Defending Pantheism

[The Grand Nudger]

Can you define the numinous for me? I searched the thread, I couldn't find any titles with numinous in it. I've seen it mentioned in a variety of threads, but those that elaborated on it, seem to be theist.

I'd be curious to hear you tell us what you mean by it, particularly if there's any real points of disagreement with the descriptions provided by Otto, and Lewis? 

Can you elaborate on when was the last time you experienced it, and what evoked it? Was it evoked by some observation of some human interactions, features of human relationships, a mother and child so to say, or more evoked by the stars, or cosmos, or some other non-human element of reality?

If you were hypothesize, why do you think biological creatures like our selves experience the numinous? Do you think it was something evolution explicitly selected for that benefits our survival and reproduction?

I experience the sense of the numinous on a daily basis, lol.  I think it's a sideline benefit of something else that was selected for.  Human beings (despite the cynics constant claims to the contrary, lol) have an expansive intellect and determined pattern seeking compulsion.  Pleasure isn't the biological purpose of sex, but it's a pretty sweet sideline deal. The same is true of experiences like these.

I have a bunch of awesome kids, a badass wife, and I work in ag.  It's hard -not- to feel as though I'm in the constant presence and favor of what other people refer to as the divine.  I'm headed out in a few hours to surf fish hatteras, I'm going to be floored, like I always am, by staring out over the ocean and smelling the salt air.  That's home for me.  I'll even get to see a sunset over water, optical illusion....but a rarity for we east coasters.  I'll shit talk the rays, and I'll whisper sweet nothings onto my braid,  past the breakers, like I'm casting a magic spell on a shark.  I get to drive through the Danny Boone to get there.  Then, when I get back, I'm going fishing for muskie and trout in Cave Run, then Wolf Creek.  When all of that is done, the tomatoes I started on a heat mat under lights will probably put their first flowers on.  My beagle will be pregnant, my entire family is ten minutes away from me (we've been living 14 hours away for the last decade).....and I have to mill white ash and black walnut for woodwork on their house.  I'm connected at every conceivable level to the people around me, nature around me, the all.

You have some silly god that got strung up on a stick..I have all of that.  Your god would be incapable of producing the sense of the numinous I experience, at least in me..whatever it does for you.  Far too small and petty in comparison. For others, this sense is, in a way, tourism. They go to a state park and feel it. It comes over them in the presence of their family at a reunion. Some people even have spots that they go to so that they can feel this. LOL, I trashed my "normal life" so that I could just bask in it all the time. Others still, theists in particular, engage in ritualism at a sacred place or by proscribed incantation to produce the feeling. I just walk out my door, every day.

The "presence of divinity", for non theists, is the exact same feeling. We just don't believe in gods - the thing you attribute that feeling too, in ignorance.