Jain Theism

SR No.: 006509
Original Sutra Author: N/A
Author: Hemant Shah
Publisher: Hemant Shah
Publication Year: 1997
Total Pages: 218
Language: English
Classification: Book_English, Philosophy, & Religion
File Size: 10 MB

Page 52

Theism, Atheism and Jainism (e) Theism
Theism, from its emphasis upon the personal nature of God differs from that of Monotheism. It conceives of a God as a “Conscious mind immanent in physical nature, man, and values of which he is either the source or creator. "100 “Panthcists identify God with nature for them nature includes God, where as Theist regard God's being as distinct from and independent of nature."10? (1) Deism
Here we find the acceptance of one God of Monotheism as well as the emphasis of Theism upon a personal God who is the creator of the universe, and is outside the world which he has created. Thus for Deists, God having created the world, "divorsed himself from, the world and merely contemplates it from beyond as a disinterested bystander, or absentee' deity, who neither heeds prayer nor choose to perform miracles."!62 Deists' God is the antithesis of the Pantheist deity (8) Deistic Supernaturalism
Here God is viewed as transcendent, external to the world he created and yet super human and supernatural revealer of values This belief goes with the name of Soren Kierkegaard, the father of Existentialism and Neo-Orthodoxy.
(h) Humanism
Humanism regards “God as man's highest aspirations, reflecting man's persuit of ideal values and embodying the sum of humanity: **:413, He is known as the 'Grand Being' (le Grande Etre) as Comte called him. We should here take note of Ludwiug Feuerbach, who was also a leading Humanist, reducing objective existence of God to Man's mindian In 'The Essence of Christianity' he wrote " Man has his highest being, his God in himself.” “God is man, man is God."} (i) Panentheism
It differs from both Deism, in the sense that God is not only transcendent here, and from Pantheism, in the sense that God does not identify with nature. Here the concept of God is that he is "'immanently
100. Sahakian & Sahakian, Ideas of the great Philosophers (1966), p. 89 101. Ibid., p. 89 1 02 Ibid., p. 89 103. Ibid., p. 90 104. Ibid., p. 91