Idealism vs. materialism

In the worldview of most modern, classical, and even religious idealists, the material world is an unreliable, less beautiful, somewhat distorted and even evil facade over the true reality of ideas, and yet most current idealists will be the first to acknowledge that most if not all of our actual experience is tied to what appears to be material, or at least that our sensations are indeed entirely structured around space and time — but will continue to suggest this is somehow misleading. It seems people hold an idealistic worldview in order to be able to deny that the self is reducible to matter which obeys ordered or randomistic laws and will in some sense perish after death, and is instead somehow transcendent, and to these people I ask: would you really deny yourself a potentially more fulfilling intellectual and empathetic appreciation of and participation in the material realm just so you can believe in a transcendent self that has genuine agency and individualized consciousness after death? I think we can find room for great beauty in a pantheistic materialism, in which the living, individual consciousness becomes lost in the four-dimensional IT that is God (everything, history, undifferentiated Oneness) after death, but in which our immediate individual experience is real (unadulterated) and finite, we can take the practical jump to a belief in causality, and assume that even though our ability to communicate about objective things is limited, our language does hold a causal relationship to reality and, for that reason, is worth taking seriously, we can finally embrace the unbreakable relationship between our conscious experience and the biology that makes it possible, we can concern ourselves with pain and suffering not out of frustration with God but as part of God, we can humble ourselves before the seemingly determined reality we are a part of while simultaneously acknowledging the fact that at this very moment it is (we are) determining — and then the sunset can be the Actual Face of God.