Amerika

Pierce adopted Cosmotheism[2] as his religion in 1978. In effect it is a form of panendeism, or a impersonal panentheism, or a belief that an impersonal God is the animating force within the universe. Moreover, Pierce’s salutation of the “life principle” adumbrates the Greek Logos, his own professed agnosticism and his atheism regarding a Personal God notwithstanding.

Cosmotheism asserts that “all is within God and God is within all.” It considers the nature of reality and of existence to be mutable and destined to co-evolve towards a complete “universal consciousness,” or godhood. Cosmos means an orderly and harmonious universe and thus the divine is tantamount to reality and consciousness, an inseparable part of an orderly, harmonious, and whole universal system.

In his speech “Our Cause”, Pierce said:
“All we require is that you share with us a commitment to the simple, but great, truth which I have explained to you here, that you understand that you are a part of the whole, which is the creator, that you understand that your purpose, the purpose of mankind and the purpose of every other part of creation, is the creator’s purpose, that this purpose is the never-ending ascent of the path of creation, the path of life symbolized by our life rune, that you understand that this path leads ever upward toward the creator’s self-realization, and that the destiny of those who follow this path is godhood.”

Pierce described his form of panendeism as being based on “[t]he idea of an evolutionary universe … with an evolution toward ever higher and higher states of self-consciousness.”

Wikipedia

While I withhold comment on the other views of the individual quoted above, I think he’s right about the universe. I’ve always been an animist: I believe that all of the universe has, in a sense, life, and that like our thoughts, it is always trying to refine itself toward greater accuracy, and that it does this through a dumb process so it doesn’t get neurotic and lock up like humans. It just keeps inching forward and never giving up. I can see why Jesus Christ, Buddha, etc. might call that “love.”