Note: This short quiz or questionnaire is constantly undergoing edits to improve it based on your feedback. So, please let me hear from you.
Follow this 3-step guided questionnaire to find if you are a Pantheist or not:
1- Consider these situations – When you:
- Look at the night sky
- Look at the blue sky
- Stand in front the rising/setting sun
- Look at clouds
- See the moon and stars
- Listen to water gushing in a ravine
- Hear the wind
- Feel the wind on your body
- Smell the rain
- See exotic sea creatures
- Smell flowers and living plant life
- Ride a horse
- Pet a dog
- Stand on the ocean shore
- See images of the Hubble Space Telescope
- Are in the midst of nature (over water, in the air & around life: plants, animals/ people)
- Hear and feel your own heart
Questions, when you are experiencing the above:
- Are you filled with feelings of awe and wonder at the overwhelming beauty and power of nature, life and the universe (known and unknown)?
- Do you feel a sense of the sacredness, of reciprocal love and of connectedness?
If you answered yes,
You have Pantheistic leanings.
Continue to step 2 below,
2 – Consider these questions - Do you:
- Believe that humans should be a part of Nature, rather than above it?
- Believe that a personal, mythical, creator or conductor god(s) do “not” exist?
- Feel an “emotional” need to connect to something greater than you or the human race?
- Feel that the universe (in its entirety) and nature are worthy of profound awe and respect?
If you answered yes,
You are likely a Pantheist.
3 – Finally, Do you:
- View God as the whole universe and not a separate entity from it?
- View the whole (known and unknown) universe and Nature as God?
- Have a spiritual connection to this God?
- View Earth as sacred?
If you answered yes, Congrats!
You are a Pantheist.
Bonus questions – Do you:
- Believe that morality, ethics and goodness are values you ought to have without having a supernatural God tell you to adopt such moral values? That high morals and sound ethics are a must-have just for being a thinking human.
- Are comfortable with not knowing everything (how the universe works, what life is, if aliens exist, what death is) but very intrigued and quest to understand?
- Understand the cycle of life & the cycle of birth/death, and the cycle of matter in the universe?
- Understand the limitations of being human, of our inventions and of science and quest to understand more?
- That you joyfully accept and embraces life outside of you and within you?
- Value human life (and perhaps all other life forms), and revere it as it is part of God?
- Like to learn from a large body of human wisdom?
- Always like to question?
If you said yes, Congrats!
You are a super duper Pantheist! (i.e a great person) - IMHO, Ethan Z.
Version 1.0
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November 28th, 2009 at 4:10 pm
These questions are good but the available answers are inadequate.
For Question1 I must answer:
bullet 1 – Yes, very much yes.
bullet 2 – Not in the slightest, ever. The universe does not know that I exist, does not care about me, does not know or care about anything. The universe is not alive and never was.
Therefore, there is no way I can answer Question1 given the options offered (Y,N).
Question2:
bullet1 – Yes.
bullet2 – Yes.
bullet3 – No.
bullet4 – Yes.
Once again, I cannot answer yes or no to this question.
Question3:
bullet1 – Of course not! The universe is not alive and is not aware. It is vast – incomprehensibly vast – but there are no entities, gods, aliens or otherwise, running the whole thing. It is purely natural and gods are not needed to explain it.
bullet2 – Of course not.
bullet3 – This cannot possibly be answered if one answers no to bullet2. This question attempts to force the answer desired by its author rather that seek an honest answer.
bullet4 – If by “sacred” you mean that it must be protected as the priceless haven that it is, our one and only home, yes. If you mean that it is the product of a magical or godly action, no.
Bonus question:
bullet1 – Yes. Morality is an Earth-animal invention and humans have a highly refined form of it, thanks to the billions of years we’ve spent evolving.
bullet2 – Yes. We will never understand more than a tiny fraction of the universe.
bullet3 – Yes, as well as humans have discovered, so far. We continue to discover.
bullet4 – Yes, as I said in bullet3.
bullet5 – I don’t know what this means. I love all living things unless they draw my blood, inject venom under my skin or otherwise try to harm me. I do not love ticks or leeches. I do not love heartworms. I love broccoli.
bullet6 – First half of question: yes. Second half of question: no. Once again the question, as written, tries to force the answer.
bullets 7 and 8 – Very, very much yes.
I took this test and found that it was impossible to answer according to the rules set up on this page. This questionnaire is just as bad as the typical fundamentalist Christian attempted trap that one is either Christian, and therefore moral, or else one is incapable of being moral. Wrong. One can be both non-Christian and moral.
One can love the universe, be in awe of it, love humanity and nature and still not be a Pantheist or a theist of any kind. It is a falsehood to claim some of the attributes of a loving Earth-animal for your particular philosophy, just as some Christians have done by claiming that everybody who is not Christian must be without morality and therefore eager to rape and steal.
December 1st, 2009 at 8:58 am
@Blizno
Thank you for your email. I agree with you regarding fundamentalists of any religion who claim that you are either a believer in their religion or else an immoral person. This questionnaire is NOT meant to evangelize to or condemn any body, it serves one purpose that is to help one know whether or not they subscribe to pantheistic beliefs.
I do take your feedback seriously, and am revising this questionnaire. I suspect that it will remain a work in progress for some time. Once the new revised edition is complete I will publish it in a new article in order to preserve the current questionnaire and your comment.
It would have been helpful to know whether you are a scientific pantheist or an atheist.
December 13th, 2009 at 6:15 pm
I posted a new quiz here http://www.pantheismtoday.com/faq/am-i-a-pantheist-v-1-1