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Cosmotheism

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Cosmotheism is a form of classical pantheism that identifies God with the cosmos, that is, with the universe as a unified whole.

Overview

Cosmotheism asserts that "all is within God and God is within all". It considers the nature of reality and of existence to be mutable and destined to co-evolve towards a complete universal consciousness, or godhood.

Etymologically, cosmotheism differs from 'pan-theism' in that "pan" is Classical Greek for all, while the Greek word cosmos means an orderly and harmonious universe. Cosmotheists take this as meaning the divine is immanent to reality and consciousness, an inseparable part of an orderly, harmonious, and whole universal system.

In its broadest sense, the word cosmotheism may be considered simply as being synonymous with pantheism, although not all modern pantheists would accept Cosmotheism as a synonym for their own worldview due to the historical association of Cosmotheism with a political movement, white separatism, which some within the pantheist community may find objectionable.

According to a Cosmotheist Web site dedicated to the late Dr.William L. Pierce:

"Cosmotheism is a religion which positively asserts that there is an internal purpose in life and in cosmos, and there is an essential unity, or consciousness that binds all living beings and all of the inorganic cosmos, as one."
"What is our true human identity is we are the cosmos made self-aware and self-conscious by evolution. "
"Our true human purpose is to know and to complete ourselves as conscious individuals and also as a self-aware species and thereby to co-evolve with the cosmos towards total and universal awareness, and towards the ever higher perfection of consciousness and being."[1]

Some claim Albert Einstein was a Cosmotheist, [2], along with Carl Sagan, Benedict Spinoza and other historical figures—although there is no quoted evidence of any of these three claiming to be "cosmotheist" as such, and all could also be said to be Pantheist.

Mordekhay Nesiyahu's cosmotheism

In Israel, Cosmotheism was also described by Mordekhay Nesiyahu, one of the foremost ideologists of the Israeli Labor Movement and a lecturer in its college Beit Berl in Israel.

In Cosmotheism — Israel, Zionism, Judaism and Humanity towards the 21st Century, Nesiyahu proposed not to just assume the existence of God, being "prior to all that was created," but to consider God as only being a result of the development of the universe and the consciousness of all of humankind.

Divinity in this particular view is inherently a human invention.

The development of the divine (or what the believer would qualify as being "the revelation of the Divine") was, in Nesiyahu's opinion, both the condition for a more exalted human functioning and all that bears the fruit that comes out of it.

In Nesiyahu's universalist re-imagining of a secular divinity, the universal celebration of Cosmotheism is the basis for rebuilding the Jewish Temple in Jerusalem, and is also a secular ethnically Jewish and a Zionist contribution to all of humankind.

Dr. William L. Pierce's Cosmotheism

Origins

In the United States, cosmotheism sometimes refers to a religion adopted in 1978 by National Alliance founder and white separatist the late Dr. William L. Pierce. Pierce affirmed his cosmotheist belief in a speech that he once gave entitled "Our Cause":

"All we require is that you share with us a commitment to the simple, but great, truth which I have explained to you here, that you understand that you are a part of the whole, which is the creator, that you understand that your purpose, the purpose of mankind and the purpose of every other part of creation, is the creator's purpose, that this purpose is the never-ending ascent of the path of creation, the path of life symbolized by our life rune, that you understand that this path leads ever upward toward the creator's self-realization, and that the destiny of those who follow this path is godhood."

Pierce's interpretation of cosmotheism ([3]) was greatly influenced by several disparate factors: interpretations of George Bernard Shaw's play Man and Superman; strains of German Romanticism; Darwinian concepts of natural selection and of survival of the fittest, mixed with the related early 20th century eugenic ideals; and Ernst Haeckel's version of monism.

Religion, society, and race

The foundation of Pierce's Cosmotheism was essentially similar to classical monistic pantheism — he recognized no physical difference or separation between human and divine, between creator and created — but with a few differences.

Pierce described his form of Cosmotheism as being based on "[t]he idea of an evolutionary universe ... with an evolution toward ever higher and higher states of self-consciousness," and his political ideas were centered on racial purity and eugenics as the means of advancing the white race first towards a superhuman state, and then towards godhood. In his view, the white race represented the pinnacle of human evolution thus far and therefore should be kept genetically separate from all other races in order to achieve its destined perfection in Godhood.

Dr. Pierce believed in a hierarchical society governed by what he saw as the essential principles of nature, including the survival of the fittest. In his social schema, the best-adapted genetic stock, which he believed to be the white race, should remain separated from other races; and within an all-white society, the most fit individuals should lead the rest. He thought that extensive programs of "racial cleansing" and of eugenics, both in Europe and in the U.S., would be necessary to achieve this socio-political program.

His National Alliance was to be the political vanguard and the spiritual priesthood of this program, which was designed ultimately to bring about a "White racial redemption". His Cosmotheist Community Church, which was to be the next step of this plan, was set up in the mid-1970s, alongside Pierce's other political projects — the National Alliance, National Vanguard Books, and the weekly broadcast American Dissident Voices — all from his mountain retreat headquarters in West Virginia.

Critical assessments

Pierce's views have been characterized as a version of early twentieth century racial anthropology, but driven by spiritual, as well as scientific, beliefs. This area of his belief was likely influenced by his early association with George Lincoln Rockwell's American Nazi Party. Others have noted the German Romantic roots that Pierce's ideas shared with Nazism and have observed similarities between the two ideologies: Pierce's plan for white divinity was similar to Adolf Hitler's vision for the Herrenvolk; also, his attacks against Jews as "parasites" on white society, who would prevent the white race from reaching its destined godhood by replacing the white elite with their own kind, echoed previous Nazi descriptions of Jewish traits and character. [4]

Other criticisms have been harsher if not as factually-accurate; for example, the Southern Poverty Law Center has characterized Pierce's Cosmotheism as "an unsuccessful tax dodge". Followers of Pierce's cosmotheism do call many of these characterizations erroneous, as can be seen from this part of the Dr. Griffin interview with Dr. Pierce below from "The Fame of a Dead Man's Deeds":

Dr Pierce-"And then there was a big fight with the IRS which I lost. They said that we weren't a church. They were obviously under pressure to take away the tax exemption we had. The IRS sent some agents out here to check us out. I still have the report they wrote. It had things like the road out here was very rough and not conducive to people getting to the services, and that we didn't have enough chairs and where were people going to sit, and there was no central heating system and so there couldn't be services in the winter— a bunch of baloney."

Dr. Griffin-(The IRS revoked Pierce's church status and the revocation was upheld in court. Pierce thinks the IRS was responding to pressure applied on it by the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith. While the vast majority of people view the ADL in a positive light, as an opponent of bigotry and intolerance, Pierce sees it as a Jewish instrument of thought control and the abridgment of freedoms. He contends that the ADL seeks to harm or even destroy anyone or anything that gets in the way of the Jewish agenda for this country, which includes him and his organization.)

Dr. Griffin-"You think your racial views were the real reason the IRS got on your case?"

Dr. Pierce-"If I had been preaching a doctrine that didn't irritate the Jews they would have left us alone. There are all kinds of snake-handling cults and everything else up here in these hills, and the IRS lets them call themselves a church and doesn't bother them. It is no big drain on the federal budget, and the IRS stays in good graces generally by not bothering people more than it has to. But in our case they were determined to get us, and it was strictly because of what I was teaching on racial and Jewish matters."


Uncritical Reference for Nesinyahu's Cosmotheism

  • Cosmotheism, Israel, Zionism, Judaism and Humanity - towards the 21st Century by Mordecai Nesinyahu (Poetica - Tuvi Sopher Publishing, Tel Aviv.)

Jewish or Marxist Critical References for Dr. Pierce's Cosmotheism

  • Gods of the Blood: The Pagan Revival and White Separatism, by Mattias Gardell (ISBN 0822330717)
  • The Turner Diaries and Cosmotheism: William Pierce's Theology of Revolution, by Brad Whitsel; published in Nova Religio Vol.1, No.2, April 1998.

Mordekhay Nesiyahu's cosmotheism

Dr. William L. Pierce's Cosmotheism

Jewish, Marxist, Pan-atheist, and Fundamentalist Christianity Criticisms

Cosmotheist Advocacy

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