The Pantheist’s ‘good’ Two football teams^1 emerge^2 from the tunnel^3 onto the pitch^4 to play a match.^5 Both young, in robust health, perfectly fit and wearing spotless kit. The question is, ‘Which team is good? If you ask the fans of either team,^6this question, the naïve^7 answer will be identical, namely ‘Our team is good!’^8 Well our team must be good since the other^9 team is about to try to (metaphorically) kill us and therefore must be bad. The pantheist^10 takes a wholly mature,^11 hence different view. Taking her cue from nature, that is to say, from the laws of nature, deified as the god PAN, she states that both teams are good^12,13 until one is proven bad by losing the match.^14 In other words, ‘the winner is good and the loser is bad!’^15 Obviously the fans of the losing, hence ‘bad’ team will, in fact must disagree and continue to believe that their team is ‘good’ since they need to survive^16 to fight another day. For the pantheist, and who worships the Blind Laws of Nature^17 as God, winning (meaning being selected for survival), and which is signalled with the various intensities of happiness, joy, bliss and so on, is good. For the henotheist, group winning, and which is signalled with group happiness (and that of its members), is good. In both cases losing (being deselected from survival), and which is signalled with the various intensities of unhappiness, pain, suffering and so on, is bad. Home © 2018 by Victor Langheld

1. Abstracted to mean two defined quanta, i.e. wholes, presenting as random digits. 2. Defined quanta, like a bottle of coke or a blade of grass, happen as emerged qualities or properties, hence subject to conditions, 3. For tunnel read: the dark struggle to survive and which can and often is experienced as the horrific dark underbelly or digestive system of God seen via his arse, and which experience dumps the observer into what has elsewhere been called ‘the dark night of the soul!’ 4. The everyday world in which the fittest are selected to upgrade creation (meaning PAN = God) by means of 1 to 1 competition, meaning ‘trial by mortal combat.’ 5. Selection by means of pantheistic ‘trial by mortal’ or, in the case of cultural or cooperative group, thus henotheistic action, not so mortal combat. 6. By extension both impure henotheists (Greek: henotheists adherence to one (i.e. mono) particular chosen God) meaning both claim to believe in their one particular (i.e. defined, formally identified) chosen God (i.e. team) as good (true, real. omnipotent, omniscient and so on) and are prepared to fight to the death (as pantheists). In other words, they believe in their one true God (that rules and protects the group) but their God (and the group as a whole) competes with a multitude of other Gods (or henotheistic systems). 7. That is to say, immature albeit with the emerging capacity to make final, hence absolute decisions. 8. To wit, ‘Our team (group, tribe or nation) is our God’ because out team is (at least potentially) the winner (but lastly only one of many). 9. In short, the henotheist fan believes that the ‘other’, to wit, that which competes with ‘us’, i.e. the ‘self’ for survival, is bad. Whereas the pantheist believes that all selves are good though in fact they act as others. 10. That is to say as pure monotheist and who believes in one God acting as user friendly icon for one set of natural survival rules good for all (individuals and groups as individuals). And for simplicity’s sake calls the God icon that stands for the rules PAN, meaning ‘all’. Pan stands for the blind (merciless, compassionless, devoid of love and hate) rules of nature from which all the appearances or phenomena of the universe, including the human, emerge as complexity related qualities or properties. 11. In fact the world view (German: Weltanschauung) of solitary (thus freed from group think and action) old age and which has experienced if not all then most of the development phases and the ups and downs of life. In contrast to the immature view of the naïve henotheist (and who yet survives because of protective many : one group rules) but which allows her to make absolute decision within her group rules framework and so create certitude, the mature pantheist’s view is wholly relative and one to one and which makes decision making nigh impossible, thus producing grievous uncertainty. In other words, the henotheist’s view is incomplete, i.e. partial and so locked in time and space, thus autocratic/despotic and therefore politically useful in that it leads to decisions. And the pantheist’s view is complete (absolute, (w)holistic but fully democratic, and minus time and space) and, since it does not differentiate is incapable of coming to absolute decisions and is, therefore, politically useless. 12. They are good because they have previously proved their fitness (i.e. goodness) because they have survived thus far. Skew the notions of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ to alternately mean ‘right’ and wrong’. Ancient Buddhism, emerging within the Upanishad pantheist ambience, had no terms for good and bad. The Buddha saw acts as either (Pali) kusala or akusala, meaning ‘profitable’ (i.e. beneficial) or ‘unprofitable’ (maleficial), thus indicating that at heart he was a pantheist and which was confirmed by his belated acceptance by his followers of the Law of Karma. 13. In the Jewish Bible Genesis 1 we are informed, correctly, that everything that God made was good. So where, as the ancient Jews asked, does the bad come from. They either never solved the problem or decided to distract from the unpleasant and culturally disruptive (meaning politically unacceptable) answer by reinventing the Sumerian fable of Adam and the Tree of Life with the addition of Eve and the second tree. That not only saw God introducing the notion of ‘the Bad’ by means of the tree of ‘Good & Bad’ but also provided the material cause for the emergence of ‘the Bad’, namely Eve, Adam’s identical, because cloned twin sister. The story of Adam & Eve became one of the most malevolent, indeed criminal hoaxes of all time, and not just for women, and for which its exceedingly nasty inventors and later developers, such as the religious bigots St Paul, Tertullian and St Augustine, at least with regard to their disastrous fantasy of Original Sin, are yet justly despised, indeed hated. 14. The pan (i.e. the natural law abiding, holistic hence culturally undefined) theist believes the winner, she who survives mortal combat (with any undefined quantum as ‘other’), is good and the loser bad. The heno (or cultural, i.e. local group defined mono-) theist believes that those who adhere to one specific set of cultural (i.e. group) rules, such as ‘The 10 Commandments’ or ‘The Noble 8-fold Path’ or the Traffic Code, thereby helping their culture (or group) and themselves as part thereof survive, are good and those who don’t are bad. 15. Winning being self-signalled with happiness, losing with unhappiness, that is to say, happiness and unhappiness serving as Guide & Control system for a self-regulating, hence blind self-navigating automaton. 16. In other words, persist, continue. In ancient India, that is to say, in the Upanishads and later on in Buddhism, it was the quality (or property) or persistence, namely continuance to eternity and with implied non-changeability that decided the good, the true, the real and so on. This quite unbelievable error of observation (and subsequent belief, right up to Shankara and beyond to the current crop of closet Vedantists) eventually caused havoc in Indian culture. 17. Curtesy of which Natural Laws (i.e. God) she has emerged after about 15 billion years of ruthless and brutal trying as supremely complex system, i.e. as evolved and manifested (as hardware) God niche or app, displaying the emergent qualities of mercy, compassion, love, hate, the capacity to play tiddlywinks and scrabble and so on.