[RickSp]

Does pantheism need to be logical? If you consider God to be the transcendent reality and nature and human beings are just manifestations of the divine, then why shoehorn rationality into it? It seems to me that whether you consider this to be the literal truth or a lovely metaphor hardly matters. Depending how you apply the idea, the outcome can either rational or irrational.

I think the real issue arises when one starts to assign a belief structure around this basic idea. If you infer that all life is sacred and that you cannot eat any living thing and therefore consign yourself to blissful starvation, that is decidely not rational. Many or most "religious" beliefs I have come across are only incrementally destructive but are destructive nevertheless.

If on the other hand you start with the premise that common sense, which is to say rationality, will shape your ethics (and even possibly your nutrition), the outcome may be far better.

I come at the issue from the opposite direction. As an atheist I start without a god. I nevertheless consider myself to be part of nature and of the universe as a whole. I am free to discover the wonder, the mystery, the magic and the possibililties of all that is before me. Life, nature, and the world around me are all sacred, in a real, if non-religious, sense.

It is not terribly different from the pantheist viewpoint except that where the pantheist strips personality from the concept of god, the atheist also dispenses with the label. Almost everything else remains the same.

Karma at least as a metaphor is completely rational. Depending on what you mean by the terms, "absolute virtue" could be as well.