Defending Pantheism

[Belacqua]

Human beings don't "make something holy" via consecration or anything else. It's already holy from the get go. You either recognize it or you don't.

That's interesting. It makes holiness a quality of the thing itself, rather than a valuation or a mental image (as color is a mental image). 
I suspect there are a lot of philosophical ramifications from that. 

Nature is nature, whether science can understand it or not. It's just that, as far as understanding nature goes, we've yet to find a better/more accurate tool than science. 

Right, that makes sense. I just wanted to make sure that we didn't call this epistemological position an essential element of pantheism. I don't know about Spinoza's particular type, but I can imagine pantheists who also believe in strong forms of intuition, or revelation, or unmediated perception of truth, as Christians say that angels have. 

Spinoza's notion that "determination is negation." ie. when you consider an object, let's say a beer can, as separate from everything else in the universe, you (in doing so) negate what it really is. It is a necessary part of the whole first and foremost.

To me, this is a restatement of the whole "One vs. Many" conception which has been crucial since at least Plotinus. The One is the real, the many disparate objects exist independently to us only through limitations in our perception. Mystical experience means losing, temporarily, our perceptual divisions and seeing that everything is in fact One. 

This is all a solid part of Christian Platonism and mysticism. I don't know enough about Spinoza to know how his views differ from this. In my limited knowledge, though, I'd say that most of what you've quoted so far is compatible with a number of serious Christian traditions. 

Spinoza does differ from strict Catholics who insist that while God is imminent in every particle of the universe, he is also transcendent to the world -- always the world + infinity. 

(Funny story: Wordsworth and Coleridge used to take long walks along the seashore enjoying nature and discussing philosophy. The police decided that grown men who seemed to be wandering aimlessly and weren't working must be spies for Napoleon and assigned an agent to trail them. The agent reported back to headquarters that the two men were clearly up to no good, since they were constantly discussing a certain Mr. "Spy-nosey.")