Why Deism? Deism Makes Sense to Me

(Many people believe Deism is restricted to belief that The Supreme Intelligence/God is impersonal and never intervenes with people or the Creation. That is factually incorrect. Some Deists believe The Supreme Intelligence/God never intervenes, some Deists believe The Supreme Intelligence/God does intervene and some Deists are not sure. This freedom of belief in Deism is due to Deism being free from man-made dogmas as the "revealed" religions suffer from. In fact, the most important Deist, Thomas Paine, believed The Supreme Intelligence/God does intervene through Providence, as is evident in the below linked to well documented essay, Paine on Providence. The Deist George Washington also believed The Supreme Intelligence/God intervenes through Providence and made it clear that he believed Providence is "inscrutable." The editor)

Paine Journal-Paine on Providence Moriarty.pdf

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Belief in a Personal God Without Religion

Evidence of a power far superior to us humans, which one can call ‘God’, that has brought the universe and all that it contains into being and is continually sustaining it is for me just too overwhelming to deny. Belief in God for me, then, stems from recognition of what seems to be the plainly obvious fact of God’s existence.

It also makes sense to me to regard this power that I call ‘God’ as a personal being whom I can relate with through an intimate personal relationship. One reason is that it is only with another being (even if, like God, it is infinitely greater than myself) that I can have such a relationship. Since I intuitively crave the need for this sort of relationship with God, considering God as a personal being makes the greatest sense to me (in contrast to if I were to imagine, as some people do, God to be an impersonal force, something akin to gravity or some sort of energy).

A second reason why the notion of a personal God resonates deeply with me is that I think it makes greater sense and seems more logical than the idea of God as an impersonal force. To fashion and to maintain such a vast and extremely intricately designed universe as we have would, I suppose, require a mind, and an immensely intelligent one at that, without which creating and maintaining this universe would be impossible. Now, as far as I can understand, only a personal being, and not some impersonal force, can have any sort of mind, which can will, design and decree things. This being the case, to me it stands to reason that God, the one who has willed, designed and decreed the universe, is a personal being, a being with a mind that is supremely intelligent, of the sort required to will, design, decree and continually sustain the sort of universe that we know of.

A third reason why the idea of God as a personal being seems logical to me, and certainly more appealing than the concept of God as an impersonal force, is that if most, if not all, living beings, including humans, possess a personality, it would seem logical that the one who has fashioned all living beings must also have a personality, although one that is supremely greater than that of the creatures that it has brought into being.

For these reasons, I believe in a personal God, God as a personal being, a creator with a personality distinct from ‘His’ creations and with whom at least some of ‘His’ creatures, such as human beings, can have an intimate personal relationship.

At the same time, after a long journey of experimenting with various religions, I have come to the firm understanding that religion, a principal means through which humans have historically sought to understand and communicate with God, is a fallible human construct, and not something perfect and error-free that the infallible God has willed, designed and decreed for human beings to believe in and follow. Because of this, while I do believe in God, I do not believe in, identify with or follow any religion.

God Without Religion: Deism’s Liberative Possibility

As I understand things now, God alone is infallible. This means that God is beyond and without religion, because religion is a fallible construct. This, in turn, suggests that fallible human beings can seek to understand and communicate with the infallible God without the mediation of a fallible instrument like religion. This is what my present position is—belief in God, with whom one can have an intimate personal relationship without believing in religion, as conventionally understood. In other words, I am now a sort of Deist, someone who believes in God (Deus in Latin, from which the term Deist is derived) but not in any so-called divinely-revealed religion.

For me, this Deist possibility has been immensely liberating. It has freed me from the enormously burdensome belief (which I suppose I unconsciously subscribed to for a long time) that one simply has to believe in and follow a religion—the supposedly only true one—in order to commune with God or to please ‘Him’ and be in ‘His’ good books and thereby win His favour in this life and gain ‘salvation’ or a place of eternal bliss in a post-death otherworldly realm. It was possibly this belief that led me to move from one religion to another, in search of the supposed one ‘true’ belief system. This process stretched over several decades, till, finally, I arrived at the clear understanding that no ‘one sole true religion’ at all exists (or has ever existed or ever will), that, in fact, all religions are fallible and flawed in one or more ways (and necessarily so, being constructs of fallible and flawed humans), and that, therefore, there was no need at all for me to subscribe to a religion in order to commune with God. Along with this, I also came to realize that one can (and, indeed, should) have one’s own direct, intimate personal relationship with God without this being based on, and mediated by, a religion. This is a possibility that is at the core of the Deist vision and one that I believe ought to be much made better known today.

From Various Religions to Deism

Speaking about myself, one reason why I moved from one religion to another (until at last I quit religion altogether) was that in every case, after a while, I discovered the existence of one or more core teachings and practices integral to that religion which I, sooner or later, came to see as completely unacceptable to me on logical and/or ethical grounds. This was accompanied by, or led to, the realization that the religion in question was flawed and so just could not be said to have been ordained by the infallible Creator and Sustainer of the universe or to be in any other sense perfect as I once may have felt I should believe it was in order to be a faithful believer in that religion. I was now able to see that this religion was clearly a human construct and to be made up of a mix of truth and untruth, good and bad—just as many, or perhaps all, other human constructs are. This being the case, there was no need for me to continue to believe in that religion as being God-ordained or in any other way perfect and so to identify with it (although this did not mean that I could not benefit from the goodness I might discern in it). Finally, after having been through several religions in this manner, I realized at last that I did not need to subscribe to any religion at all, for all the religions seemed obviously fallible and also flawed in some way or the other. I could, I now came to understand, relate with God in my own way, no longer feeling compelled to believe in and follow the rules about the supposed only or best way for this set by someone else, generally centuries ago (such as by some ancient religious authority). In short, I could be a freethinking Deist.

My Deism—belief in, and a personal relationship with, God without religion—has freed me from the unquestioning belief and unthinking conformism that I once regarded as necessary for being a faithful follower of this or that religion during much of the time when I was a religionist. It has liberated me from the compulsion of having to uncritically accept someone else’s truth-claims (generally, those of the founder of a religion or what is attributed to him in a book) which there was no way I could possibly verify. For instance, it was simply impossible for me to know for sure if God had indeed made the founder of a certain religion as His appointee and had revealed His will for humankind through this person (one reason being that he lived centuries before I was born), but as a believer in a religion that was based on this belief, I was expected to unquestioningly regard this mere truth-claim as a firmly established fact. To reject it, or even so much as to entertain doubts about it, was considered execrable anathema. But now, as a sort of Deist, not being bound to any religion means that I no longer feel compelled to blindly believe anything in any belief system that I cannot verify for myself or that I find ethically and logically problematic, which is something I just could not do if I were a faithful follower of a religion. I am fully free now to doubt, and even to dissent from and reject, any such beliefs if I do not find them wholesome or ethically or logically acceptable, this being something completely that is incompatible with unshakable faith in them that is demanded of their flocks by religious orthodoxies.

My Deism—belief in, and an intimate personal relationship with, God without religion—has thus set me free from feeling bound to subscribe to beliefs and practices in various religions that I do not find credible and worthy but which believers in these religions must consent to and even firmly believe in and uphold if they are to be considered their faithful adherents or ‘true believers’. I no longer feel compelled to accept logically and ethically problematic teachings and practices that stem from core dogmas of a religion that faithful believers in it are expected to agree with. As a Deist, I no longer need to make such compromises that would violate my conscience.

Most, if not all, religions, especially the ones that are heavy on dogma, do contain such problematic teachings and practices. Clearly, because of being unacceptable on both logical and ethical grounds, they cannot be said to have been ordained by God, whose commandments, by definition, can never violate reason and morality. Yet, their faithful adherents feel compelled to believe in them as a cardinal aspect of their faith commitment. In this way, they deny to themselves the freedom to think objectively and critically in such matters, having been made to believe that even to merely doubt them is a sin that might have horrific consequences for them, such as evoking God’s wrath and leading to them to being punished by God in this life and possibly also in the Hereafter. Millions upon millions of such religionists believe in, or at least outwardly profess to believe in, such problematic religious teachings simply out of fear of Divine punishment for failing to do so. By believing in God while not in religion, Deists are saved from this crippling mental slavery. Since they do not believe in religion, they are freed from the fear that rejecting, or even simply doubting and questioning, the dogmas of a religion that they intuitively feel are problematic, such as due to logical and ethical reasons, might lead them to earn God’s anger and to be punished by ‘Him’ here, on Earth and/or in Hell. In this way, Deism liberates a person from the pressure of ideological conformity and the loss of intellectual freedom that faithful adherence to dogma-based religion generally demands.

The Deist position of relating with God without this being mediated by belief in, and adherence to, any religion thus avoids a major predicament that vast numbers of religionists contend with—of conforming to oppressive harmful and cruel beliefs and practices that are often an integral and undeniable part of a religion. These are clearly human fabrications, in many cases invented to seek to justify crass greed and exploitation and inhumane social structures and hierarchies and dressed up in the garb of supposed supernatural revelations or realizations so that religionists are made to believe they are of Divine origin or are true in some other compelling sense. There is possibly no evil that one can think of that has not been sanctioned and even actively promoted by one or the other religion at some point of time down the centuries. Slavery, hatred, conflict and even aggressive wars directed against people of other persuasions, colonial conquests, terrorism, oppression of women and sexual minorities, the hounding of dissenters, ‘heretics’ and apostates, denial of freedom of conscience, belief and expression, crass superstition and anti-scientific attitudes, rapacious priestcraft, barbaric treatment of non-human species, pillaging of the bounties of Nature, subjugation of marginalized social groups, including the poor, those branded as ‘lowborn’, and ethnic, cultural and religious minorities, the fostering of steep social hierarchies and egregious economic inequalities and sanctioning the hegemony of ruling elites as supposedly divinely-ordained—these are only some of the evils that have been pursued in the name of religion and that various religions and their adherents have been responsible for over millennia. With its advocacy of relating directly with God without the mediation of any religion and its rejection of the notion of Divinely-revealed religion, Deism at once robustly negates the claims of supposed divine sanction for these and other such evils that various religions and their adherents have historically employed.

Given that many such evils are still routinely sought to be defended, legitimized and actively promoted by several religions and in their name, resulting in misery on a massive scale, Deism’s contemporary relevance is easily evident. As before, even in our own times, unwholesome religious beliefs and practices are a major barrier for many religionists to be able to enjoy a truly wholesome and enriching relationship with God and also with God’s creation. By bypassing religion and its dogmas altogether and holding out the possibility of a direct relationship with God unmediated by religion, Deism effectively addresses the challenge posed by this major problem area that seems to be an integral part of dogmatic religion. This, to me, clearly underlines the immense importance and value of the Deist position—of belief in, and a personal relationship with, God without religion.

Deism as the Basis of a Wholesome Spirituality

Another major reason that I resonate with the Deist position of relating with God without this being mediated by belief in, and adherence to, any religion is simply because God ‘Himself’ is without a religion. And since God ‘Himself’ has no religion, why should we, who are God’s children or made in ‘His’ image? If we are, as it might be said, to become more like God or to reflect God more in our lives, then, logically, would not that mean that just like God, we, too, oughtn’t to have a religion?

Yet another major reason why the Deist position of relating with God without this being mediated by belief in, and adherence to, any religion powerfully appeals to me is that it gives one the freedom to relate with God in the way that best resonates with oneself, a privilege that one cannot enjoy as a firm believer in this or that religion, for all religions have their own rules and regulations for this most intimate of relations that they expect their followers to adhere to, sometimes recommending harsh punishments for nonconformity. Being a Deist, I can make up my own prayers and commune with God just as and when I like without having any one else (like a religious functionary or a supposedly holy book) dictate to me what the supposed ‘best’ or even ‘only’ way is for this most personal of all relations—that between an individual and their Creator. And what a great liberation this truly is!

A further reason why I uphold the Deist position of relating with God without this being mediated by belief in, and adherence to, any religion is because it offers a much-needed alternative to agnosticism and atheism, on the one hand, and conformity to one or the other religion, on the other, that vast numbers of people are perhaps today unconsciously searching for. It can thus satisfy their quest for belief and trust in God and, at the same time, address their unease with dogmatic religion. Many such people may not deny the existence of God, for they may regard evidence of God as simply undeniable. Yet, at the same time, they cannot believe in this or that religion, for various reasons. For instance, they may not agree, on logical and/or ethical grounds, with some core teachings and practices of various religions. Or, they may not wish to be bound by a belief system that has been devised by another person or group of persons, finding this too restrictive, confining, controlling and alienating. For such people, Deism can be a most suitable option since it enables them to have belief in and trust in, and a deep personal relationship with, God without being associated with any religion whatsoever.

Yet another reason why the Deist position of relating with God without this being mediated by belief in, and adherence to, any religion is of great value is that in today’s globalised context, characterized by unprecedented density of interaction between people from different religious, ethnic and national backgrounds, it provides a basis for a much-needed global spirituality that transcends religious particularisms and divisions, and so is especially suitable to address some of the vital needs of our age. It offers the framework of a spirituality that is rooted not in any one religion, but, rather, in trust in the One Source of all beings that transcends religion as such, a sort of universal spirituality that can meet our present needs for global peace and harmonious coexistence. A simple belief and trust in, and personal relationship, with the one God of all, without and beyond religion—which is Deism as I understand it—can be an effective antidote to deep-seated hatred and widespread conflict between rival sets of religionists and also form the firmest basis for bringing people from diverse backgrounds from across the world into close communion, an urgent necessity in today’s globalized context characterized by multiple forms of oppression and conflict engendered by religions or in their name.

For all these many reasons, then, Deism—which I understand basically as a personal relationship with God without and beyond religion—makes sense to me, a particularly relevant and necessary possibility that ought to be made widely known.