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Eternity, infinity, whatever. Awesome and dangerous concepts to mess with. There is no easy way to get your head around such formidable intellectual challenges.
You and your atheist friends found yourself on common ground discussing your viewpoints on "before time" until you brought the Creator into it. While deists share the rejection of revealed religion with atheists, we diverge when it comes to our feelings about a higher Being.
Myself, as I've stated in other postings, am not comfortable with the word, Creator. Because, for all we know, our planet was seeded by a long forgotten, long dead race from somewhere else in this galaxy. If they still exist, or we found evidence of who the Creator was, in terms of a race of predecessors, that still doesn't reconcile with my suspicion that some form of conscious higher Being has something to do with our existence.
The only easy way to deal with this stuff, is to surrender to some faith based dogma, and accept whatever easy solutions dogmatic solutions have to offer. Welcome to deism, that nasty place between dogma and complete rejection of any possibility of a higher Being.
I'm beginning to suspect that Deists need to re-examine the use of that word, Creator. It's a trigger word. Not necessarily where all our heads are, even though we subscribe to the general principles of deism over any other form of "ism".
If you are troubled by concepts like "beginning of time", and "eternity (infinity)" I suggest you get a copy of Robert Persig's book: "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance", and maybe also read Ernest Becker's Pulitzer Prize winning work: "Denial of Death". I won't try to explain the point of either work, but both gave me a better understanding of what I should worry about and not worry about, and why as a person I'm driven to do so many things that don't make sense.
Hope this helps.
Hello ChromeRadio. Such questions as these represent the same mind-set as wondering how many angels dance on the head of a pin. The wonders of the universe are awesome indeed; but life is short--too short to waste time on the impossible questions--the ones that we will never answer in a million life times. Long ago and far away, I used to waste time pondering these things, till a friend handed me her worn copy of Robert Persig's, "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance": the story of a philosophy professer who goes insane trying to define the word "quality" from a philosophical stand-point; and re-discovers himself and the things that matter in life on a long motorcycle trip with his son. My friend cared about the time I was wasting pondering the unponderable. After reading it, I discussed it with her, then she screwed my brains out. Life has so much to offer in such a short span. Be the best person you can be, look up at the universe and enjoy, and if a person who likes you hands you a book....READ IT!!!
It contains conscious things that are networked into a meta-consciousness.
I don't know if we can have a structural relationship with ultimate concepts ~except~ via consciousness and modeling, since to the best of our determination, that's all "we" as entities are doing - what we see is the inverted picture on the backs of our eyeballs, what we touch are impulses traveling up our arms, and then combined into an internal simulation which then reactions as a series of stages outward. Consciousness is an emergent property of strange loops that can self-refer, and we're building these outward into the universe - literally and metaphorically - so we can simulate the experiences of the entire universe, but within our simulation, we can simulate things that extend past that universe. We put forth organizing principles so understand this, and the relationship of our selves, experiences and other things - I believe in both primordial consciousness and that it made existence for it to evolve, to change.
As for things like a Final Theory of Everything, I don't think it's that there will be a Line Zero in the code, so to speak - it's going to be an infinitely complex latticework - just like there's no conceivable center of the universe: http://www.universetoday.com/111561/where-is-the-center-of-the-universe/ - the First Principle will be that it's all connected and support by everything else.
The book God's Debris by Scott Adams is a good reference for this sort of thinking: http://smile.amazon.com/dp/0740747878 He presents it as an atheist, but as a thought experiment about the nature of the physical universe, the progression of Time and the interaction with consciousness.
This has been an interesting post and threads!
Process Deism Process deists believe that god and the universe are subject to change. God created the universe but continues to re-evaluate it. This god is not omnipotent, but like the pandeist god, he is omnipresent. God, though eternal, experiences the passage of time. Since people also change over time, this thought of deism maintains that life is positive and enjoyable and is validated by the experiences of god.
Read more: Types of Deism | eHow.com http://www.ehow.com/about_5372786_types-deism.html#ixzz1uiKeYIWM
Yes, a non religious government would be considered secular, but a non religious person would also be considered secular. All it means is the lack of defined religious beliefs.
Atheism literally means "without gods" so any belief in something called a god cannot be atheism no matter what your definition of the word "god" is.
As far as the universe being created by mathematical principles and laws of nature, thats probably how it happened. I just wouldn't call that a god.
Deism can actually refer to quite a few ethos, but this subreddit defines it as:
> deism: the belief that God made a perfect machine when he made the universe and it runs on its own without further assistance from God; God does not actively guide or influence events in the world
It can refer to a personal god, but not an interventionist. It can also just refer to an ambiguous creative force.
Pandeism just says that the god that created the universe is one in the same with all gods ever conceived by men.
Panendeism combines deism with panentheism, the belief that the universe is part of God, but not all of God.
The nuances can get very complicated. I recommend looking the words up on Wikipedia and the Oxford Online Dictionary, to get a better understanding of what they mean.
Christmas for the prodigal daughter
One for each of the grandkids when they enter 9th grade.
One for me to go along with the audio book.
If you don't know who Lysander Spooner is. He was a lawyer and an Individualist Anarchist that advocates a Market that's against Private Property and Capitalism. He was also a Deist that was against Christianity and advocate Freethought. He wrote two essays and a book that is focused on Deism and Christianity. If you want to get all three, then it's on Amazon with the book of the title Reasonable Religion: Lysander Spooner on Christianity. You can look it up here here
I'm debating a lot of atheists on reddit. Do you have by any chance a good reason to believe in the existence of a god? I have been told to purchase the following 2 books from amazon:
I wish if these 2 authors had the secret reasons to believe in God, that they would share it for free instead of charging money for it. ☹️
You're very welcome! Please post what you think of it, and also please post a review of it on Amazon here. Thanks!
God Gave Us Reason, Not Religion! Bob Johnson
www.deism.com
I recommend everyone to read Bart Ertman's book about Heaven and Hell.He does research of concept Heaven and Hell in Christianity and Islam
https://www.amazon.com/Heaven-Hell-Afterlife-Bart-Ehrman/dp/1501136739
There's nothing wrong with what you are saying or feeling on this topic. I'm not a mental health professional, but what you're describing sounds like an existential crisis (or existential angst). If it's triggering a depressive response, you should definitely discuss this with your therapist -- there's nothing wrong with that. We go to the doctor when our bodies aren't well, why not the mind?
Read Aristotle, he has a lot of really good writings on happiness, and even calls it the ultimate purpose of existence (in Nicomachean Ethics). Also Buddha's Middle Path.
We are the most evolved beings that we know of. Happiness is (debatably) unique to us, and if it were truly irrelevant, we would have evolved beyond it instead of into it. It's a trait that (in conscious beings) goes beyond the instinctual survival feelings of, say, fear or love. So there's more to it than just the basics.
Keep questioning, keep pondering!
Ask 100 deists these and you'll get 100 answers. It's not a religion with dogma or really any belief other than god exists, yet doesn't intervene. I'll give my opinion (not belief)
No clue, I just highly doubt he created "us". He created the universe, and even that, I feel, was not an intention the way a being that exists within linear time would create. I feel we need to take purpose out of it. Ever read Watchmen? Dr Manhattan knows what's about to happen, as a part of him lives outside of time, yet he also reacts as if he were still contained within....I feel this is as close to an explanation (even though poor) of what the existence of an eternal being would be like.
No
Completely agnostic on it. I hope there is one, and if there is I would imagine it's more of a feeling, a hum so to speak, and individualism is lost. I've got "pan" in my belief structure, so I do believe we are all a part of god.
Nope, same as I don't care about the bacteria in a petri dish, in his view I highly doubt we would be considered conscious creatures. We are as dumb as you can possibly be to invent agriculture....I'd say that stacks up pretty low vs. a universe creating entity.
Not really any. I've read Paine, but nothing specifically related to deism, or agnostic thought. I like a lot of Huxley quotes, but he's an agnostic. I see little value in even the Jefferson bible. Probably the most spiritually meanful and life changing books I've read were both Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and Zen Keys by Thich Nhat Hanh (I've heard some of his other stuff is even better) both books did not change my spirituality much, however they did teach me how to change the way I think, my attention span, self control....basically allowed me to recognize what is "me", and control my physical brain to do as I want (I'm not perfect by any stretch, but much better than I was prior to learning the tools these books gave me)
Edit: formatting
This theme is central to Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Just read this book for the first time, and as has been mentioned before on this subreddit, I believe it is a must read for deists, and pretty much everyone.
The Upanishads read like the Greek Pre-Socratic texts: various assortments of wisdom texts about the nature of Brahman and the nature of the Self.
Another (completely unrelated) text, which I have sitting beside my bed, is La Rochefoucauld's <em>Maxims</em>.
A couple of other books came to mind: St. Augustine's Confessions, and Marcus Aurelius' Meditations.
Both Penguin Books and Oxford World's Classics have a great selection of religious/wisdom literature.
Sure. And if you want to look at it on that basis, you might consider adding When The Stars Are Right: Toward An Authentic R'lyeh Spirituality to your reading list.
You might be interested in this book. Its more or less what you're saying. and its called transtheism.
Well, realistically if you leave religion what you might need first is to learn about replacement ethics before falling into the error a lot of people do when leaving religion of assuming ethics are subjective. Find some good books on utilitarianism, like this one. Get it at your library if you don't want to pay that stupid cost.
I had never thought about a point of creation being creating a past and a future. The Christian that believe the universe is only a few thousand years could be right.
Number Two. Nobody has the correct answer to this one. As a deist, I believe that something with intelligence started it. That intelligence doesn't have a personal interaction with the people of earth.
The founding fathers had a mixture of religions. Faiths of the Founding Fathers is a great book on the subject.
http://www.amazon.com/The-Faiths-Founding-Fathers-ebook/dp/B000SEHT1Q/ref=sr_1_1?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1342184348&sr=1-1&keywords=faiths+of+the+founding+fathers