u/Glad_Writing

▲ 9 r/deism

I'm thinking of writing an essay, called something like "articles of modern deism". I may change the title later since it is more my personal views. It defines God and Deism, but also seems to explain the following:

  • God does not take the form of creation. We cannot imagine God's form and God lacks human characteristics. God has no gender. (I use the traditionally gender-neutral pronoun "he", but "she" and "they" are also fine, obviously "it" is bad because it is inanimate and generally seen as disrespectful when applied to something animate).
  • God is omnipotent and omniscient. God is logically above having human emotions - our anthropocentric view of everything causes many organized religions to fail to understand this.
  • Organized religion is a result of the human zeitgeist trying to reconcile the fact that something clearly created all of this with the fact we can't typically perceive the divine through traditional senses like (sight, smell, touch, taste, hearing). They try to explain the inexplicable through dogma and legend.
  • Since God created the universe, life is an indirect creation of God as well. As such, we can do our best to respect this life in all of its forms. However, by observation of the natural world, it is evident that personal health and the survival of one's self and ones species should always come as a top priority. Essentially, there is a loose "do as little harm (as feasible)" doctrine. E.g., killing animals for meat is fine because it's good for one's health. But we should try to be as humane as possible.
  • Just because we won't be struck down by lightning for doing so doesn't mean we should disrespect God. He created us, after all.
  • We need to recognize that there are universal human morals (I'll list out what they are and why), we do not need God to police us in order to understand this.
  • The omnipotent force outside our physical reality is not subject to the entropy of that physical reality.

Also, I'll include:

  • How deism explains the problem of suffering
  • How we can tell prayer is useless ("God answers in his time, and sometimes doesn't answer at all in a way you wanted" means that you're selectively looking for evidence that it worked.
  • Evidence for the existence of God from both our current scientific understanding and the observation of the natural world (I won't list it out here because there's so much of it)
  • Evidence against the dominant Abrahamic religions, such as "Why would God, an omnipotent force who could literally speak to humans "from the heavens", only communicated through prophets, in very small regions of the Levant? Why wouldn't God want all of us to know about Him and make the choice to believe or not to?
  • Evidence that revelation isn't really from the divine (again, too much to include here)
  • It may be easy to assume that monotheism is an idea originating in the Levant (the OG one Atenism, as well as Judaism, Christianity, Islam all originate in or around the Levant). But actually, the idea was present in several other places. Several pre-contact native American groups, Sikhs from India, and ancient China also practiced a form of monotheism, albeit theologically different from Abrahamic religions. Many societies realized that monotheism makes the most sense.

Sorry, I tried to keep it brief. Is there anything else I should add?

Edit: forgot the one of the most important ones, "why doesn't God intervene and why are we selfish and anthropocentric enough to think that He does?"

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u/Glad_Writing — 9 days ago