I am a pantheist.

I have just discovered that I am a pantheist. I have often struggled to define myself in religious terms. Sometimes I'm a christian (by birth, not practice), other times I am an entirely non-religious atheist and then there are times when I'm a naturalist/universalist/believe in the inter-connectedness of all things known and unknown spiritualist and why isn't there a word for this? Well, apparently there is. It's pantheism and I discovered this when reading the following passage in Richard Dawkins' book, The God Delusion:

A theist believes in a supernatural intelligence who, in addition to his main work of creating the universe in the first place, is still around to oversee and influence the subsequent fate of his initial creation. In many theistic belief systems, the deity is intimately involved in human affairs. He answers prayers; forgives or punishes sins; intervenes in the world by performing miracles; frets about good and bad deeds, and knows when we do them (or even think of doing them).

This is what most of the world's religions are: theists. Clearly, this isn't me. Although the small part of me that is Christian, the part that was christened when I was five, which clearly is a very small part of the thirty-two year-old me, still wonders if God knows when I'm naughty and will send me to hell as punishment, and can be known to make a quiet prayer when there's something I really want (or don't want) to happen. But deep down, I know it isn't going to make the blindest bit of difference. But wouldn't it be cool if there were a such thing as miracles?

A deist, too, believes in a supernatural intelligence, but one whose activities were confined to setting up the laws that govern the universe in the first place. The deist God never intervenes thereafter, and certainly has no specific interest in human affairs.

Now this is an interesting concept, and one I haven't really considered. However, as Carl Sagan said, "if by 'God' one means the set of physical laws that govern the universe, then clearly there is such a God. This God is emotionally unsatisfying ... it does not make much sense to pray to the law of gravity." Gosh, how I laughed when I read that. Still tickles me.

Pantheists don't believe in a supernatural God at all, but use the word God as a non-supernatural synonym for Nature, or for the Universe, or for the lawfulness that governs its workings. Deists differ from theists in that their God does not answer prayers, is not interested in sins or confessions, does not read our thoughts and does not intervene with capricious miracles. Deists differ from pantheists in that the deist God is some kind of cosmic intelligence, rather than the pantheist's metaphoric or poetic synonym for the laws of the universe. Pantheism is sexed-up atheism. Deism is watered-down theism.

So there you go. Dawkins does go on to argue that such "believers", if they can indeed be called as such should refrain from referring to their metaphorical spiritual force as "God":

The metaphorical or pantheistic God of the physicists is light years away from the interventionist, miracle-wreaking, thought-reading, sin-punishing, prayer-answering God of the Bible, of priests, mullahs and rabbis and of ordinary language. Deliberately to confuse the two is, in my opinion, an act of intellectual high treason.

I am happy not to call my interconnecting energy God, but I would like a name for it. However, for now I am happy to put a name to my general belief. Pantheism. I shall now go google and wiki it just to be sure that that's what I am. I'm only up to page 41 of the book so there's a good chance I could change my mind by the end of it but "sexed-up atheism"? I can live with that.