GeddyBass2112

I'll scrub all my previous posts in this thread...I'm a deist, no pretending about it.

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Cello fund: $300/$750.

SIRIUSB

Though I applaud your stance can you tell us what differs you from Atheism?

GeddyBass2112

Deists believe, to put this simply, in a God who created the universe according to the scientific principles we observe for ourselves, and that this same God gave us the gift of reason, with which we understand the universe.

This God however is limited ONLY to creating the universe, and setting up those initial principles which allowed the universe to come into being as it is today.

To answer the question, atheism is similar to deism in that it rejects superstition and replaces it with scientific and logic principles, but the major difference is that in the case of the deist, there exists a God who gave us those principles.

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Cello fund: $300/$750.

RVCA

Deism is the only form of theism I can respect, however...

"If the general picture of a big bang followed by an expanding universe is correct, what happened before that? Was the universe devoid of all matter and then the matter somehow, suddenly created? How did that happen? In many cultures the customary answer is that a god or gods created the universe out of nothing. But if we wish to pursue this question courageously, we must of course ask the next question: where did god come from? If we decide that this is an unanswerable question, why not save a step and conclude that the origin of the universe is an unanswerable question? Or if we say that god always existed, why not save a step and conclude that the universe always existed?"

Then where did God come from? (Carl Sagan) - YouTube

The Batlord

It's not that I don't respect the deists themselves, as they're usually far more intelligent and reasonable than most, but deists strikes me as atheists too scared to not believe in god. They get rid of everything religious, except for the actual god belief.

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GeddyBass2112

Major problem for even atheists is that for a lot of people, God and the traditional ideas of heaven, hell, answered prayer, belief in sin and all the usual traditional ideas that come in the 'God package'. Even atheists cannot understand the idea of a God without all those other things attached.

But the belief in a God CAN exist without believing in prayer, the afterlife or anything else. Indeed, God doesn't need these ideas to exist.

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Cello fund: $300/$750.

RVCA

I understand perfectly the type of deism that you subscribe to. My question is this: if you hold god to be an immutable and unchangeable constant in the equation of life, why not eliminate him/her/it from the equation altogether? Perhaps a god did create everything, but there is no evidence one way or the other. So why not stick to Occam's Razor and shave off the unnecessary bits? Why can't the laws of physics and the existence of the universe itself be the "end all be all", and why do they need a creator who is doomed to sit idly by for the rest of eternity?