Oily Fundy Evangelical calls Pantheism "Kooky"!

PANTHEISM is KOOKY & EVANGELICAL CHRISTIANITY is not?

Hey, Richard Cizik, "creation care" advocate & rapture believer, ever look in a mirror? Here is the flaw in your dismissal of Pantheism: IF the CREATOR is HOLY, how can his CREATION be UN-HOLY? the kingdom is within you & without you? remember that one?

"Evangelical Environmentalists" should be our allies, but i just want to smack him upside the head!

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/03/magazine/03QUESTIONS.html

''Creation care'' sounds like a division of Medicare.

It's still better than environmentalism.

What is wrong with that term?

It's not the term. It's the environmentalists themselves. I was recently speaking with the leadership of the Sierra Club and the National Wildlife Federation, and I told them, ''Gentlemen, I respect you, but at this point don't plan on any formal collaborations.''

Why? Because they lean to the left?

Environmentalists have a bad reputation among evangelical Christians for four reasons. One, they rely on big-government solutions. Two, their alliance with population-control movements. Three, they keep kooky religious company.

What is your idea of a kooky religion?

Some environmentalists are pantheists who believe creation itself is holy, not the Creator.

Sound familiar?

i'm thick this morning

The translation is, "throw away all your ideals, and we'll allow you to sit at the table and rubber-stamp whatever we choose to do."

Now the bible-thumpers seem to be implying that they're willing to preserve the environment, if only the crazy, left-leaning environmentalists will shut up, call themselves something else, and dress and speak like evangelists.

Thanks, but no.

I mean, worship a cold, fairly soft and not overly useful metal which is not essential for life? Come on! That is so silly? And so many people will do so much damage for the pursuit of it or it's proxy, currency. :wtf: is the point of it? Better to worship that which sustains life.

there is a point where there are simply too many people for the stress we put on the ecosystems, specifically the ocean. everybody can't eat sushi all day long.

but "creation carers" don't think that far ahead.

C.G. Jung has written that there are two ways to lose your soul. One of these is to worship a god outside you. If he is correct, then a lot of churchgoers in the West have been losing their souls for generations to the extent that they have attended religious events where prayer is addressed to a god outside. The idea that God is "out there" is probably the ultimate dualism, divorcing as it does God and humanity and reducing religion to a childish state of pleasing or pleading with a God "out there." All theism sets up a model or paradigm of people here and God out there. All theisms are about subject/object relationships to God. The Newtonian theism that posited a clockmaker God who wound the universe up and sat back found its logical conclusion in Laplace's statement that he had no need in his scientific system for a God. But this agnosticism and eventual atheism finds its logical antecedents in religious theism itself, which kills God and the soul alike by preaching a God "out there."

What is the solution to the killing of God and the loss of human soul? It is our moving from theism to panentheism. Now panentheism is not pantheism. Pantheism, which is a declared heresy because it robs God of transcendence, states that "everything is God and God is everything." Panentheism, on the other hand, is altogether orthodox and very fit for orthopraxis as well, for it slips in the little Greek word en and thus means "God is in everything and everything is in God." This experience of the presence of God in our depth and of Dabhar in all the blessings and the sufferings of life is a mystical understanding of God. Panentheism is desperately needed by individuals and religious institutions today. It is the way the creation-centered tradition of spirituality experiences God. It is not theistic because it does not relate to God as subject or object, but neither is it pantheistic. Panentheism is a way of seeing the world sacramentally. Indeed, as we have seen previously, in the creation-centered tradition, the primary sacrament is creation itself -- which includes every person and being who lives.

I once more applaud Matt Fox for his lucidity and I thank you for the generosity of sharing it.

Nice, nice post.

god IS everything or god is IN everything, whatev. i see little practical value in transcendence.

i had no idea it was a declared heresy.

They don't seem kooky to me at all.

I have Stan Lee and Jack Kirby to thank for my thoughts, truth be told. I read THOR comics from early times and it happily led me into the pantheist realm. I don't believe in the literal gods and goddesses but I love their allegorical/psychological energies.

And Thor himself was such a hunk.

A bunch of kooks.


Occam's Razor -> Cizik is a kook.