Talk:pretheism

RFV discussion: August 2015–April 2016
Any evidence of this word, with this meaning? SemperBlotto (talk) 06:24, 12 August 2015 (UTC)
 * Commonly in use as a nonce word, but I can't see any evidence of a consistent meaning:
 * One hit meaning "belief that humanity may become like a god"
 * I believe someone (God) already exists who has figured it out, and just needs humanity's cooperation. You don't think that someone yet exists, but you do think that because we "are an ingenious species" that maybe "we'll find a way out" on our own.I am what I call a general theist.  You are on the verges of what I call pretheism.
 * One hit that seems to have something to do with messianism:
 * Check up pretheism, they have some good arguments
 * One hit meaning "beliefs of the pre-religious era"
 * The same goes for a hypothetical prereligious era, which should, perhaps, rather be referred to as pretheism (or pre-animism even, since animism is often seen as an older, sometimes pretheistic type of religion).
 * One hit meaning "belief that god is thought rather than being":
 * This schema also and at once illustrates the division of the Hegelian theism of absolute self-consciousness into the atheism of Sartre (for whom the idea of God is significantly the unrealizable human value) and the pretheism'' of Levinas (for whom the idea of God contests itself in the form of the thinking otherwise than being)
 * (Although in the text, there is a hyphened linebreak in pre-theism, the index shows that this is a single word)
 * pre-theism gets a few more hits, but still nothing relevant or consistent. Smurrayinchester (talk) 08:03, 12 August 2015 (UTC)


 * I note that pretheistic is well enough attested, referring to a point in society preceding the development of theism (see, e.g. 1997, Sarah C. Humphreys, Cultures of Scholarship, page 69: "Though not jeopardizing the human status of its practitioners, however, the lowest, dream-related form of animism was categorically pretheistic in Tylor's scheme, merely furnishing the ground upon which gods would later develop". bd2412 T 14:29, 13 August 2015 (UTC)
 * But that's not how it's now framed. There ought to be a posttheism/pretheism comparative pair, instead of what is presently there. Pandeist (talk) 05:59, 31 August 2015 (UTC)

RfV failed, for the contested sense. If another sense can be attested, feel free to attest and add it. bd2412 T 23:57, 24 April 2016 (UTC)