I am first a humanist, the idea that human beings must develop concepts of right and wrong and must solve problems that affect human welfare (such as global warming), that epistomologically, knowledge is arrived at and developed by humans, not by supernatural beings. I am a pantheist, in the sense that I feel that awe and reverence is most properly derived from and given to nature itself, and that the notion of god is a poetic way of describing reality as a whole, all that is, was, or will be. The incompletness or unprovability of certain concepts in math, as developed for instance by people like Bertrand Russell and Kurt Godel demonstrates formally the persistance of mystery, and the failure of any metaphysics to fully subsume all of what we might call reality. I do not see a god concept as a god of the gaps so to speak but rather god itself is a stand-in for the ever-flowing and changing mystery of being itself, what Jacques Lacan called the Real. This is a much grander, to my mind, notion of the object of awe and reverence, than any traditional religion could ever invent. I also think pantheism and humanism can be incorporated into other traditions, and for example I myself practice Judaism. Traditions and rituals have an important place in life but they must be within the context of a logical worldview, and that for me is humanism where ethics is concerned, and pantheism where if you like "an object of reverence" is concerned. I am interested in exchanging ideas and learning from like minded individuals.
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