@Karpel
They’re faxu-theists, I see them on forums such as these from time to time.
I don’t know if they think of themselves as a group, but I’m grouping them.
Right, but in what way is the supreme (or supreme beings) imminent in this rock here, or that tree over there?
either they don’t specify, which’s vague (which’s not necessarily a bad thing, it’s okay to be vague, just pointing out that it is, and on a philosophy forum I would prefer clarification), or they deny there is a supreme being, which’s atheism.
I think you’re thinking more about Gnosticism than Judeo-Christianity and Islam.
Matter and flesh aren’t evil in Christianity, we can find Jesus enjoying food and wine in company of friends.
Jesus said the flesh is weak, not evil, the spirit has to reign it in.
When El created the heavens and earth, he said the earth was good, not evil.
According to the bible the origin of evil is Lucifer and man’s hubris, which, like everything, ultimately came from El, El says I created the good and the evil.
Now for Gnostics, a syncretistic philosophical religion, they equate El with Satan (the accuser) and evil (bondage, faith), and Jesus with Lucifer (the serpent) and good (liberation, knowledge).
They said El/Satan and his archons were evil for creating matter to ensnare souls, and then blame them for being tempted, whereas Jesus/Lucifer wants to liberate souls from matter through knowledge or gnosis of our true nature.
Once we no longer identify with matter, and instead identify ourselves with spirit, we are liberated from pain, suffering and mortality, but El/Satan wishes to keep us in the darkness of our ignorance, to feed off our suffering like a vampire.
Gnosticism is more dualistic, matter and flesh are evil, soul is good.
The Abrahamic religions are dualistic in the sense there is a creator and created, but everything save hubris is good, there isn’t this hostility between flesh and spirit, more complimentary, the two go together and are good, so long as spirit reigns over flesh.
And El ultimately wants to create a new earth, not do away with it altogether.
Right, El makes matter something distinct from spirit, he locates all intelligence and spontaneity in the latter, and nothing but blind causality in the former.
So the scientific worldview can be thought of as doing away with spirit but keeping the blind causality of matter, but metaphysical materialism was invented by the Greeks, Hindus and Chinese independently of one another and the Jews in early antiquity.
Democritus was probably the originator of materialism in the west.
Right, that is justifying your pantheism, you’re saying everything is fundamentally interconnected and alive in some sense, conscious (panpsychism), and one or whole (monism), that this totality is the supreme being, the only being, God.