For all the fraught ambivalence over God I’ve wrestled with lately, it never occurred to me that I could just be a garden-variety Pantheist. I dismissed it outright in my last post on this subject, wondering whether I was really finding God when looking on nature, or just expressing wonder.
Well, how do things look from a Pantheist perspective, where God and the universe are the same?
I have something to pray to. It’s not hard to find, when you can step outside and feel the wind on your face. It’s impermanent, changing constantly. There are no theological gymnastics to jump through, but it’s also not the rabbit hole of woo that I’ve found new age traditions to be. It will never be at odds with science.
And accepting it, things just fall into place.
(Erik, you beloved dolt, overthinking things as always.)
Years ago, I thought I was looking for God. All I found was religions with dogma to sell. I kept finding friends, though, and deeper relationships with them and with family as I grew. And after awhile, I put it to myself like this: people must’ve made up “God” as shorthand for “all of us humans and the universe we live in.” I mean, per the Abrahamic religions, “God is one,” and as genetic science has recently proven, so are all of us, and all of nature and the universe seem to work together and affect each other. That it’s-all-one-thing-ness that is the universe does fill me with awe and I do “instill worth in” (worship) it. I don’t pray “to” anything “for” anything, but I look at the universe and my fellow humans every day with gratitude for their existence and for being part of it/them all.