Yeah... hm. Maybe butterflying Plato's ideas in favor of Heraclius and the Atomist school would lead early Second Temple Judaism to assimilate more of those ideas of all things flowing and God fading into the background somehow?
*remembers this one idea for a WI where Judaea and Rome exchange fates, Romans becoming a marginalized people faithful to Jupiter Optimus Maximus and Jerusalem becoming the heart of a henotheistic, semi-Hellenic empire*
I remember that TL. I dunno... maybe. I don't think Atomist based philosophies seemed to do that well in the ancient world. At least every example I can think of seemed to falter and die in comparrison to more spiritually minded philosophies.
I think a problem is the notion of "Deity".
There are some Abrahamic understandings of God that come close to see Him as an organizing force, mover or cosmic principle rather than a personal God. This is seen, as noted, in Kabbalah, in many Gnostic traditions, in Ismaili Islam and, to a point, in Islamic Philosophy.
If you go back through the thread, I talk about why an impersonal god doesn't meat the requirements for Transtheism. If you look in the spoiler section of the OP, I give examples as to why an impersonal god who maybe doesn't have any interactions with the universe still makes a religion the opposite of transtheism if it is the "prime mover" or essence of existence.
However, God in Abrahamic traditions is the source of Scripture (I am not going into the theological debate on the relationship between God and the Qur'an), and that obviously means a "personality" of sorts as God is communicating to mankind. I understand that Kabbalah traditions may be stretched to a point where Scripture is "above" God and something like an organizing force of the universe (we see something similar in Vedanta) and I believe that Hurufiyya in Islam also had a comparable approach, but I am not sure this would qualify.
I saw you refer to Vedanta. Have you heard of or are familiar with Samkhya? Samkhya is a really good example of a transtheist philosophy appearing from a normally monotheist/polytheist/monolatralist religion as Prakriti acts as the "force" from which even creator deities could/would arise.
I underlined a point to discuss where a potentially transtheist religion could still retain it's monotheism in that regard. I mentioned earlier the idea of a platonic (not neoplatonic) view of Yahweh/Allah in which Yahweh is an emanation of "the form of the good" and is naturally imperfect but through revelation tries to bring people to act in accordance with the "form of the good". It also quite nicely solves the problem of evil too, although I have no idea how such a religion would come about or if it would be popular.
People from Abrahamic traditions do sometimes move in this direction, so it is possible.
Do you mean as in succesfully move to transtheism or to a more impersonal deity? Just want to clarify because Transtheism is a weird (but useful) concept for people to get their head around and a lot of people are presuming Gnosticism fits despite being literally it's oposite.
However I think there is an inherent difficulty, which is that the Abrahamic tradition is fundamentally patriarchal. This makes the personification of the supreme being essential. If instead we had a Great Religion tradition that was more deeply feminist, with the Great Mother being seen as fundamental, I think the transition to a reverence for the creative potential of the mindless material cosmos is much easier. I perceive Marx himself as being more consistent with such a thing--he comes to it from a firmly patriarchal background and so minimizes the "woo" aspect of it, but hard-core Marxist dialectical materialism coming into contact with an intellectualizing and secularizing Goddess tradition would blend in more smoothly, on these terms anyway, than Christian or Islamic or Jewish Marxism.
I think this is interesting... Religious Marxism wouldn't quite work in terms of being transtheist (without changing dialectical materialism entirely), Yahweh/Allah is a force that predates and is above dialectical materialism. But the feminist perspective is certainly interesting... I actually do know some "aztec wiccans" who do come under this, subscribing to a mother and father godess who are emanations of Teotl.
Of course when I say the Abrahamic tradition is fundamentally patriarchal, I don't mean to deny that feminine aspects are merged into the various religions that stem from it. But I do perceive that in all the orthodox versions the Dominator paradigm, that is preoccupied with "power over" rather than "power of" prevails and sets the terms. For Jews, Christians or Muslims to move away from patriarchy is to move away from the foundation of the orthodoxy they were raised in. This does happen a lot, but it is a rupture with the core tradition.
I regard Marx's dialectical materialism as exactly the sort of thing I read your Transtheism tradition as embracing--Marx is a Transtheist. This is exactly why orthodox religions recoil and denounce it as "atheist," a label Marx was pleased to accept. But in fact I see in Marx's concept of dialectic exactly the kind of thing that fascinate and inspire reverence, as well as a basis of ethics.
Just to clarify, I did not invent transtheism. German Indologist Heinrich Zimmer did, because it neatly fits in every religion which does not easily fit the traiditional atheist/theist dynamic.
Also, Marx really was not a transtheist.
The important concept here is to understand that Transtheist religions have a non-deity principle which is above any other force in existance, deity or otherwise. Dialetical Materialism may be correct, and the Islamic concept of god may be correct, but the Islamic concept of god would not be bound by Dialectical Materialism in any sense.
Denial of God as a person is dead against Abrahamic tradition, though people from it can re-appropriate much of their mythos to a new context. They are no longer Jews (in the religious sense), Christians or Muslims if they do so though.
You don't have to deny God to be a Transtheist, you just have to acknowledge a force that is above God (which is not a deity in itself). If you look at my response to Falecius, I give a hypothetical example (which I can't see appearing personally) of one such hypothetical religion.
