Sam Barnett-Cormack calls in to talk about nontheist Quakers. Sam is one. This has been requested by a few listeners.

Micah is currently moving cross-country to be co-pastor (with his wife) at Berkeley Friends Church, so everybody wish him well. He’ll be back when things settle a little.

Transcript

Mackenzie: Hi. Welcome back to Quaker Faith and Podcast. This is Mackenzie, your host. Micah is not with us right now. He has just accepted a new post as a co-pastor at Berkeley Friends Church in California so he is in the middle of a cross country move.

Mackenzie: And we have a guest today of Sam Barnett-Cormack … I hope I said that correctly … from the UK.

Sam: Hi, yep, yep. You got that right. Hello, everyone.

Mackenzie: We’ve been asked several times to have an episode about specifically about nontheist friends because we mention them from time to time but neither Micah nor I is one anymore. And Sam is a very vocal nontheist friend online so I asked him to join us.

Sam: Glad to be here.

Mackenzie: So, I guess we’ll just start with how do you define nontheism?

Sam: Well, there’s two ways for me to answer that. One is the really broad way that I see it as an analytical category and the other is to talk about what I actually feel or believe or however you want to phrase it. Obviously, that fits into the analytical category I would use. And I say analytical category because I don’t ever want to tell someone what label they should be using.

Mackenzie: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Sam: But sometimes it’s useful when you’re looking at the huge range of beliefs among friends to be able to categorize just for that purpose of looking at the differences. So, in the broad sense, it comes down to how I learnt from a rather eccentric religious education teacher the idea of what theism is. And there are a few different definitions out there. But I’ve always stuck with the one that I learned at school because it makes sense to me and seems quite useful.

Sam: And it’s the idea that being a theistic God or Gods, and a God is theistic if they have identity. They are a being. They have preferences, wants, desires. And they are willing and able to act directly in our world. So, I would categorize a view of God or whatever label you want to use as non-theistic if it doesn’t meet all of those criteria.

Mackenzie: I know this has been a point where we have discovered that we label things differently. I used to call myself pantheist and I know that you would say that that is a nontheist way of thinking and I would think of it pantheist one.

Sam: I’ve spoken to pantheist friends who I would categorize their belief as nontheistic and also I would categorize as theistic. So, you know, pantheism is this idea that everything is God, to put it simply. And then, the question there just becomes whether this Geshtalt entity of everything has a personality of its own that we can only, as the parts of that great thing, see part of.

Sam: So, for me, a theistic pantheist would believe that this universe God has a personality of its own independent of any of us and has things it wants to see happen and is able to affect things within itself. Whereas, a nontheist pantheist would see there being no independent personality of the Geshtalt might see it as a completely impersonal being that incorporates everything.

Sam: And there’s a lot of fuzzy edges here and it can be very hard to talk about some things without, especially in Quaker experience, without ascribing the idea of will to the divine.

Mackenzie: Especially when we get into things like business method.

Sam: Absolutely. Absolutely.

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