We seek renewed reverence for the biosphere as
the ultimate context for human existence....
We seek renewed reverence for the biosphere as
the ultimate context for human existence....
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The God of PantheismBy John Burroughs
The term "religion" is an equivocal and much-abused word, but I am convinced that no man's life is complete without some kind of an emotional experience that may be called religious. Not necessarily so much a definite creed or belief as an attraction and aspiration toward the Infinite, or a feeling of awe and reverence, inspired by the contemplation of this wonderful and mysterious universe, something to lift a man above purely selfish and material ends, and open his soul to influences from the highest heavens of thought. Religion in some form is as natural to man as are eating and sleeping. The mysteries of life and the wonder and terror of the world in which he finds himself arouse emotions of awe and fear and worship in him as soon as his powers of reflection are born. In man's early history, religion, philosophy, and literature are one. He is, of course, superstitious long before he is scientific; he trembles before the supernatural long before he has mastered the natural. In our day we read the problem of Nature and God in a new light, the light of science , or of emancipated human reason, and the old myths mean little to us. We accept Nature as we find it, and do not crave the intervention of a God that sits behind and is superior to it. Science kills credulity and superstition, but to the well-balanced mind it enhances the feeling of wonder, of veneration, and of kinship which we feel in the presence of the marvelous universe. It seems to me that there is no other adequate solution to the total problem of life and Nature than what is called "Pantheism", which identifies mind and matter, finite and Infinite, and sees in all these diverse manifestations one absolute being. God becomes the one and only ultimate fact that fills the universe and from which we can no more be estranged than we can be estranged from gravitation. When we call the power back of all God, it smells of creeds and systems, of superstition, intolerance, persecution; but when we call it Nature, it smells of spring and summer, of green fields and blooming groves, of birds and flowers and sky and stars. I admit that it smells of tornadoes and earthquakes, of disease and death too, but these things make it all the more real to us to conceive of God in terms of universal Nature - a nature God in whom we really live and move and have our being, with whom our relation is as intimate and constant as that of the babe in its mother's womb, or the apple upon the bough. This is the God that science and reason reveal to us - the God we touch with our hands, see with our eyes, hear with our ears, and from whom there is no escape - a God whom we serve and please by works and not by words, whose worship is deeds, and whose justification is in adjusting ourselves to his laws and availing ourselves of his bounty, a God who is indeed from everlasting to everlasting.
Source: Accepting the Universe, by John Burroughs, Houghton Mifflin Co., Boston and New York, 1920; reprinted in Universal Pantheist Society Newsletter, Summer, 1978. |
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