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I disagree particularly with your first and last statement. Monotheism is not superior except in the mind of a monotheist. Pantheism is a monotheistic religion thus even with a monotheistic prejudice it is still not lesser under that context. The second statement is flawed because religion does not evolve it changes with social context. As human culture became less influenced and dependent on the surrounding environment and as social structures and political structure the religion changes. God becomes more human like in time with the extreme is seen in Christianity where god becomes human. As our environment changed recently along with advances in our understanding of the natural world we see changes again developing with an increase in atheism, pantheism, and polytheism. There has also been a resurgence in First Nations beliefs. So all religion does not evolve to monotheism.
Oh please Tony! This kind of vacuous response has no place in a debate. You made the claim that Baha'u'llah was evidence of the existence of a monotheistic supernatural and personal deity - if you cannot provide evidence to support that claim you have a moral obligation to say so...if you can provide such evidence then do so, so that people can choose whether to accept it or not - as evidence. So far, as usual, you make a brash theological claim and then follow up with an abject and total failure to provide any evidence at all to support it - let alone convincing evidence. I completely fail to see how such an attitude could possibly provide any basis for meaningful religious dialogue, let alone unity.
That just boils down to "take my word for it" - that's not evidence - it's just another unfounded religious claim. How can you hope to build unity on unfounded claims?
That's well said. It was (kind of) understandable that earlier generations of western anthropologists would be biased to that way of thinking...and equally understandable - though lamentable - that the bias still persists to some degree...after all, what business would a professional anthropologist have in examining a culture superior to his own? Most of us are not professional anthropologists and if we were inclined to honesty, we'd have to admit that some ancient cultures got some stuff right centuries or even millennia before 'ours' even comprehended the issue of concern at all - like positional notation in mathematics for example. Anyway, the point I'm making is that it seems that the anthropological examiner of other cultures is probably unavoidably limited by the cultural vantage point he is viewing them from - I suppose we all are - but we needn't imagine that that limitation is a fundamental (or even real) one - we can only see it as we see it from where we are - but we can interpret what we see by illuminating it better with light from other cultures. No generation has been better resourced to do this - and yet we often seem to insist on viewing everything 'other' in the plane-polarized light of our own inherited or chosen worldview. This is what needs to change - and what I suspect might give a pantheistic/ panentheistic outlook a slight edge over other models of deity in the quest to see religious 'otherness' as a set of harmonic tones alongside our own rather than an annoyingly discordant racket in the background.
Tehran is a bit of trek for me - I don't suppose you would actually be able to suggest a more straightforward way of finding actual (rather than hearsay) evidence that there exists a supernatural personal monotheistic deity. So far, all you have done is quote the writings of some humans who thought that they (or the one they were writing a story about) were either God or God's divinely appointed rep. That, again, is not evidence - these are unfounded religious claims. (I'm getting bored with repeating myself now so unless you finally manage to post some actual evidence, I probably will not respond further on the this side track)...
Well if only the first sentence was what you really mean by "one God" - that would make sense - i.e. that God IS the collective (and evolving) purpose of humanity...I can see a successful religion emerging from an idea like that - its really an expression of religious humanism I suppose. But that isn't what you really mean by "one God" at all is it? And you second sentence implies that unless everyone (or pretty well everyone) acquiesces to your conception of deity with its infallible Divine Manifestations - and the vastly inferior human efforts to preserve the genuine teachings of all but the last couple of a possibly endless succession of earlier Manifestations (aka other religions which are, by definition, inferior versions designed for earlier ages of humanity and corrupted by time and human imperfection) - we are destined to continue in misery and dissatisfaction. Hardly a recipe for unity is it?
We have indeed Tony! We have indeed! And what further need do we have of evidence?
It is not the concept that I am struggling with Tony. It is the validity (in terms of its obvious exclusivity) and, more importantly, the relative value (in terms of its potential to promote 'unity') of the concept that I am questioning. To take your own imagery, if there is really only one source of light, there will remain shadows (although some aspects will admittedly be thrown into starker relief rendering them more visible than perhaps other conceptions might - I might post a thread on the advantages of a unique, polarized view such as monotheism at some point just to show that I am not baulking or biased against the concept of "one God" per se, but rather the exclusiveness that it seems often to engender and how that is counterproductive to a genuine dialogue towards unity) - reality needs to be illuminated by light from different angles and viewpoints so that the shadows that make some aspects disappear from view and others appear larger and more important than they really are can be eliminated. In a pantheistic view, everything is God - so God may still be 'one' (certainly in the sense you expressed earlier), but all our concepts of deity are valid conceptions - more than that, they (the concepts) are part of God too - that illuminate the reality from various angles and eliminate the shadows cast by the monolithic traditions which, by themselves, are incapable of actually viewing the reality from any viewpoint other than their own. They can, I suggest, only make a call for "unity" - like a "barren woman" having false "birth pangs" but never actually bringing it to birth - except perhaps a kind of false 'unity' accomplished by subsuming alternative viewpoints into their own only to extinguish their lights (perhaps gradually, perhaps forcefully) (compare Isaiah 66:9). Certainly that has been the history of the "great" monotheistic faiths of the west. They have grown more by the powers of persuasion, enforcement and subjugation than by any attempt to accommodate religious diversity or even diversity of religious thought - although some fundamentalists would argue oppositely - that the "Church" has been overly accommodating of diverse religious ideas and thus "polluted" itself.
That is a generally misanthropic point of view IMO - and what is more, it is typical of the great monotheistic faiths which claim that humans continue in a fallen condition and require divine redemption to effect their salvation. I disagree with that and hold the view that humans are what humans are and our "plan of salvation" should be to find harmony with the natural world of which we are part in order to ensure the long term best interests of our species and those we share our earthly home with. God ain't gonna step in a save us from catastrophe at the eleventh hour - despite promises to that effect. We have to provide our own "light" and the religious traditions of the past and present (taken in a humanistic and anthropogenic context) can be an illuminating part of that - but not if we pick one and insist that it has an exclusive authority to dictate "truth". In that sense, if anything, I would argue that it is "God" not man, that has a cast a great shadow of ignorance over the world.