What is Deism?

 

***Photo taken from Deism website: https://www.deism.com/

Author’s Note

 

"If anyone can refute me—show me I’m making a mistake or looking at things from the wrong perspective—I’ll gladly change. It’s the truth I’m after, and the truth never harmed anyone. What harms us is to persist in self-deceit and ignorance."

 

Marcus Aurelius

 

Reflections

 

Deism is belief in The Supreme Intelligence/God based on reason and Nature. Deism espouses the belief the intelligence-based laws and rules found throughout the known Universe, proclaim the necessary existence of The Supreme Intelligence/God. Deists believe the only possible Word of God is the Universe and Creation itself. Deism allows a follower to live a life with dignity.

 

According to the 18th century philosopher Immanuel Kant, dignity originates with, and is dependent upon, the veneration of our will for the laws of Nature. Kant’s reasoning can only encourage people to value our own self-worth and the self-worth of others, to be kind to one another and to value and respect all life on Earth

 

One of the most dangerous attacks against the dignity of us and against the dignity of others comes from the various man-made “revealed” religions (Judaism, Christianity, Islam).

 

Take for example the essential man-made dogma of Christianity, original sin. According to this ungodly teaching and belief, all of humanity is born evil because Adam and Eve listened to and acted upon the advice they received from a talking snake/serpent to eat from the tree of knowledge of good and evil. It’s impossible to have dignity and to value your own self-worth, let alone the dignity and self- worth of other people, if you believe you and everyone else is born evil and stained with sin.

 

Voltaire pointed out the profound truth that faith is not at all needed for belief in God. Voltaire wrote:

“What is faith? Is it to believe that which is evident? No. It is perfectly evident to my mind that there exists a necessary, eternal, supreme, and intelligent being. This is no matter of faith, but of reason.”

 

            None of the revealed religions promote human dignity. They are all based on fear that God will punish them for not believing teachings that violate our innate God-given reason.

 

The Hebrew Bible (Old Testament), the New Testament, the Quran and the Book of Mormon portray God as a foolish, jealous, and violent bully who promotes slavery and genocide.  We must honestly ask ourselves how we can truly love God and not oppose these anti-God religious teachings about a God who kills every man, woman, child, and unborn child in the flood, except for the occupants of the mythical Noah’s ark. Teachings such as Leviticus 25:44-46 which claims God told the Jews not to own their fellow Jews as slaves, but to take all their slaves from Gentile people and their children to own “forever”. Or Jesus teaching that we should fear God because God can burn and torture us for eternity in hell (Luke 12:5). The list goes on and on ad nauseam.

 

Thomas Paine addressed this issue when he asked us this question that we need to answer in The Age of Reason:

 

“Is it because ye are sunk in the cruelty of superstition, or feel no interest in the honor of your Creator, that ye listen to the horrid tales of the Bible, or hear them with callous indifference? Hopefully, over time, she will realize that God gave her reason and not religion, allowing her to finally appreciate, embrace and use what God gave her, and reject the ungodly nonsense of the Bible and Christianity. The fear that if we stop believing in the religion, God will punish us by burning us in Hell for eternity along with some earthly punishments as well.”

 

Paine taught us that God and religion are two very different things. He also taught me that you cannot truly love The Supreme Intelligence/God while still embracing the evil and foolish stories about God which are found in all the “holy” books. His stirring words of,

 

“It is incumbent on every man who reverences the character of the Creator, and who wishes to lessen the catalogue of artificial miseries and remove the cause that has sown persecutions thick among mankind, to expel all ideas of revealed religion, as a dangerous heresy and an impious fraud.”

 

Doug Tozier did a great job of addressing this problem in his article How Was Abraham the Father of a Great Nation? He wrote,

 

“We must examine more closely what we are being asked to believe about Abraham (or Abram before God called him to conquer the world). We must ask why we should believe that he is the chosen one? And the answer is simple: blind faith needs no reason. But we ought to expect more and not accept a belief that goes against every shred of decency we have come to know in modern times.”

 

He continues,

 

“But let us not forget that this is how we are told the religion of our fathers came to be. We are asked to believe that this is how God accomplishes his plan in the world. And this is how all religions come to us: claiming special revelation and demanding unquestioning belief in things that violate the conscience that God himself gave us to keep us from accepting such superstition. We normally call such superstition by another name: mythology.

 

“Deism precludes mythology, for what need have we of myths when we have all the evidence of God we need in his marvelous creation: Nature. It is the God of Nature who all religions try to imitate and mutate but fail to exemplify. Religion is simply the personification, through superstition, of this God who is evident in the natural world we see with our own eyes. We need no fairy tales to see this God, who speaks to us without any mystery, and only asks that we be good stewards of this world.”

 

The Universe is the only possible “Word of God”, and it is not only always with us, but we’re also actually living and thinking parts of it. Thomas Paine did a wonderful job of pointing this fact out when he wrote,

“I believe it is only in the CREATION that all our ideas and conceptions of a Word of God can unite. The Creation speaks a universal language, independently of human speech or human language, multiplied and various as they may be. It is an ever existing original, which every man can read. It cannot be forged; it cannot be counterfeited; it cannot be lost; it cannot be altered; it cannot be suppressed. It does not depend upon the will of man whether it shall be published or not; it publishes itself from one end of the earth to the other. It preaches to all nations and to all worlds; and this Word of God reveals to man all that is necessary for man to know of God.''

In The Age of Reason, Thomas Paine did a great job of summing up the kind of person Christianity makes and how prayer is used to manipulate The Supreme Intelligence/God. Paine wrote:

“Yet, with all this strange appearance of humility and this contempt for human reason, he ventures into the boldest presumptions; he finds fault with everything; his selfishness is never satisfied; his ingratitude is never at an end. He takes on himself to direct the Almighty what to do, even in the government of the universe; he prays dictatorially; when it is sunshine, he prays for rain, and when it is rain, he prays for sunshine; he follows the same idea in everything that he prays for; for what is the amount of all his prayers but an attempt to make the Almighty change his mind, and act otherwise than he does? It is as if he were to say: Thou knowest not so well as I.”

Silent Prayer

 

Creator God, thank you for imagining us in your dreams!

 

Music

 

Beethoven – Moonlight Sonata 3rd Movement

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XUzwdBQDzxw

Barry