Isn’t pantheism the same thing as atheism?

[vulcanlogician]

Alan, you may have absorbed some non seqs that nuts insist on.

A god could lack free will and it would still be a god, just as….if we lacked free will, we’d still be people, still be all that we are.  Theistic gods are categorized as such because they’re like us, not in some different class.  If the whole universe could credibly be called personal and intervening, a pantheistic god would exist.  Pantheism would be true.  No extra levels or different stuff required.

It can’t be, and isn’t.  It’s not because gods have to be super duper what’s its (they don’t, and most were never claimed to be).  It’s because the central claim of pantheism appears to be wildly wrong.

- and yes, Spinoza probably was an atheist who used the idea for cover.

There is a ton of credence for Spinoza using "God" as a euphemism for atheism. After all, he tried to publish his Theological-Political Tract under a German-sounding pseudonym, but was kind of "caught in the act" and exposed for doing so. Oops. Everyone knows you despise religion now, Baruch.

The Ethics (his magnum opus) was published posthumously. And every time I think about that it irritates me to no fucking end. Here is someone who was advancing human knowledge and should have proudly published the Ethics and been able to respond to academic criticisms of the work. But no. You better publish that stuff posthumously, Baruch, given how controversial the imbeciles who surround you take it to be.

Because of this, we'll never really know to what extent Spinoza's "theism" was just a measure to prevent his work from being banned across Europe. (Spoiler alert: upon publication, the Ethics was immediately banned across most of Europe.) I tend to think that there is a difference between Spinoza and other atheistic materialists of his day. To read Spinoza as a straight materialist is only 97% correct. After all, he saw reality as a self-caused thing. And, according to Spinoza there is only one substance. You can say that that one substance must be material, but again, that's only 97% correct. Spinoza is a defacto materialist, but he also thought that reality could be perceived according to an infinite number of attributes. And he also thought that to see reality as a whole is more accurate than seeing it as individual parts.

So, when you look at reality as this unified, self-caused thing with an infinite amount of attributes... it looks more like a god than perhaps a straight materialist might perceive it. But, again, we'll never know. Posthumous publication. Banned across Europe. Hard to clarify your position when you're censored like that.

@Alan V

If we are assuming hard determinism, nobody makes choices freely. Not human beings. Not God. We can still say a king has power over those in his kingdom. We can still say he is a being of great power. Even though, ultimately, he is just a clump of matter behaving as the laws of nature necessitate the clump of matter behaves.