would still exist independently from me.

God, on the other hand, includes the phone number and everything else within himself. He can't be separated from it. This is what "omniscient" means -- that everything known or knowable is a part of God. If God doesn't know something, it doesn't exist.

So I think it would work the same way for thinking. There is not (1) a thinker and (2) an object of thought. If I'm thinking about the revocation of the edict of Nantes, that's two things: me and the historical event. But a pantheistic or Catholic God includes that and every other historical event within itself. Forgetting, or thinking wrongly, etc., is not possible. So that's fundamentally different from the way people think, I think.

I noticed that you said “it doesn't think about objects in the same way that people do.”. I guess this means that it thinks about objects in his own way.

In your example of a person and a phone number, a person is just a machine. It has a processor and some memory cells. He can store the phone number in his memory cells or he can delete the phone number.
What does a god do? Does he memorize the location of every object, every atom, every subatomic particle, every photon? That is going to require a large amount of memory.
If he is going to also memorize all activity, all events into the past, then that might require an infinite amount of memory.

Also, how do you avoid recursion? If this god is in this universe, he also has to keep a copy of himself in his memory cells as well, which means duplicating himself entirely in his own brain. He has to memorize how each memory cell, how they operate, their states, everything. This is going to require an infinite amount of memory since recursion leads to infinity.

It seems to me that christians and pantheists have not addressed the memory requirement problem.

[ThatNomad]

To answer your main question, no, pantheism is not the same thing as atheism, because pantheism can mean different things. There are some pantheists who are staunch atheist and who just experience a sense of reverential awe at the beauty and grandeur of the universe around them. There are some who believe that the universe is actually a manifestation of a divine being, evolving based on preset physical laws, and then there are some who use the term as it was used classically to believe that all gods exist and all religions are valid. So yeah... No, pantheism is not technically the same thing as atheism, which is nothing more than a rejection of the idea that a divine being exists.

Also, do you have any supporting evidence to back up your claim that the Tanakh itself posits that the world is only 6,000 years old. The furthest back I can find any mention is in the early 1000's AD, and it looks like the actual belief didn't really come to be popular until much later. The books that make up the Tanakh are from well more than 3,000 yrs older than this. Not to mention most Jewish authorities have rejected the young earth creation ideas as unfounded and illogical. Even those who reject science in most things have had to accept that the Earth is far older than 6,000 yrs old. It's mostly loony White Evangelicals who believe that. The same ones who believe Noah's Ark was real, and go to the idiotic museum where you can see miniature versions of dinosaurs on display as if they lived even remotely close to the same timeframe as humans.

[Ferrocyanide]

To answer your main question, no, pantheism is not the same thing as atheism, because pantheism can mean different things. There are some pantheists who are staunch atheist and who just experience a sense of reverential awe at the beauty and grandeur of the universe around them. There are some who believe that the universe is actually a manifestation of a divine being, evolving based on preset physical laws, and then there are some who use the term as it was used classically to believe that all gods exist and all religions are valid. So yeah... No, pantheism is not technically the same thing as atheism, which is nothing more than a rejection of the idea that a divine being exists.

Also, do you have any supporting evidence to back up your claim that the Tanakh itself posits that the world is only 6,000 years old. The furthest back I can find any mention is in the early 1000's AD, and it looks like the actual belief didn't really come to be popular until much later. The books that make up the Tanakh are from well more than 3,000 yrs older than this. Not to mention most Jewish authorities have rejected the young earth creation ideas as unfounded and illogical. Even those who reject science in most things have had to accept that the Earth is far older than 6,000 yrs old. It's mostly loony White Evangelicals who believe that. The same ones who believe Noah's Ark was real, and go to the idiotic museum where you can see miniature versions of dinosaurs on display as if they lived even remotely close to the same timeframe as humans.

“Also, do you have any supporting evidence to back up your claim that the Tanakh itself posits that the world is only 6,000 years old. The furthest back I can find any mention is in the early 1000's AD”

==If the tanakh itself makes that claim? Well, where else does the 6000 y old number come from? Does it come from the history books of the Romans?

The tanakh is the history, the religious, the political, the scientific (the basic knowledge about nature from back then) book. The 6000 numbers comes from a rough calculation of all the begats.

“Not to mention most Jewish authorities have rejected the young earth creation ideas as unfounded and illogical.”

==Which jewish authorities are you talking about? And which jewish authorities accept a 6000 y old universe?

Wikipedia says:
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There is no scholarly consensus as to when the Hebrew Bible canon was fixed: some scholars argue that it was fixed by the Hasmonean dynasty,[18] while others argue it was not fixed until the second century CE or even later.[19]

According to Louis Ginzberg's Legends of the Jews, the twenty-four book canon of the Hebrew Bible was fixed by Ezra and the scribes in the Second Temple period.[20]

According to the Talmud, much of the Tanakh was compiled by the men of the Great Assembly (Anshei K'nesset HaGedolah), a task completed in 450 BCE, and it has remained unchanged ever since.[21]

The 24-book canon is mentioned in the Midrash Koheleth 12:12: Whoever brings together in his house more than twenty four books brings confusion.[22]
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I do remember that somewhere it was estimated that the first parts of the tanakh were written around 1500 BCE, so yes, it comes to about 3500 y old.

“Even those who reject science in most things have had to accept that the Earth is far older than 6,000 yrs old. “

==Who?

“It's mostly loony White Evangelicals who believe that. The same ones who believe Noah's Ark was real, and go to the idiotic museum where you can see miniature versions of dinosaurs on display as if they lived even remotely close to the same timeframe as humans.”

==You are talking about humans from the 20th and 21th century. In these centuries, science (multiple lines of evidence) influences religion and it becomes easy to call them loony. As a 20 th and 21 th century human, you can point to those research papers easily.
What are you going to do as a human from the 18 th century?

[Belacqua]

What does a god do? Does he memorize the location of every object, every atom, every subatomic particle, every photon? That is going to require a large amount of memory.

No, God's mind just is the universe. There is no memory separate from the universe. According to the standard theology. 

If this god is in this universe

He isn't in the universe, he is the universe. 

It seems to me that christians and pantheists have not addressed the memory requirement problem.

I think you'll find it's been addressed quite a bit. Things with direct vision of the universe, all times and all places, have no memory because they don't need it. They see directly rather than recalling it from memory.

[Deesse23]

The universe is a mind 

[Peebothuhlu]

At work.

So.... if 'The' diety is 'Everything'.

How are vastly seperated parts of said 'All encompassing diety' even aware of themself?(Itself?)

Y'know, 'Light speed lag' and all that 'Relativity' stuff.

[Belacqua]

At work.

  So.... if 'The' diety is 'Everything'.

  

Is a "diety" like when you're trying to lose weight but not really? Like it's diety, but not really a diet?

How are vastly seperated parts of said 'All encompassing diety' even aware of themself?(Itself?)

 Y'know, 'Light speed lag' and all that 'Relativity' stuff.

You're still imagining that God is a thing with a big physical body. Maybe you're confusing him with Godzilla.

[Peebothuhlu]

  So.... if 'The' diety is 'Everything'.

  

Is a "diety" like when you're trying to lose weight but not really? Like it's diety, but not really a diet?

How are vastly seperated parts of said 'All encompassing diety' even aware of themself?(Itself?)

 Y'know, 'Light speed lag' and all that 'Relativity' stuff.

You're still imagining that God is a thing with a big physical body. Maybe you're confusing him with Godzilla.

 Why yes, fek you very much for again pointing out my poor spelling. Something I've been struggling with for a tad while now. Shouldn't you stop fattening your wife? (As a suitable bite back)  

No I am not putting any ideas/label what have you on the all encomasing deity that's been postualted.

What is this 'Essence' then of which said proposed deity is composed of that can cirumvent how we understand reality to behave, pray tell?

Not at work.