AFTER HAVING CHOSEN TO BE A DEIST

After having chosen to be a Deist, I have come to believe that we humans experience our perceived realities and react to them at different levels of understanding and pragmatism at different times.

The following levels are merely my best attempt so far to put into words the concepts I am trying to express. A second caveat is that I realize that my thinking on any of these posited levels can never be in complete isolation from the others. A third caveat is that I know that the best I can hope for is that any given thought I have has been as objectively differentiated from the others as I am capable of achieving.

So here they are. Please tear them apart... as objectively as you are capable of being.

Level 1: I need to eat and sleep almost every day if I am going to be me... today, tomorrow, and in the near future. This is arguably the level of thinking that is omnipresent, consciously and/or unconsciously.

Level 2: I need to provide for my sustenance and safety to ensure my existence...in the present, in the near future, and during my lifetime.

Level 3: I need to be social because I need my family and society to enrich my life... and theirs in turn... in all that that entails.

Level 4: I need to become as competent as I can be...socially, educationally and morally... if I am to live the best that I can while I am alive.

Level 5: I must accept and/or ponder the meanings of my cultures' teachings and the evidence provided by science in my effort to understand the meaning of all that I am able to perceive and do in my lifetime.

Level 6: I must accept that it is impossible to unerringly fulfill all of my obligations all of the time on each of the previous levels... even if (and maybe because) my perceptions of what they are may be flawed.

Level 7: I must pick and choose to the best of my ability the aspects of each of the previous levels of understanding that best comfort my understanding of what my species has labeled 'existential angst'...while knowing that I will never know for sure if I am doing 'the right thing'... and nobody else does either.

The efficacy of my having chosen to be a Deist is coming from what I perceive to be my best efforts at Levels 5, 6, and 7.

But I could be wrong...

Author: Lyman Paul Grover

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CLOSER TO DEISM THAN ATHEISM

While Baron D'Holbach is normally considered a staunch advocate of atheism, I've found a few passages in The System of Nature which suggest he might have had a belief closer to Deism than atheism. The following passage certainly caught my eye:

"Of whatever nature this great Cause of causes may be, it is evident to the slightest reflection that he has been sedulous to conceal himself from our view; that he has rendered it impossible for us to have the least- acquaintance with him, except through the medium of nature, which he has unquestionably rendered competent to everything. This is the rich banquet spread before man; he is invited to partake, with a welcome he has no right to dispute; to enjoy that which must make him most acceptable; to be happy himself is to make others happy; to make others happy is to be virtuous, to be virtuous he must revere truth. To know what truth is, he must examine with caution, scrutinize with severity, every opinion he adopts.
This granted, is it at all consistent with the majesty of the Divinity, is it not insulting to such a being to clothe him with our wayward passions, to ascribe to him designs similar to our narrow view of things; to give him our filthy desires; to suppose' he can be guided by our finite conceptions: to bring him on a level with frail humanity, by investing him with our qualities, however much we may exaggerate them; to indulge an opinion that he can either act or think as we do; to imagine he can in any manner resemble such a feeble play-thing, as is the greatest, the most distinguished man? No! it is to degrade him in the eye of reason; to violate every regard for truth, to set moral decency at defiance; to fall back into the depth of Cimmerian darkness. Let man, therefore, sit down cheerfully, to the feast; let him contentedly partake of what he finds; but let him not worry the Divinity with his useless prayers, with his shallow-sighted requests, to solicit at his hands that which, if granted, would in all probability be the most injurious for himself: these supplications are, in fact, at once to say, that with our limited experience, with our slender knowledge, we better understand what is suitable to our condition, what is convenient to our welfare, than the mighty Cause of all causes who has left us in the hands of nature: it is to be presumptuous in the highest degree of presumption; it is impiously to endeavour to lift up a veil which it is evidently forbidden man to touch; that even his most strenuous efforts attempt in vain."

That, to me, sounds like a man that believes in a Deistic God that he knows he could never have any true "knowledge" of, and accepts his limitations.

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