Deism

Crazy as it sounds, my daily crossword puzzle led to an epiphany this morning.  The clue was "certain believer in God" and I had the first letter, a "D".  I had to fill it in to get the answer, which was "diest".  Now I know the word "diety" as in "God" or at least "a god".  Part of what I like about doing puzzles is looking up words I don't know or fully understand or people I don't recognize so I can learn something new, so I looked it up and guess what?... I'M  A DIEST!!  Finally, a word that describes my place in the "religious" community!  And because I tend to have a bit of the forgetful mind these days, I'm going to quote Wiki so that I can refer back here until it's firmly entrenched in my mind...

Diesm is the philisophical position and rationalistic theology that generally rejects revelation as a source of divine knowledge and asserts that empirical reason and observation of the natural world are exclusively logical, reliable, and sufficient to determine the existence of a Supreme Being as a creator of the universe. More simply stated, Deism is the belief in the existence of God (often, but not necessarily, a God who does not intervene with the universe after creating it), solely based on rational thought without any reliance on revealed religions or religious authority. Deism emphasizes the concept of natural theology —that is, God's existence is revealed through nature.

It then goes into the history of Diesm, which is interesting but a bit of a snooze.  But here's some more interesting stuff I can relate to...

Enlightenment Deism consisted of two philosophical assertions: (1) reason, along with features of the natural world, is a valid source of religious knowledge, and (2) revelation is not a valid source of religious knowledge. Different Deist philosophers expanded on these two assertions to create what Leslie Stephen later termed the "constructive" and "critical" aspects of Deism. "Constructive" assertions—assertions that deist writers felt were justified by appeals to reason and features of the natural world (or perhaps were intuitively obvious or common notions)—included:

• God exists and created the universe.
• God gave humans the ability to reason.

"Critical" assertions—assertions that followed from the denial of revelation as a valid source of religious knowledge—were much more numerous, and included:

• Rejection of all books (including the Quran and the Bible) that claimed to contain divine revelation.
• Rejection of the incomprehensible notion of the Trinity and other religious "mysteries".
• Rejection of reports of miracles, prophecies, etc.
  

(These assertions truly hit home for me!  I've thought for a long time that the Bible really should be tossed out because it causes more havoc and division than any other single thing in this world.  I think that Jesus was a great man whose singular message was love, but the son of God?  No more than any of the rest of us. Died for our sins?  A ridiculous concept.  If "sin" is a thing, and I can point to the fact that Jesus died for my sins, why not sin on?  I am the only person who is responsible for my actions and no other person has the power to atone for what I do.  And I don't think that miracles are from God.  I think they occur from the power of wanting - the power of our own minds.  If they are from God, what makes this guy "worthy" of a miracle and the next not "worthy"? Where does the saying, "The good die young" come from? It highlights the unfairness that the religious concept of good and evil don't seem to be at play when good things happen to/for bad people and good people seem to get the shaft...)  

A central premise of Deism was that the religions of their day were corruptions of an original religion that was pure, natural, simple, and rational. Humanity lost this original religion when it was subsequently corrupted by priests who manipulated it for personal gain and for the class interests of the priesthood, and encrusted it with superstitions and "mysteries"—irrational theological doctrines. Deists referred to this manipulation of religious doctrine as "priestcraft", a derogatory term. For deists, this corruption of natural religion was designed to keep laypeople baffled by "mysteries" and dependent on the priesthood for information about the requirements for salvation. This gave the priesthood a great deal of power, which the Deists believed the priesthood worked to maintain and increase. Deists saw it as their mission to strip away "priestcraft" and "mysteries". Tindal, perhaps the most prominent deist writer, claimed that this was the proper, original role of the Christian Church.

One implication of this premise was that current-day primitive societies, or societies that existed in the distant past, should have religious beliefs less infused with superstitions and closer to those of natural theology. This position became less and less plausible as thinkers such as David Hume began studying the natural history of religion and suggested that the origin of religion was not in reason but in emotions, such as the fear of the unknown. 

Different Deists had different beliefs about the immortality of the soul, about the existence of Hell and damnation to punish the wicked, and the existence of Heaven to reward the virtuous. Anthony Collins, Bolingbroke, Thomas Chubb, and Peter Annet were materialists and either denied or doubted the immortality of the soul.  Benjamin Franklin believed in reincarnation or resurrection. Lord Herbert of Cherbury and William Wollaston held that souls exist, survive death, and in the afterlife are rewarded or punished by God for their behavior in life. Thomas Paine believed in the "probability" of the immortality of the soul. 

Yes, I believe that our "soul" or inner being, spirit...whatever you want to call it, goes on when our body dies.  I think we go into "source" or God and continue on both collectively and ever the individual.  But I don't believe that there is either punishment or reward, because we are born as pure, positive energy and we return into pure, positive energy - when we leave these bodies behind, our spirit is once again pure, positive energy and all that negativity is GONE.  Coming here is about learning and seeking joy.  If we screw that up, it's because we have gotten far from source, become out of alignment with our inner being and the punishment is here on earth - it's the negativity in our lives that is the result of that.  It manifests in degrees of unhappiness and hopelessness, broken relationships, seeming "bad luck", not getting our desires, health issues from mild to severe, a feeling of disconnection... any negative experience or emotion is the "punishment" brought on by our actions that occur from a place of misalignment.

Anyway, I'll be looking into this further.  I've spent a lifetime of sifting and sorting through belief systems to find what feels right and logical to me and this so closely describes what makes the most sense to me.  It's comforting to know that there are other people out there who reject the status quo and think freely, without the constraints of their Bible-based roots.