logic of an agnostic pantheist

"This is what God said: 'I promise that never again will all people and animals be destroyed by a flood. I am putting my rainbow in the clouds. And when the rainbow appears, I will see it and remember this promise of mine.'"

for despite all claims to an omniscient God, God in fact has something of a bad, or at least imperfect, memory. it is a memory that needs reminders of promises, the promise alone unable to substantiate itself. God needs aids as we need them. this imperfect memory defeats, first of all, assumptions of omniscience, knowledge being only sustained memories, and complete knowledge entailing a working memory of anything and everything, alpha and omega, first and final cause. the act of forgetting -- Forgetting being actually inherent to everything -- could not be a possibility were it a true case of omniscience. so, God does not know all (and indeed CANNOT know all anyway, as a thorough study of prophecy would show).

secondly, God's imperfect memory begets an altogether different reading of the scriptures, if they are indeed supposed to be God's Word. the bible is no less a historical telling by way of selective memory than the histories of humankind produced by its own imperfect collective memories. were we even to propose that God would be at least less inclined to error in his telling than humans, it would no more depreciate the weight, the heavy burdenous weight, of the condition of a possibility (and therefore SOME probability) for error; nor can it stave off the more immense problem that with limited memory (of any sort!) there is inherently, indispensibly, a perspective, a point-of-view, and necessarily, simultaneously, a bias in what is Told. alternate histories must therefore have alternate Gods, differentiated and distributed by people (or, the more likely case, pre-differentiated and pre-distributed by something human but unconscious or subconscious), people who themselves have points of view and biases. God(s) must be pluralistic. monotheism in its strong form then can only exist emically, in those cases of violent (abridging, omitting) isolationism, in self-limiting; in its weak form, monotheism must equate itself with pluralism of a sort, a closet monolatrism, whereby, just like "Love", only the name and the act of signification itself of SOMETHING (always something different) can serve a base for union.

approaching meta-physics

to avoid the essentialism of conventional universalist or relativist labels -- that is, the essentialist universality of both: universalists claiming that we're all essentially the same while relativists claim a different universal that we are all irredeemably different -- to avoid this, it seems best to me to approach meta-ethics in cultural theory through respective emical or etical analyses; respective of multiplicities of contexts (i.e., cultures and histories). in any case, it requires a vocabulary devoid of the essentialist underpinnings of the former two terms.

miss truth

One of Science’s main contentions with religion is in its handling of the truth. For in this day and age, only religion can hold a person’s appreciation for lies, for this is most often how it reveals to us the truth. Indeed, some truths can only be understood through lies, which are not really lies so much as mistruths, imaginary elements that provide the contrast that is sometimes our only means to perceiving an important aspect of the real. As such, both conservative sciences and fundamentalist Religion (what we can call the ‘pseudoreligious’ in the same way that we call methods and institutions sub par of the natural sciences pseudosciences) make the same mistake in assuming that all knowable truths are explicit – with conservative science belaboring the attempt to make what is knowable explicit, and fundamentalist Religion what is explicit knowable. Both miss entire dimensions of reality, dimensions that are real as that they are manifest in the physical and mental and spiritual aspects of human being, and that are missed due to this myopic, monist and even violent assumption concerning the nature of truth. Only the spiritually healthy perhaps can develop an experienced appreciation for mistruths.