Talk:Neo-Pantheism

Untitled
Believe I have removed New Age quote that may have caused the copyright problem. Doubt that it was copywriten but it's not needed so best to be safe.Also removed another just to be safe. Please advise and I will rewrite as needed. Will add references back in when this is resolved. Temporary sub-page has been done.(Jlrobertson (talk) 15:30, 25 November 2008 (UTC))jlrobertson


 * This should be useful - Google Books returns, which show usage of the term going back as far as 1838, and occurring as recently as this year. I'm still not convinced, however, that "neo-Pantheism" is doctrinally distinct from what is commonly thought of as Pantheism today. bd2412  T 02:49, 1 December 2008 (UTC)

Thanks for the info. Will check it out. The distinction between Pantheism, Scientific Pantheism, Naturalism, Religious Naturalism, Spiritual Naturalism and neo-Pantheism is fuzzy as is usually the case with sects in religious theologies. neo-Pantheism encompasses most of these beliefs and thus can be theist, agnostic and atheistic. Pandeism was a new word for me which I had not ran across as yet and I have read about everything going on Pantheism and most on Religious Naturalism. Gives me something to think about and how to put together a statement covering them all. Deism and Pantheism are not the same and modern Pantheism at best is a sect of neo-Pantheism. Perhaps I needed to find a better way to say that.Jlrobertson (talk) 23:08, 1 December 2008 (UTC)
 * Thanks - I think you also need to address panentheism. All of the above variations seem to represent earnest efforts to square an old philisophical concept with new scientific knowledge. "Neo-Pantheism" (at least as raised in the early sources below) is sort of an umbrella term for that movement. Panentheism and pandeism are not simply other names for pantheism, but are efforts within this movement to combine pantheism with another strain of thought believed to contain valuable insights.
 * Structurally, the article needs much work - look at panentheism by comparison. Dividing the work into discrete sections separated by headers would vastly improve readability. bd2412  T 19:23, 2 December 2008 (UTC)

Examples from 1917 and earlier
This may be useful as well:


 * [W]e cannot close the remarks on the God-idea in Japanese Buddhism without adding a few words by way of supplement. There is among educated Japanese quite a large number of those who would class themselves as Buddhists, but who know little or nothing of the specific teachings of Buddhist philosophy, and yet whose general intelligence forbids them to believe in the polytheistic ideas of the uneducated masses. It seems safe to say that many of these have at least a vague belief in a Personal God who is the Great Intelligence which controls this universe of ours, and who is the Moral Power which in some way will reward the righteous and punish the wicked, both in this life and in the life to come. And there are still more whose conception is less theistic but rather neo-pantheistic. They draw their inspiration from modern science, which in its most reverent moods recognizes dimly an eternal mysterious life or energy permeating all things. This neo-pantheism differs from the old Oriental pantheism in that it puts a greater value upon the physical universe. For while the older pantheism always held that the pluralistic world of experience is the manifestation of the One-All, it nevertheless regarded this manifestation as inherently evil and as something to be avoided. These neo-pantheists, or spiritual monists, are reverent towards the physical world and see in it the mysterious workings of an all-pervasive energy, or life. We might say they are disciples of Spinoza and our pantheistic poets rather than of the old Oriental school. Their God-idea is almost theistic, with all the emphasis placed on the immanence of God, ignoring that God also transcends his universe. This belief may not be strong enough always to restrain such men from sin and to lead them in the paths of righteousness and peace, but it is there. It is from the ranks of such men that Christianity makes its converts, for they are the ones who have breathed most deeply the modern Western atmosphere which, though it contains much that is evil, also contains much that is Christian.
 * -August Karl Reischauer, Studies in Japanese Buddhism (1917), p. 232.


 * It is the regime of State-worship, in a modernised form and adapted to the materialism of the age and to the successive theories propounded by the philosophers of the nineteenth century ; for the official Christianity of the Prussian Court, under the rather vague formula? of a Protestantism tinged with freemasonry, favoured every kind of compromise, so long as it was not aimed at the fundamental dogma of Germanic State-worship and Germanic superiority. The Christian mysteries were to be preserved as elements of fiction which were "good for the people," and which it would be dangerous to suppress. But they might be used as a cloak for the almost pagan theories of a neo-Pantheism. The official creed, always confined within the limits of the cult of Germanic organisation, would evolve, then, in accordance with individual tendencies and in the course of generations, into something between a philosophic neo-Christianity and a profound materialism; and the Christian formulae would be regarded merely in the light of a survival.
 * -Jacques Dampierre, German Imperialism and International Law (1917), p. 30.


 * For certain types of mind pantheism will doubtless always be alluring. Many of Emerson's utterances had a pantheistic ring, as when, standing on the summit of Greylock, he ejaculated: "God ! It's all God !" His friend Carlyle was more thoroly pantheistic — and not afraid of the term, as his reply to Sterling's accusation witnesses: "Pantheism! Pantheism! What does it matter, it's religion." Coming to our own day, the veteran and beloved John Burroughs equates the terms "God" and "Nature." "We must get rid," he says, "of the great moral governor or head director. He is a fiction of our own brains. We must recognize only Nature, the All; call it God if we will, but divest it of all anthropological conceptions."
 * Similarly, ex-President Eliot, in his famous address on "The Religion of the Future," declares that "the new thought of God will be its most characteristic element." "The Infinite Spirit pervades the universe, just as the spirit of a man pervades his body, and acts, consciously or unconsciously, in every atom of it." This neo-pantheism is wide-spread enough to induce one of our leading publishing houses to reprint Seeley's "Natural Religion," a treatise once famous but lately out of print.
 * -Durant Drake, "The God of the Future is in the Making", Current Opinion (1917), p. 246.


 * Neither the God of the old Pantheism nor that of the neo-pantheism of Froebel is the all-seeing, all-loving Father to whom the weary and the suffering turn for rest and consolation. The belief that the divine is in us may flatter and sustain us in the sunshine; but in the hours of pain and desolation, we repeat the cry of agony that rang out from the cross, and we know that we are human, not divine, and that we need help from some source that is higher than ourselves.
 * -Mary Fisher, A Valiant Woman: A Contribution to the Educational Problem, (1912), p. 242.


 * Schelling's influence, although unacknowledged, was evidently at work in Coleridge's mind, suggesting a new form of pantheism compatible with the admission of freewill. We have a scenic, almost histrionic, presentation of the change in Crabb Robinson's pages. Coleridge opens the 'Ethica,' kisses Spinoza's portrait on the face, exclaiming, 'this book is a gospel to me!' but adds, in less than a minute, 'his philosophy is nevertheless false;' epigrammatically explaining that were the fundamental truth of philosophy expressible in the form 'it is,' Spinoza would be right; whereas we begin (or ought to begin) with 'I am.'
 * This new departure looks like a reversion to the standpoint of Descartes: in reality it is an advance to the standpoint of Fichte and Schelling, to their synthesis of Spinozism with the subjectivity of Kant, or rather of Kant's whole century, concisely expressed by Hegel when he said that substance and subject are one. Aristotle, whom Hegel quotes in this connexion, had struck out very much the same line of speculation when he set up an eternally self-thinking thought as the supreme type of existence. But Aristotle's Absolute had personality without will; the Absolute of German neo-pantheism has, or rather is, will without personality; for originally it is without self-consciousness. Indeed, we have hardly a right to use such words as 'is' and 'being' in connexion with it at all.
 * -Alfred William Benn, The History of English Rationalism in the Nineteenth Century (1906), p. 243-244.

Cheers! bd2412 T 03:50, 1 December 2008 (UTC)

Another reference.

 * [J]ust as Wordsworth's narrator would "reject" Prospero's idea of   retiring from the world, he also does not succumb to the Vaughan narrator's yearning to leave it because it has tainted him too much. Vaughan's speaker declares: "Some men a forward motion love, / But I bybackward steps would move; / And when this dust falls to the urn, / In that state I came, return" (29-32). It almost seems as if "The Retreat" speaker cannot wait to get "this" all over with. Wordsworth's narrator not only wants to retrieve his childhood bliss but also desires to remain alive as a wholly formed adult. Before his death, he yearns to revel in the world and its joys, yet as a man with childlike purity and insight. Unlike Vaughan's narrator, who fears that his childhood memories of God are all but gone, the Wordsworth speaker rejoices in his belief "that in our embers / Is something that doth live, /That Nature yet remembers, / What was so fugitive!" (Wordsworth 129-32). Wordsworth replaces the neoplatonic view of Vaughan's speaker that the world and flesh pollute the spirit that was once part of God with a kind of neopantheism that sees God everywhere, especially in nature, and a belief that we can "rekindle" that celebration of truth. Indeed, "Though nothing can bring back the hour / Of splendour in thegrass," we can find "strength in what remains behind" (Wordsworth 178-80).
 * -Bill Thierfelder, "Wordsworth's Ode: Intimations of Immortality, Shakespeare's The Tempest 5.1, and Vaughan's The Retreat", The Explicator (March 22, 2005), p. 136(3) Vol. 63 No. 3 ISSN: 0014-4940.

Cheers! bd2412 T 06:47, 3 December 2008 (UTC)

Importance of neutrality, sourcing, and avoiding original research.
There is no recognizable entity known as neo-Pantheism. The term has been used variously since 1838 in different ways and has never constituted a specific "school" of Pantheism. Often it has just been used to mean "modern", referring to whatever was modern at the time. Various sections had been inserted into this article claiming that neo-Pantheism had a set of specific beliefs, and explaining those beliefs without sources. The only sources I have been able to find for some of these assertions is a personal website. Naturalistic (talk) 02:16, 12 January 2010 (UTC)

proposed removal of "Uses of the term neo-Pantheism" section
This section is useless And the inline citations add nothing new or insightful to the article. I offer to copy the inline citations on this talk page, just in case, for future reference. Ren  ✉  19:28, 12 January 2010 (UTC) Although now it would mean only the introduction and some external links would remain :O Ren   ✉  19:38, 12 January 2010 (UTC)
 * I agree, given the lack of a single core of ideas running through the group. bd2412  T 23:39, 12 January 2010 (UTC)

I think I'll just redirect to Pantheism, as it seems this article's sole purpose was that of self-promotion, and it can always be easily undone if someone objects. Ren  ✉  00:35, 13 January 2010 (UTC)
 * I would think a little more discussion would be appropriate before making such a drastic change. That said, however, I note that the original author, User:Jlrobertson (whom I tried to help out with this quite a bit), has been absent from editing for several months. bd2412  T 01:07, 13 January 2010 (UTC)
 * The only things that remained non-OR in this article were these quotes... And then again they had been used to present new ideas ( that neo-pantheism is somewhat different from pantheism, that it exists and that it 'replaces' pantheism). User:Jlrobertson had included various websites which he owns (according to whois) as references. Other things were not referenced. No proof of any "neo-pantheism" could be found apart from these self-promoting sources and articles on other websites which are based on this(now defunct) wiki article. This article should have been speedy-deleted in 2006. I think of User:Jlrobertson's contributions on this page as high-class vandalism. I only investigated this article deeply because of the whois results, and the reason I did the whois was that I thought the websites looked a bit similar :O. I'm amazed no-one(bots, where are you?) had noticed these issues before !(And I admit it felt really good to discover it :P) Ren  ✉  01:29, 13 January 2010 (UTC)
 * I was unaware of what was going on off-wiki. It certainly does seem suspicious, and self-promotional. Thank you for hunting that down - I feel rather naive now for having tried to help as much as I did! bd2412  T 01:42, 13 January 2010 (UTC)

I think they call that assuming good faith ;) If you can, there's always Pantheism that needs some help. Ren  ✉  01:55, 13 January 2010 (UTC)
 * Indeed there is - I'll certainly be working on that one. Cheers! bd2412  T 02:10, 13 January 2010 (UTC)

Redirection to Pantheism versus reduction to sample quotes
User:Jlrobertson has undone the redirect and restored the quotes. These quotes actually demonstrate the absence of any special meaning to the term Neo-Pantheism, neo being just a prefix that cultural critics attach all the time to all kinds of recent trends. Neo-Pantheism as a term never caught on in the way that, say, neo-Paganism or neo-Conservatism did, never became the name of a recognized grouping of people. User:Jlrobertson has restored a link to what User:Ren discovered to be User:Jlrobertson's personal version of pantheism, which he calls neo-Pantheism. IMHO this creates once again the misleading impression that such a version has notability. User:Jlrobertson needs to do the homework OUTSIDE of Wikipedia to create this notability, and cannot expect to use Wikipedia as a means of creating notability. If the sample quotes are to remain, then I would suggest that all of the links need to be removed, except to the main Pantheism article. I have removed them. Here they are for reference. Naturalistic (talk) 18:30, 22 January 2010 (UTC)

speedy deletion
I think that's waht I'll do. bd2412 told me afd was a good idea, but I'll just nominate for speedy deletion, it's not even worth afd, the quotes wouldn't even be useful on Pantheism I think Ren   ✉  04:03, 23 January 2010 (UTC)
 * Speedy deletion is not the correct procedure for this article. It's been around too long and is too substantial (even though most of that substance is quotes). You should prod it, and if that fails take it to AFD. TallNapoleon (talk) 11:13, 23 January 2010 (UTC)

Hold for now
I'm back to editing and will address the neo-pantheism article over the next week. It was the first one I did and I have learned a good bit since then. I think I can clean it up to wiki standards. It is used on a number of sites now and as noted by Tall NJlrobertson (talk) 20:49, 5 February 2010 (UTC) If you go back to the Jan 14 ,2009 you will find it is a much lager article than it is now. It is my intent to reduce it down to solid meat this next week.

Please read the rest of the discussion, above, starting with "Importance of neutrality, sourcing, and avoiding original research". The version you mention has all of the faults mentioned above in great detail. The whole thing was framed to make it look as if Pantheism was naturally evolving into Neo-Pantheism, a concept promoted on your own websites which has no significant differences from Naturalistic Pantheism. That version was heavily edited to remove all original research (OR) point of view (POV) and links to self-published websites.

All that was left was the version restricted to a collection of citations. These made it very plain that the term Neo-Pantheism was never used to denote any particular version, but the word neo was simply stuck on, in different contexts, by different individuals, meaning different things, as cultural critics do all the time with many different phenomena.

Apart from a small number of websites which appear to be linked to yourself, there is no recognizable entity known as neo-pantheism. Wikipedia has strict policies and practices related to this kind of situation and a number of users have been shocked at the way these policies have been ignored here.

Wikipedia cannot be used as a shortcut to notability. The fact that this article is now used on a number of sites is not a reason reason for restoring it - rather, it is a reason for NOT restoring it. Please use your imagination to think what would become of Wikipedia if every person who thinks they have a new concept used Wikipedia to promote it. --Naturalistic (talk) 22:53, 5 February 2010 (UTC)