Pantheism

There is a holiday appropriate song.



You never write, you never call
And now you wander in the hall
You look familiar;
I barely know your face at all

We never get together at all
Until the last day of Hanukkah.
I got you a harmonica
And a bag of chocolate coins.

The only thing we have is fights,
But there's got to be a change tonight.
Please be nice on this feast of lights.
We never get together at all
Until the last day of Hanukkah.

I got you a harmonica,
And a bag of chocolate coins.
The only thing we have is fights,
But there's got to be a change tonight.
Please be nice on this feast of lights.



I'm not Jewish, but then I'm not a believer in any faith. Nor will I assert that there is no god. Because to do so is to believe in the absence of a god, which is also a faith. I tend to think that all the gods are equally real, and say much about the interaction of the human mind with the universe. Our definitions of what gods are, however illuminating of our own half hidden motivations and worries, is only half of the story. The reality is one thing, our interpretation another.

I was once castigated because a believer in god thought we "really thought the same thing using different words." When I asked him to define what it was he believed god is, Oh, no, not going to "catch" him that way! Well, I wasn't trying to "catch" him, but how can people believe when they don't know what they believe in? I'd been told much the same by my oldest brother, who's beliefs were fervently all over the place over the years, and he expected me to convert along with him at each turning. He too was a believer, a salesman, Air Force recruiter, bought into Amway too. Eventually went back to Catholicism. His pushing me into Buddhism did lead me to Taoism, at least as a general philosophy, but nothing else stuck.

Pratchett's idea seems a more practical way, on his Discworld, the gods are real. No need to go around believing in them. See below.



I ain't against gods and goddesses, in their place. But they've got to be the ones we make ourselves. Then we can take 'em to bits for parts when we don't need 'em any more, see?' (LL)

Everything was a test. Everything was a competition. Life put them in front of you every day. You watched yourself all the time. You had to make choices. You never got told which ones were right. Oh, some of the priests said you got given marks afterwards but what was the point of that? (CJ)

Most witches don’t believe in gods. They know that the gods exist, of course. They even deal with them occasionally. But they don’t believe in them. They know them too well. It would be like believing in the postman. (WA)