Quotes & Sayings


We, and creation itself, actualize the possibilities of the God who sustains the world, towards becoming in the world in a fuller, more deeper way. - R.E. Slater

There is urgency in coming to see the world as a web of interrelated processes of which we are integral parts, so that all of our choices and actions have [consequential effects upon] the world around us. - Process Metaphysician Alfred North Whitehead

Kurt Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem says (i) all closed systems are unprovable within themselves and, that (ii) all open systems are rightly understood as incomplete. - R.E. Slater

The most true thing about you is what God has said to you in Christ, "You are My Beloved." - Tripp Fuller

The God among us is the God who refuses to be God without us, so great is God's Love. - Tripp Fuller

According to some Christian outlooks we were made for another world. Perhaps, rather, we were made for this world to recreate, reclaim, redeem, and renew unto God's future aspiration by the power of His Spirit. - R.E. Slater

Our eschatological ethos is to love. To stand with those who are oppressed. To stand against those who are oppressing. It is that simple. Love is our only calling and Christian Hope. - R.E. Slater

Secularization theory has been massively falsified. We don't live in an age of secularity. We live in an age of explosive, pervasive religiosity... an age of religious pluralism. - Peter L. Berger

Exploring the edge of life and faith in a post-everything world. - Todd Littleton

I don't need another reason to believe, your love is all around for me to see. – Anon

Thou art our need; and in giving us more of thyself thou givest us all. - Khalil Gibran, Prayer XXIII

Be careful what you pretend to be. You become what you pretend to be. - Kurt Vonnegut

Religious beliefs, far from being primary, are often shaped and adjusted by our social goals. - Jim Forest

We become who we are by what we believe and can justify. - R.E. Slater

People, even more than things, need to be restored, renewed, revived, reclaimed, and redeemed; never throw out anyone. – Anon

Certainly, God's love has made fools of us all. - R.E. Slater

An apocalyptic Christian faith doesn't wait for Jesus to come, but for Jesus to become in our midst. - R.E. Slater

Christian belief in God begins with the cross and resurrection of Jesus, not with rational apologetics. - Eberhard Jüngel, Jürgen Moltmann

Our knowledge of God is through the 'I-Thou' encounter, not in finding God at the end of a syllogism or argument. There is a grave danger in any Christian treatment of God as an object. The God of Jesus Christ and Scripture is irreducibly subject and never made as an object, a force, a power, or a principle that can be manipulated. - Emil Brunner

“Ehyeh Asher Ehyeh” means "I will be that who I have yet to become." - God (Ex 3.14) or, conversely, “I AM who I AM Becoming.”

Our job is to love others without stopping to inquire whether or not they are worthy. - Thomas Merton

The church is God's world-changing social experiment of bringing unlikes and differents to the Eucharist/Communion table to share life with one another as a new kind of family. When this happens, we show to the world what love, justice, peace, reconciliation, and life together is designed by God to be. The church is God's show-and-tell for the world to see how God wants us to live as a blended, global, polypluralistic family united with one will, by one Lord, and baptized by one Spirit. – Anon

The cross that is planted at the heart of the history of the world cannot be uprooted. - Jacques Ellul

The Unity in whose loving presence the universe unfolds is inside each person as a call to welcome the stranger, protect animals and the earth, respect the dignity of each person, think new thoughts, and help bring about ecological civilizations. - John Cobb & Farhan A. Shah

If you board the wrong train it is of no use running along the corridors of the train in the other direction. - Dietrich Bonhoeffer

God's justice is restorative rather than punitive; His discipline is merciful rather than punishing; His power is made perfect in weakness; and His grace is sufficient for all. – Anon

Our little [biblical] systems have their day; they have their day and cease to be. They are but broken lights of Thee, and Thou, O God art more than they. - Alfred Lord Tennyson

We can’t control God; God is uncontrollable. God can’t control us; God’s love is uncontrolling! - Thomas Jay Oord

Life in perspective but always in process... as we are relational beings in process to one another, so life events are in process in relation to each event... as God is to Self, is to world, is to us... like Father, like sons and daughters, like events... life in process yet always in perspective. - R.E. Slater

To promote societal transition to sustainable ways of living and a global society founded on a shared ethical framework which includes respect and care for the community of life, ecological integrity, universal human rights, respect for diversity, economic justice, democracy, and a culture of peace. - The Earth Charter Mission Statement

Christian humanism is the belief that human freedom, individual conscience, and unencumbered rational inquiry are compatible with the practice of Christianity or even intrinsic in its doctrine. It represents a philosophical union of Christian faith and classical humanist principles. - Scott Postma

It is never wise to have a self-appointed religious institution determine a nation's moral code. The opportunities for moral compromise and failure are high; the moral codes and creeds assuredly racist, discriminatory, or subjectively and religiously defined; and the pronouncement of inhumanitarian political objectives quite predictable. - R.E. Slater

God's love must both center and define the Christian faith and all religious or human faiths seeking human and ecological balance in worlds of subtraction, harm, tragedy, and evil. - R.E. Slater

In Whitehead’s process ontology, we can think of the experiential ground of reality as an eternal pulse whereby what is objectively public in one moment becomes subjectively prehended in the next, and whereby the subject that emerges from its feelings then perishes into public expression as an object (or “superject”) aiming for novelty. There is a rhythm of Being between object and subject, not an ontological division. This rhythm powers the creative growth of the universe from one occasion of experience to the next. This is the Whiteheadian mantra: “The many become one and are increased by one.” - Matthew Segall

Without Love there is no Truth. And True Truth is always Loving. There is no dichotomy between these terms but only seamless integration. This is the premier centering focus of a Processual Theology of Love. - R.E. Slater

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Note: Generally I do not respond to commentary. I may read the comments but wish to reserve my time to write (or write off the comments I read). Instead, I'd like to see our community help one another and in the helping encourage and exhort each of us towards Christian love in Christ Jesus our Lord and Savior. - re slater

Tuesday, August 25, 2020

What Panpsychism Process of Organism Means




"The proposition and development of the "panpsychism process of organism" means re-imagining the "consciousness of the universe" as a living collective and evolving dynamic of "creational panpsychism" where normal, everyday pancreational contexts point to the panexperiential, panexistential, and panpsychic elements of creation and creation's God." - re slater


Creational Beingness

If we are in agreement that the Spirit of God enlivens all creation at its birth with a divine vibrancy of possibility, renewal, re-creation, and wellbeing, then we are travelling together in healthy circles of potentiality.

Meaningfully, God has birthed creation with the urge to be more than itself - within its very soul and its cosmic structures - against the destructive urges which would tear it apart from the connectivity creation feels within itself and all that is encompassed within its "being, energy, or cosmic comportments".

To this testament words fail. Yet this is what is meant by creational "urgency" imbued by the living God when "birthing or transferring" Himself (sic, God's Image; God's Divine Being) into the evolutionary birth of creation. God has birthed creation with a divinity fully inhabiting all creational (or cosmic) structures. This is what gives to creation its urgency, its purpose, its teleology: God's Self.
Creation's urgency, purpose, or teleology comes from God's Self.

Mankind is but the sum of all which came before it. Mankind is not the exception to creational homogeneity. Humanity is evolved from within the greater context of creation's "soul, consciousness, or beingness," however we try to explain it. Mere words fail. Even the bible cannot describe creation's "soul" apart from using anthropomorphic terms telling of stones crying out, trees clapping their hands, and the mountains dancing for joy.

Man is not the creational exception to consciouness

Cosmic Consciousness

God has birthed creation from Himself. His Essence, Soul, Being has been birthed into creation. Humanity is but one of many "children" of God. It is what is meant by "cosmic consciousness all the way down". Consciouness, beingness, soulness is not singular to the human experience. However it is described by the term panpsychism it tells us God's Self is within the thing He has made.

Which is why we describe God and Creation as essentially similar yet dissimilar in ontological self. One is God - the other is created. But they are the same thing - filled with agency, love, generative wellbeing, purposeful drive for creativity and novelty, and so forth.

Besides the difference of ontological being would be the difference of holiness versus sin. Creation bears both. God does not. It is the theological problem of freewill agency. With agency comes the matter of sin and how it does not love, nor fellowship, union, connectedness, wellbeing, peace, or harmony. Agency brings with it a rogue's gallery of destructive urges to beingness, selfhood, consciousness, etc. It is the reason Christ came to atone for sin and remove its destructiveness through Himself and within the course of history as it plays out. We know this as the Christian hope.

Panpsychism is not a Separatistic Emergent Process

Cosmic conscious panpsychism stands against the emergentist position of a separately evolved process birthed out of nowhere, out of the ether as it were. It is the theoretical posit of an action unlike any action, trait, or ontology found within creation itself.

Non-Christian emergentists posit the exterior condition of the development of neurological brain connectivity which may then form an exotic (out of nothingness) consciousness unfamiliar to creation's interior processes. Consequently, this esoteric element of "consciousness" came from nowhere but the process itself.

Christian emergentists posit the non-evolutionary development of humanity as a (singular) miraculous event bring consciousness along with it. Most likely from the God which created mankind. A humanity which shares likeness with creation only in that creation shares a likeness with God. In this process, it is an exterior event disconnected from creation's (evolutionary) process of development. Thus it is described as an emergentist position or proposition.
The Christian evolutionist will state that emergentism is without connectivity to the creational pan-connected universe describing it's panexperiential, panexistential, and panpsychic elements of creation. That this esoteric emergentist "matter" known as "consciousness" is more magical, mystical, even *miraculous, when claiming esoteric existence out of nothing coming before it. As if it came from the very ether it exists within.
This emergentist position is known as bio-panpsychism denying holistic creational connectivity with creation's "essence". It is why the non-emergentist will claim creational panpsychism all the way down to the lowest elemental elements and forces of the universe. That everything within creation breathes the same life and dynamo of its Creator-God without exception. And that human consciousness but reflects the greater consciousness found within the very expanses of creation.
The sum of humanity's evolutionary development is not greater than the whole from which it was birthed. The consciousness of humanity but shares with the whole of creation, and in all its parts: all that it is, will be, and ever will become. Creation is conscious' mother. God is it's Father. Humanity is the bearer of both acts.

R.E. Slater
August 25, 2020

*All (open and relational) process theologians will struggle with miracles "out of nowhere" interrupting the free flow of one agency-filled process to the next. When God does miracles in the bible it is not as an exterior force interjected into the present complex of process-filled forces of creation. If anything, the miracles of God come from within the process of creation moving in agreement and partnership with God as it can against the reality of sin and evil which contend against all things God and God filled.


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