Defending Pantheism

[vulcanlogician]

What sort of beliefs of yours would you have to lose, or no longer accept, to be more a traditional atheist, than a pantheist? 

Just to clarify: pantheism isn't my belief. I identify as an agnostic atheist. What I'm doing in the thread isn't "selling" pantheism. I want to have a reasoned debate about its merits/shortcomings. Why? It's a good intellectual exercise to challenge one's own beliefs on occasion. It might help myself and others grow as thinkers. But I understand the inclination to think I'm "selling" it since you are so familiar with apologetics.

Is it mainly your beliefs in things like the numinous, in objective morality, etc.. Would you say it's such aspects as Hitchens describes below, that lead you to refer to reality as possessing something spiritual, holy, to elevate it to the status of God?

"I’m a materialist…yet there is something beyond the material, or not entirely consistent with it, what you could call the Numinous, the Transcendent, or at its best the Ecstatic. […] It’s in certain music, landscape, certain creative work, without this we really would merely be primates. It’s important to appreciate the finesse of that, and religion has done a very good job of enshrining it in music and architecture." -Hitchens

So? All you're showing is that pantheism is very similar to regular ol' atheism in many regards. I don't disagree; there is quite a lot of overlap between the two. But isn't there plenty of overlap between agnostic and gnostic atheism? Baptist and Methodist theology? Yet there are minor distinctions too. And sometimes such distinctions warrant discussion.

(BTW, I'll get to your earlier post. I'm going through the questions/objections in order.)