hmmm sorry ou lost me here…
always thought that EVIL was here just to give an excuse for slaugtering anything that was on our path?
See? you already think that a movie talking about Animism ( i think that it is what it is called )is as an attack on Pantheism…
hmm Avatar must be evil yes…

As something of a pantheist and an avowed Pagan, I don’t buy into the whole good/evil dichotomy. Here’s why.
You say that evil arises out of malevolent intent, which itself arises out of ignorance. Where does the malevolent intent arise from then? You state that it is a result of misunderstanding someone else’s action(s), but what were the hypothetical nature of such actions? What sort of actions (whether misunderstood or not) would prompt a malevolent intent?
There are two things which humans are concerned with, being reproduction and survival. In the context of “concern” as relates to my above questions, reproduction encompasses the strong attachment we feel towards sexual partners, but also to relatives, offspring, and an ever widening (and weakening) circle of friends, community and social relationships (including pets). Survival encompasses bodily health, and access to resources necessary to live (4 elements). More broadly, survival extends to include property, possessions, and access to acquire more of same, both for self and for our extending circles of relations.
When any of the above is interfered with by an outside force or agency, it causes a sense of pain, whether it be psychic of physical in nature. All life forms with a sense of it, eschew pain and pursue pleasure. When pain is felt, naturally a being either flees, or attempts to eradicate the cause.
Malevolent intent, is simply the attempt to acquire or diminish the sexual and/or material resources which are considered to “belong to” someone else. Typically the cause of such intent is a sense of pain, which the perpetrator attempts to assuage by their supposedly “evil” actions. However the action to relieve the pain is outside the accepted social order. It is really social order which is at issue when we speak of evil. Social order is highly relative to time, place and social group. Even animals have their pecking orders, their mating and eating hierarchies, which are enforced in a manner analogous to how we humans do.
I also take issue with the supposition that humans are superior to animals because of our ability to rationalize about the consequences of our actions. In order to say we are superior, you must first identify some 3rd landmark, separate from both humans and animals, by which to measure the relative elevation of each (since that is the analogy being used). I see no such 3rd landmark, other than a supposed anthropomorphic deity with reasoning powers (which remains to be seen). Saying human beings are superior without identifying the measuring rod, is equivalent to saying “the bible is the word of god, because it says so in the bible”.
Anyway Gus, I think you’ve let far too great a measure of Abrahamic religious concepts pollute your thinking as a Pagan. Time to reevaluate…
Happy Solstice!

Galdr you’d stated: “There are two things which humans are concerned with, being reproduction and survival.”
I disagree with you. I have no children, and had my fallopian tubes cut and cauterized when I was 26 to ensure it. And survival itself is not always a concern. Some humans choose to end their own lives when in the depths of depression, or faced with a debilitating, terminal illness. Or sacrifice themselves for what they consider a greater cause.
I find your statement far too limiting. The issues with which humans concern themselves are as diverse as humanity itself.

My explanation for what we perceive of as evil is that we are part of a limited system, which of necessity feeds on itself, except simple organisms that live directly off sunlight – but early on came the stratagem of taking advantage, and other creatures started eating the sunlight beings. This taking-advantage thing is something we exult in when we’re on the victorious end, and consider evil when someone’s taking advantage of us.
We have consciousness enough to realize that we humans would do better to cooperate, and even (tho we must continue to eat) cooperate to a very large extent with the rest of life, for our own survival.

I find your observation that creativity requires a measure of ignorance interesting and valid. Thank you for the new rhetorical toy!

An interesting–and interestingly Pagan-friendly–take on the film from an Eastern Orthodox viewpoint can be found at the “Roads from Emmaus” blog: http://roadsfromemmaus.wordpress.com/2009/12/25/ecological-vision-in-james-camerons-avatar/

Very well written, Gus. I’m with you in your description of evil, though I would describe it more along the lines of acting through hate as opposed to malevolent intent. A hunter has malevolent intent toward his or her prey. Even though I’m vegetarian I don’t see the act of hunting as something evil, not all the time, and especially in cases where it’s needed for survival.

Thank you Lizz.
I think the difference between us is in the words not the meaning. I think of malevolence as taking pleasure in the unhappiness of another – so hate is a form of malevolence. Many – probably most – take no pleasure in the killing or ending of an animal’s life. It is a far more complex emotion, utterly without malevolence. The best book on hunting I have ever read is Richard Nelson’s The Island Within. I think it captures what is most genuine about hunting better than anything else I have encountered.

I suppose that if one cannot appreciate whole systems and instead tries to puzzle out parts, then one’s world view is more like a junkyard and less like the functioning systems that, as time goes by and entropy has it way, gave rise to the junked parts.
The way I see it, pantheism and its cousin panentheism go a long way at reducing alienation in its manifest legions. So I, pantheist/panentheist in my deep, dark heart, find it difficult to pay much mind to all this discourse about the menace of pantheism. It strikes me as folks trying to rationalize the alienation they continue to impose on themselves.

Wow, seriously? I’m always amazed when people can’t seem to differentiate fantasy and reality. I didn’t see the movie as “promoting” anything, really.
But, that said, there was a line in there where the main character is praying to the goddess he’s come to worship with the Na’vi, for help battling the invading humans, and he says to her, “They killed their mother.”
That was sobering for me. We are killing our mother, whether you see the earth as goddess or just home. As a species I think we’re the aliens, and not just on other planets.
Another reason to shake my head over the Christian right. Love your blog, by the way.

Why do theists rail against pantheism and deism, but never pandeism? Answer: they can’t; pandeism is unlike the others in that, by combining their strengths and discarding their weaknesses, it subsumes and fully accounts for all forms of theism, making it unassailable to theistic objection.

Pantheism, panentheism, and pandeism – words it is too easy to fight over. So far as I can tell, your pandeism is akin to panentheism, and where we stand on that issue is a function of our philosophical predilections and our personal experience. I prefer panentheism when I am getting technical and skip gaily between it and pantheism the rest of the time.
As I see it, the problem at its core, is that transcendental monopolistic monotheists are psychologically committed to a deeply hierarchical view of the world where what is lower is categorically inferior. Consequently it is deeply threatening for them to think of the “less than human” to have genuine intrinsic value, let alone a sacred dimension.
As I understand it, Orthodox Christianity is not guilty of this error, but it holds to the other one of thinking they are the only path with genuine spiritual wisdom – which seems to me a problem if deity is everywhere. But it is their problem, not mine.
As I get older and hopefully somewhat wiser I am impressed with how the arbitrary assumptions of transcendental monopolistic monotheism have penetrated every nook and cranny of this society- even among secularists who continue to embody many of its assumptions.

Well I don’t mean to fight over it, but pandeism is very precise in its distinction from panentheism, in that there is no part of the Creator, the Deus, held separate from the Universe that it has become (and so, no problem of evil to overcome, all things being outside the knowledge and control of the Creator until it the Universe comes to its end)….

I dont think that the director was trying to promote pantheism with his movie Avatar, but the movie may have made pantheism more understandable to the general public so i can see Catholic Ross Douthat being mad, but im stoked!

Pantheism is a simple basic idea to describe the universe in poetic terms, but these become repetitive, most notoriously in Whitman who often sounds like a paid preacher in his enumerations of “beings” included in the “All” and its “infinite immensity” of “eternal variance”. It is an abstraction and can easily become hollow.
I have to learn about here and now, including politics and economics.Pantheism is too solemn.

Remember we are beings in the midst of All. My own belief is that individuality is the way the All gets to experience and practice love in as many ways as it can be practiced and experienced. We aren’t real good at it as a species, but maybe this is kindergarten – or as Ram Dass once suggested, the Fourth Grade.