Cosmotheism

The cosmotheism is a concept of philosophy of religion . In cosmotheism, in contrast to theism , the world itself plays a central role as an ordering and creating force. It is not the willful act of a creator god , but arose by itself, or it has always existed. There is no separation between the natural and the supernatural ( monism ).

Cosmotheism can be understood as atheistic , polytheistic or monotheistic . The connecting element is the conception that there is a force to which the gods or god are subject, like karma or dharma in Hinduism and Buddhism or Dao in Daoism .

In relation to China, Jan Jakob Maria de Groot used the term " Universism " in 1918 to denote the conviction, which was decisive for ancient Chinese thinking, of the order of the cosmos and the correspondence of the human microcosm to the macrocosm of the universe. Helmuth von Glasenapp took up this expression and, with the help of the term universism, distinguished the religions in which an "eternal world law" is accepted, as in the cosmology of Daoism and Confucianism , from those religions in which a Creator God creates the world with his will as is the case in Judaism , Christianity and Islam .

Pantheism is difficult to distinguish from cosmotheism : While the divine expresses itself uniquely and uniquely for the pantheist in the diversity of the world, for the cosmotheist the world is only one manifestation of the divine being, besides which there could be others.

literature

Jan Assmann : Monotheism and Cosmotheism. Egyptian forms of a "thinking of the one" and their European reception history Heidelberg, 1993, ISBN 3-8253-0026-9
Helmuth von Glasenapp : The five world religions. Hinduism, Buddhism, Chinese Universism, Christianity, Islam. 1963, ISBN 3-453-05815-1

Individual evidence

^ Meyers Großes Konversations-Lexikon , Vol. 15, 1905-1909, pp. 366f.
↑ Background information on the series “Religious Orientations” by GEFAP eV 2003 . Society for Research and Promotion of Applied Philosophy eV - GEFAP, Hamburg, accessed on August 13, 2014.

[1] Meyers Großes Konversations-Lexikon , Vol. 15, 1905-1909, pp. 366f.

[2] Background information on the series “Religious Orientations” by GEFAP eV 2003 . Society for Research and Promotion of Applied Philosophy eV - GEFAP, Hamburg, accessed on August 13, 2014.