Pantheism is the view that everything in the universe is part of the whole, the whole being divine or God or Nature or the Universe. This does not imply that everything in the universe is divine, but that the sum of all the parts is. Pantheism can be theistic (believing in the existence of a god or gods) or nontheistic (not believing in the existence of a god or gods), but it rejects the notion of a judging or loving god and eschews anthropomorphism. It is distinct from panentheism, which posits that God’s mind is more than the universe (and that God loves us), and from pandeism, which posits God is the universe (often through a process intentional or otherwise of becoming the universe). The first known appearance of the term pantheism was in a 1697 book to describe the beliefs of Dutch Jewish philosopher Baruch Spinoza (1632–77), while the term panentheism first appeared in 1828 and pandeism, in opposition to these concepts, in 1859. As the term is used today, some believe pantheism is a religion, others that it is a religious belief, and some that it is a non-religious philosophical position. Mainstream Judaic, Christian and Islamic theism differs from pantheism in asserting that God is present in everything (omnipresent), not that He is collectively everything. However, the mystical traditions and currents within Abrahamic religions tend to be pantheistic. Pantheistic views have often been labelled heretical. The number of people self-identifying as pantheist in national censuses is relatively low (about 10,000 worldwide). The first organisation to establish Pantheism as a church (claiming pantheism to be a religion) was the US-based Universal Pantheist Society, in 1975. According to their website, the pantheist doesn’t ‘place ultimate faith’ on books, prophets ‘or any of the inventions of Man, but rather in the creative Universe itself.’ Pantheism can retrospectively describe many religions and worldviews, including Zoroanstrianism, Gnosticism, Hermeticism, Taoism, Kabbalistic Judaism, Stoicism, many nature and folk religions and some forms of Hinduism and Buddhism. Pantheism can also describe many New Age beliefs, Unity Churches, Christian Science and Scientology. Most people holding a pantheistic worldview would not self-identify as a pantheist. Foundational to the pantheist worldview as it is known today in the West is the work of Spinoza, widely considered as one of the most important, radical and enduringly relevant Western philosophers, branded heretical in his lifetime. His posthumously published treatise, Ethics, written in Latin, proposes that there is only one substance in the universe, namely God, and that everything else that exists is within God. Spinoza did not propose attitudes of awe or worship before God or Nature, which he believed led to superstition and subservience to religious authorities, but rather a philosophical and scientific orientation, which he believed led to enlightenment. Pantheism today can and often does include nature worship or belief in nature as holy or sacred. After Spinoza, some figures frequently identified as foundational or as holding pantheist views include German writer Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832), composer Ludwig van Beethoven (1770–1827), English poet William Wordsworth (1770–1850), American poets Walt Whitman (1819–1862) and Emily Dickinson (1830–1886), American writers Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) and Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862), Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung (1875–1961), and theoretical physicist Albert Einstein (1879–1955), American nature writer Rachel Carson (1907–1964), writer and activist Alice Walker (b. 1944). Because pantheism is not anthropocentric and encourages observation of nature, pantheists are often deeply committed to environmental issues like sustainability and biodiversity. Pantheists often avoid processed food, and many are vegetarian. Many pantheists mark natural cycles, such as changing seasons, solstices, lunar cycles or sunrise and sunset in some way. The Universal Pantheist Society claims to follow ‘no formal creed in the sense of a listing of beliefs to which all members must adhere’. As well, ‘established places of worship are within the hearts and minds of the Pantheist’, and the construction of places of worship ‘would be contrary to the Pantheist spirit’. Co-founder Harold Wood writes that the existence of their Pantheist church proves that ‘a church doesn’t need a creed, it doesn’t need a venal priesthood; it doesn’t even need weekly Sunday services.’