Paul Harrison - Elements of Pantheism; A Spirituality of Nature and the Universe. 3rd Edition

Theism: Belief in one personal judging creator God who transcends the world, and who may or may not be immanent in it.

Panentheism: Belief in a personal creator God who transcends the world, but is also intimately present and active in the world and in each of us.
Pandeism: Belief in a creator God who merged completely into the Universe he created.

Pantheism: Profound spiritual reverence for the Universe/Nature.

Atheism: Disbelief in any supernatural deity.

Humanism: A positive atheistic philosophy stressing human responsibility for our ethical choices.

Polytheism: Belief in and worship of many gods.

Paganism (modern): Nature-oriented form of polytheism, usually revering Goddess and God, and sometimes other deities. Paganism may involve literal belief in those deities, or just symbolic use of them as aids to revere Nature.

Pantheism is among the oldest of religious beliefs. It can be dated back to at least the sixth or seventh centuries BC, when the Hindu Upanishads were written, and the Greek philosopher Heraclitus flourished. Pantheism, of one kind or another, came to dominate the ancient world East and West.

The spread of Christianity and Islam forced Pantheism underground for some 1200 years, but by the nineteenth century it was beginning to regain some of its old prominence. It was the dominant belief of many philosophers and poets from Wordsworth and Goethe to Hegel and Walt Whitman.

The wars and ideologies of the twentieth century pushed Pantheism to the background again, but today it is enjoying a new renaissance in Scientific Pantheism, nature-oriented Paganism, Deep Ecology, philosophical Taoism, Zen Buddhism, and forms of Humanism and atheism that are open to spirituality.

All pantheists feel the same profound reverence for the Universe/Nature, but different pantheists use different forms of language to express this reverence. Traditionally, Pantheism has made use of theistic-sounding words like God, but in basically non-theistic ways - pantheists do not believe in a supernatural creator personal God who will judge us all after death.

Modern pantheists fall into two distinct groups in relation to language: some avoid words such as God or divine, because this makes listeners think in terms of traditional concepts of God that can be very misleading. Others are quite comfortable using these words, but when they use them they dont mean the same thing that conventional theists mean. If they say "the Universe is God," they dont mean that the Universe is identical with the deity in the Bible or the Koran. They mean that for them the Universe has the primacy that a god would have in theistic religions, and awakens in them at least some of the feelings of awe and wonder and love and acceptance and gratitude that Jews, Christians and Moslems feel towards their gods.

The Irish writer John Toland first used the word pantheist in 1705, and defined it as a person who believes "in no other eternal being but the universe."

By and large the most authoritative modern definitions of Pantheism remain close to Toland's. Here are a few recent versions:

The religious belief or philosophical theory that God and the Universe are identical (implying a denial of the personality and transcendence of God); the doctrine that God is everything and everything is God.[Oxford English Dictionary]

A doctrine that equates God with the forces and laws of the universe.
[Merriam Webster Collegiate]
The doctrine that the universe conceived of as a whole is God and, conversely, that there is no God but the combined substance, forces, and laws that are manifested in the existing universe.
[Encyclopaedia Britannica]

Most pantheists in Western countries today were not reared as pantheists, but as Christians, Jews, Muslims, atheists or agnostics. So what made them become pantheists?

Usually they had grown unhappy with the religions or beliefs they were brought up in. In the case of Christianity, for example, they could no longer accept the claims of impossible miracles, or logical conundrums such as a God who is both three and one, or a Saviour who is both human and divine.

Many pantheists also feel that the traditional religions are too oriented towards invisible beings and realms, and not enough towards the real world we inhabit, towards this present life, and towards the body.

Dissatisfaction with established religions drove people on long spiritual journeys, often through many alternative beliefs, in search of alternatives, testing out the many forms of Buddhism, paganism, Humanism or simple atheism.

But in all of them there was still an unsatisfied yearning for spirituality: the need for a system of beliefs and practices that relate us emotionally to nature and the universe, that tell us of our place as a member of them. They felt the need to go beyond Atheism, which simply denies the existence of a personal creator God and takes no positive positions about how we should live our lives or how we should feel about the Universe/Nature.