[DrCaleb]

BartSimpson BartSimpson:

DrCaleb DrCaleb:

I've never said I don't believe in God.

I hope you don't think I addressed that to you.

Not specifically, no. But you did say "you people.." so I didn't think it obtrusive if I posted the things I've been bottling up since Friday.

[BartSimpson]

Ah. Mea culpa. Mea maxima culpa.

In 'you people' I'm referring to that collection of obnoxious types who have no qualms in contradicting themselves if the target of their contradictory arguments happens to be Christian.

I may not always agree with you but I've never observed you putting passion before intellect.

[DrCaleb]

BartSimpson BartSimpson:

Ah. Mea culpa. Mea maxima culpa.

In 'you people' I'm referring to that collection of obnoxious types who have no qualms in contradicting themselves if the target of their contradictory arguments happens to be Christian.

I may not always agree with you but I've never observed you putting passion before intellect.

Ahhh. No, it's not in my nature to 'flame' nor insult.

[CanadianJeff]

Lemmy Lemmy:

al·le·go·ry noun \ˈa-lə-ˌgȯr-ē\
plural al·le·go·ries

Definition of ALLEGORY

1: the expression by means of symbolic fictional figures and actions of truths or generalizations about human existence; also : an instance (as in a story or painting) of such expression

2: a symbolic representation : emblem

I would be more then willing to let that be if people didn't cherry pick which parts of the bible are metaphor (slavery for example) and which parts are literal truths (homosexuality).

[Lemmy]

DrCaleb DrCaleb:

I've never said I don't believe in God. I don't believe in Religion. I maintain, I do believe in the morality that many religions profess (but don't always practice). Note the title of the thread - "Analytic thinking can decrease religious belief". Not decrease Faith. The inherent contradictions in Religion do not lend themselves to the logical mind.

And yes, I would post the same things I've said in this and other threads like this about Islam, or the Hare Krishnas for that matter. I've met a few people that for whom faith and religion are practiced as intended, and those are the kind of people that have earned my lifelong respect.

CanadianJeff CanadianJeff:

I would be more then willing to let that be if people didn't cherry pick which parts of the bible are metaphor (slavery for example) and which parts are literal truths (homosexuality).

...or when people utterly mistake one for the other.

[ShepherdsDog]

You do realize trhat the Bible was written by men(from the latter bronze and early iron age) interpreting, old regional myths and history they'd picked up while wandering from Sumer to the Levant.. The only thing in the Bible, directly attributable to 'God'(or a god dictating something to someone) are the ten commandments

[Zipperfish]

$1:

$1:

Which part? Godel's Incompleteness Theorem? The basis of logical deduction on unproved axioms? Or the Problem of Induiction?

The bolded is what is Incorrect.

Your faith in rason is strong.

[Zipperfish]

andyt andyt:

It just goes to show how we need to define terms when arguing about this stuff. The garden of Eden was eternal - no aging, no death, just everlasting existence. Taken literally, I think it conflicts with anything we know about the universe. Logically you can't disprove it, like you really can't prove the absence of anything. But you have to buy into a whole different cosomology to take the garden of eden literally.

With logic you can disprove things. For instance, God and free will. If God is omniscient, then He knows what is going to happen. If He knows what is going to happen then the future of the universe is deterministic. If the universe is deterministic there can be no free will.

The problem, as I see it, with most religions is that they don't appear to share the "common reality" that our consciousnesses otherwise share. Again, from my blog.

$1:

If we assume, for the sake of argument, that an objective universe exists and that you are not all just figments of my imagination dreamt up to keep my mind occupied, then we admit to a common reality shared by other minds.

Language--from Swahili to body language to mathematics--is the means by which we communicate between minds about the common reality we share. So Ug the caveman, at some point, developed a word for "water," to express the common experience of that wet stuff that we like so much. Even in other languages, where there is no communication between the cultures, we find that, in each, a word for water has developed.

We are sufficiently rooted in this common reality, it seems, that we can progress to abstractions. So, for instance, abstractions such as astronomy and mathematics have developed independently in different cultures and, when compared, these abstractions have been compatible with each other, suggesting this common reality.

However, with creation myths, the common reality model fails. Cultures have remarkably different creation myths, that do not correlate. This doesn’t of course, disprove God, but suggests that religious creation myths do not address a common reality.

Although supernatural creation myths do not generally correlate, they do exist in every culture I can think of. The universe, it seems, is unknowable through mere empiricism and logic. It doesn’t stretch the bounds of imagination to suppose that humans of all ages have had an inkling that, in the vastness of the universe, they don't have an inkling. So perhaps it's human nature to construct or (more usually) adopt a cohesive model of the universe to make sense of that which we don't understand. It's a necessary anchor.

It said that "nature abhors a vacuum." Perhaps the same is true of our minds. Where a vacuum exists, we will create connections, extrapolate intuitive patterns we already know. We see our Father who art in Heaven as a big beard in the sky, because our father--a figure of compassion and power from our pre-memories--was a big beard in the sky. Or maybe we are actually interpolating patterns which are really out there, but not within our rational minds to grasp--that is to say maybe there is there is a God Supreme Being or gods, which are simply beyond our rational sense, but within the bounds of intuitive reckoning.

[andyt]

DrCaleb DrCaleb:

andyt andyt:

and having Caleb jump in and fling shit and offer nothing else, is deemed as a good argument, while I'm a troll.

Like I've said before, I don't usually post in topics I agree with. The whole premise of the thread is a big "Well Duh!" for those of us that have been thinking analytically about religion for years.

What that has to do with you taking the trouble to throw unprovoked shit at me, I'll never know.

[andyt]

BartSimpson BartSimpson:

andyt andyt:

I'll take Karen Anderson's word over yours any day. When a blog quotes Origen, it doesn't mean that Origen never said it. I've cited a number of sources. You've cited yourself, that's it. Then thrown around some derogatives like liberals. Not much of an argument you've presented here.

But of course on CKA, attacking my sources while offering none of your own, and having Caleb jump in and fling shit and offer nothing else, is deemed as a good argument, while I'm a troll.

Andy, positing that Christians were once a bunch of academic philosophers who sat around trying to parse the meanings of Biblical metaphors is sort of 180° turn for you, isn't it? Really, this premise is that Christians were amazingly advanced in their grasp of philosophy until the advent of those eebil fundamentalists?

The fact, Andy, is that the vast majority of Christians up until the 1600's or so were illiterates who mostly took the Bible at face value as it was told to them by their clergy.

Fundamentalism rose in the early 1800's at the same time that modern printing techniques coupled with a spreading literacy allowed individual Christians to read the Bible for themselves.

Once these people started reading the Bible for themselves they started asking their orthodoxies where their Scriptural authority came from for scads of practices and traditions. Thus they started to draw their own denominations towards a fundamental relationship to the Word.

What you call 'fundamentalism' is often times simply a movement by modern Christians to clear away centuries of hogwash and bureacracy away from the Word. Fundamentalism is analytical thinking on the part of Christians who read the Bible and then dismiss what their orthodox church leaders have told them to believe.

To propose that 'analytical thinking' reduces religious belief is exactly the kind of crap I'd expect from Derby or any other nonbeliever.

I just don't get you people.

You say you don't believe in God yet you spend more effort fighting Him than most church people invest in believing in Him.

Whatever.

Let me wrap this up and say that 1) you'd NEVER post something like this about Islam and 2) posting stuff like this makes you look like an ass.

As I said, I'll take the word of Karen Armstrong over yours. She seems to have more cred here than you do: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karen_Armstrong#Honours

$1:

The title of Karen Armstrong’s latest book, The Case for God (Knopf Canada, $34.95), sounds like another entry in the debate that has erupted over such arguments for atheism as Richard Dawkins’s The God Delusion and Christopher Hitchens’s God Is Not Great. But the distinguished London-based historian of religion claims she has no interest in fanning the flames. As she explained to the Georgia Straight during a recent visit to Vancouver, she’d rather show how the clash between religious fundamentalists and their devoutly atheist opponents is a historical aberration, brought on by ideas about religion that are both ill-founded and thoroughly modern.

Georgia Straight: You’re a historian of the Bible and of concepts of God. People might think of this pursuit as somehow a process of disenchantment—taking things that were previously thought sacred and beyond time and moving them inside history and removing that aura. Yet you argue that the Bible is still a deeply spiritual document.

Karen Armstrong: Well, it is, but you’ve got to work with it. And what the book [The Case for God] goes on to say is, yes, it was a spiritual document in its time, but before the modern period, nobody ever thought of taking this literally. This is the modern disease. I mean, people are now reading the Bible with literalism that is unparalleled in the history of religion.

And the rabbis showed that the Bible wasn’t something that fell down from heaven and cast in stone forever. You had to work on it and make it say something new, for the rabbis, even if that didn’t have any relation to the intention of the biblical author, because the word of God is infinite, and it must be made audible in each generation. So the rabbis felt perfectly free to invent new meanings, to discard certain books—just reverently laying them aside—and using their ingenuity. They used the example that the scripture revelation was not something that happened once on Mount Sinai—it was continued every time a Jew confronted the sacred text and brought his own interpretation to it. And that was all part of a continuous process since Mount Sinai. You must use scripture as a kind of springboard to make you available—to sort of apply this to the present.

And similarly the fathers of the church—called “fathers of the church” because they formed the Christian tradition—said you could not interpret these texts literally. There’s too many contradictions. And so from the fathers of the church right up until the 16th and 17th centuries, in the West, Christians sought four different levels of scriptural interpretation. You started with the literal sense, you moved on to the moral sense, you then moved on to allegorical-spiritual sense, and finally to the mystical sense. And it was an ascent from the body of the literal sense to the spirit of the others, and each text had to be interpreted in this fourfold way. So no one thought of sticking with the literal meanings.

GS: In the book you talk about these literal readings as the result of a misguided attempt to to take a scientific view of religious texts.

KA: Yes, and we started to read it like any other text. But it’s important—I’d like you to mention the fact that, for example, Saint Augustine, who’s the father of western Christianity and revered by protestants and Catholics alike as a major authority, says that if, for example, a biblical text contradicted science, it had to be reinterpreted. And that was the general practice right up until the 17th century.

A lot of the people who today are opposing, in the United States, the teaching of evolution in the public schools are Calvinists. But Calvin himself said the Bible has nothing to teach us about science. Science is very useful, he said, and it must not be impeded because—and I quote—some “frantic persons” tried to denigrate what they don’t understand. If you want to learn about cosmology, and if you want to learn about astronomy, don’t look to the Bible. It has nothing to tell us about that—go elsewhere. And at the same time, a cardinal in the Vatican during the Galileo crisis said, “In scripture, the Holy Spirit is telling us how to go to heaven, not how the heavens go.”

GS: You show in your book that even the ancient Hebrew Bible is split between compassion and chauvinism. In your own work, you’re obviously in favour of the first as being the truest spiritually and the most useful to us now. Would it be better, then, to redact the Bible, and remove the parts you don’t like?

KA: I don’t think you can do that in a democratic society. You know, the devout often sneer at biblical criticism, but I think you need to make study of these texts, a serious study of these difficult texts. We’ve all got them. The Christian New Testament is full of nasty stuff that actually caused Jewish pogroms. You can’t ignore that. The Book of Revelation is a highly problematic book. And the Koran, too, has its passages—but there’s far more violence and extremism in the Bible than there is in the Koran.

Now, what we need to do is look at these texts, study them—and I like to do it in a collaborative way, so Jews, Christians, Muslims do it together, so instead of just pointing the finger at other people’s difficult texts, ignoring those in our own—look at them. How did they come into the tradition? What part have they played over the centuries in the tradition as a whole? Why have they come to the fore now? You know, really in depth. That’s number one—that’s a project.

Saint Augustine, who’s not someone I quote often with great joy—I have issues with Saint Augustine on many things—but on biblical interpretation and on the sciences, he’s excellent. Again, he said, “If a scriptural text seems to teach hatred, you must give it an allegorical interpretation and make it teach charity.” And that probably won’t do for us now, because we don’t think allegorically.

GS: That would seem to many present-day readers as if you’re bending the text to suit your purposes. It wouldn’t be considered valid.

KA: But the rabbis didn’t mind doing that. Basically, I think it’s better in our sort of rationalistic world—I was brought up a Catholic, and I never heard the word evolution in a religious context. When we were preached to or had retreats, they segued very easily from the literal text to an allegorical interpretation.

RELIGION AS WORK, NOT WORDS

GS: One of the main things you argue in The Case for God is that practical applications or actions are the only context in which these truths or beliefs make sense.

KA: Yes. Religion is a practical discipline. And these doctrines, as we call them, were designed to tell us how to behave, not to tell us what to believe.

GS: Certain skeptics are going to see this as a process of auto-suggestion, a dangerous state in which anything can be true.

KA: But that’s not it. Try it out. I’m with the Buddha here. He used to say, “If my teaching doesn’t do it for you, leave it.””¦It’s like saying, “I don’t believe in athletics because I am not able to do the long jump or run the 100 yards in 10 seconds.” Religion is something you have to do. And it’s only when you do it that it makes sense. So to sit on the sidelines in a magisterial way, assessing whether you believe it or not, that’s a modern attitude. That’s what I’ve tried to show in the book.

GS: When does this modern attitude emerge, historically?

KA: It’s the scientific revolution. To say that’s there’s always been enmity between religion and science is, as I show in the book, not true. Despite blips like Galileo, the unfortunate fact was that religion and science were in love with one another throughout the 17th and 18th centuries. Newton thought that he’d proved the existence of God, and God was essential to his physics. But of course, it was only a few generations before people were able to get rid of the God hypothesis and say, “We find a natural explanation for the cosmos.” And that wouldn’t have mattered had not the churchmen become so intoxicated with this scientific proof of God that they made this rationalized God essential to the Christian tradition, and they lost the older habits of thought I describe in the book.

GS: In the book you call this an addiction. Religious leaders in this period didn’t realize it, but their fascination with scientific proofs of religious ideas was extremely damaging to their cause, you argue.

KA: Because religion was never designed to tell us the origin of the universe. It wasn’t designed to help us find out things that we could find out with natural reason. It was to help deal with those aspects of life for which there are no easy answers: mortality, pain, old age—which I never used to worry about. I kept wondering why the Buddha, for example, made such a fuss about old age, until my mother got old and ill, and it was a dreadful thing to see. And I hope I don’t live to be too old or at least lose my faculties.

So, old age and death, the injustice that we perpetrate on one another, the senselessness of life—and religion was about that. Nobody took the first chapter of Genesis as a literal account of the origins of life, until the 17th century. You know, I’m not knocking science—science is terrific, and as someone who’s benefited from modern medicine enormously, I’m all for it. But it has nothing to tell us about religion, and religion has nothing to tell us about science. Before the modern period, everybody knew that.

GS: Your own relationship with religion has gone through several stages. You were once a Catholic nun, then went through a period of deep skepticism and even hostility toward religion, before reevaluating religion once again in a positive light. Has the recent debate involving Richard Dawkins’s book The God Delusion and others stirred up new perspectives for you?

KA: It’s been a deepening chapter, because one of the things that irritates me about the debate and the Dawkins phenomenon is that they raise many good points, if they weren’t so spiteful about it. I don’t believe that we need, in our polarized world, another divisive discourse that sets us at odds with one another.

Now, before Dawkins, Muslims had no problem with evolution. The Koran says that every single one its statements is a parable—just as the Christians would do at about the same time. No one read these texts literally. And Muslims were saying, “Evolution is fine by us.” But then—you know, I get a lot of e-mail”¦and I suddenly see in the Muslim press all over the world “British atheist attacks Allah’s creation.” Now they’re all up in arms about evolution. They don’t need this on top of all their other problems.

GS: In your book, you emphasize the Socratic ideal that such debates must be good-natured—that’s supposed to be the base rule, the bottom line.

KA: And that nobody wins at the end. At the end, everybody realizes that they don’t know anything. You don’t bludgeon your opponent into accepting your point of view. Your point of view is as limited as the next person.

MODERNITY'S INTOLERANCE

GS: You also write about “the intolerant tendency of modernity”. What do you mean by that?

KA: Basically, in the modern period, what science does is take one problem after another, eliminates that problem, and moves on to the next—and that’s how it progresses. And right from the time of very early modernity, you find people thinking it necessary that in order to find truth, you have to oppose or eradicate the recent past. So you see the Renaissance and the Reformation turning against the Middle Ages—anything medieval was bad. But the Middle Ages were a complex time, and there was a lot of good stuff there that they lost.

And similarly now. In order to progress, you’ve got to get rid of the religious position. But, you see, humanities don’t progress in that way. In the humanities, people keep on asking the same questions and discussing the same problems: the nature of happiness, how do we deal with our mortality, how do we die well, how do we live at peace amidst the sufferings that we experience ourselves or that we see in the world around us.

GS: So you wouldn’t expect progress in this area any more than you would expect progress in the novel or any other art form?

KA: No. It’s like saying Beethoven is less advanced than Shostakovich. Shostakovich just has something else to say. Or that Plato isn’t as brilliant as Kant. They’re both brilliant, and they’re both responding to crises, but you can’t say one is better than the other.

GS: That’s the kernel of the intolerance?

KA: Yes. Newton’s system, genius though he was, has now been discredited, as it were, in quantum mechanics. You know, you can’t go back to revive the Newtonian system.

Plus, we are intolerant, as modern people. I mean, the way we approach truth, the way we argue—it’s not along Socratic lines. It’s not enough for us to seek the truth. We also have to discredit, defeat, and even humiliate our opponents, whether that’s in academia, the law courts, the media.

GS: You contend that writers like Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, with his anti-religious book God Is Not Great, really haven’t done their homework regarding religion.

KA: When my publisher said, “Would you write something about this?” I said that I cannot write about the new atheists. I cannot write about Hitchens and so forth. It’s been done, it’s boring, and the theology is so poor. The thing to do is to go back in time and show how we’ve changed—what religion was, and how we got to this point.

GS: Instead of just producing more polemic?

KA: I’m not interested in polemic. I don’t care what anybody believes, to be honest. And neither did most religious people.

As I say in the book, the emphasis on belief is another modern problem. The word has changed its meaning. You know, when I was Oxford, I was reading English literature, and we were supposed to look up a word in the Oxford English Dictionary every day, to see how meanings changed. And I wish I’d looked up belief—it would have saved me a lot of trouble. It used to mean “to love”, related to the German liebe. But it’s only in the late 17th century that you find it being used—first by scientists and philosophers, and only in the 19th century does it start being used in the new way in a religious context—it starts to mean the acceptance of a proposition.

GS: In which case, lots of religious propositions begin to look incredible

KA: Yes. Because you don’t have to believe them or accept them, you have to do them.

GS: As opposed to that standard objection to religious beliefs as being the equivalent of believing in the Tooth Fairy or Santa Claus.

KA: Yes—or, you know, “You have to believe in God.” Well, what on earth does that mean without awakening within yourself a sense of utter transcendence by ethical action—getting rid of ego?

BELIEF AS A SKILL

GS: As someone who maintains the value of the religious impulse, is it hard to live with its defects?

KA: Sure. It’s like if you’re a painter and you see some really bad painting on a daily basis, it hurts. If you are a musician, it’s agonizing to hear someone playing out of tune. It’s in that way—it jars, because it’s not skillful. You don’t say it’s bad, because that suggests anger and contempt. But it’s not helpful. It’s going to get you stuck in a sort of stupid cul de sac, either intellectual or moral.

GS: And it’s the intellectual part that’s attracted to polemic, right?

KA: Yes. Intellectual is also unskillful spiritually, because when we argue in that sort of polemical way, it’s promoting ego. You know, when people say, “I believe this and this is what I think,” it’s puffed up with ego. When they say what they believe, a sort of noble look comes upon them. And who cares what you believe?

Third-century B.C. Taoists would say that to say this cannot mean that is nonsense, because we’re talking about the transcendent. Nobody can have the last word. So saying this is wrong and that’s right—you’re simply trying to impose your own view on others. And that’s ego, and it’s ego that holds us back from religious enlightenment, and it also holds us back from good artistic achievement. An artist loses him or herself in the art. And once it becomes an expression either of a narrow political ideology, you get Soviet realism or fascist art. And if it’s all about ego, it becomes self-indulgent mush, a lot of the time—you know, that awful element of self-pity that we all have: “Poor me and my suffering” and all of the rest when we’re awake at 3 in the morning.

GS: Like teenage poetry.

KA: Like teenage poetry. You know, you need to go through that stage, but if you get stuck in it—it’s that kind of religion that’s aggressive. I really believe that aggression is incompatible with religion, of any sort. I don’t mean just fighting and killing, I mean unkind words about other people or other nations, or other ideologies. That is not what religion is supposed to do. Love your enemies, honour the stranger. But people don’t want to be compassionate. They’d rather be right.

GS: And that’s a more recent development, fuelled by modernity?

KA: No. it’s always been a struggle to be compassionate, as I say, because people don’t want to do it. They’d really rather use religion to endorse their identity—rather than lose it. But without depth, all we have is ourselves, and that’s a pretty dismal prospect—depth to look at the immensity of what we don’t know, to look at the pain we see on all sides of us, the wrongdoing that we ourselves are committing, without just looking at other parts of the globe, but that we ourselves in the West have certainly inflicted on the rest of the world. How can one feel proud?

GS: So you have to do this kind of inventory?

KA: To say, you know, we don’t know anything. You have Einstein saying—and I quote it in the book—that powerful statement about living in the presence of what we cannot understand as a source of wonder and awe. Karl Popper used to say we don’t know anything”¦.And yet it’s not a source of frustration. It’s a source of contentment.

GS: Have we lost the art of feeling this way?

KA: Yes, we expect information at the click of a mouse, but information is not the same as wisdom.”¦It [information] can consume you. But, you know, it’s good—you can use it for good. But it won’t help us to die well. It won’t help us when the diagnosis comes that tells us we’ve got a terminal illness.

As I say in the book, science can diagnose your complaint, and it might even be able to cure it, but it can’t help the dread and terror and dismay and disappointment that comes with the diagnosis. And it can’t help you to die well—like Socrates, who died an unjust death, not raging and spitting but with full humanity, and joking with his jailer, washing his body to save the women the trouble, all of that. How it was, I don’t know, because they say that hemlock is such an agonizing death that it’s really unlikely that Socrates was able to chat. But nevertheless, that was the ideal that they wanted to project. They wanted him to die as he’d lived. And Jesus too—I mean, he’s presented as someone who has time to say a kind word to one of his fellow victims, to forgive his executioners, and to make provision for his mother, even in the depths of agony and despair”¦.You know, this is a human being, not this divine god who’s only pretending to be suffering.

And so to achieve that kind of death—you will suffer, but the thing to do is be at peace within yourself, in suffering. And I’ve just been through my mother’s death, and she wasn’t at peace, and it was a very disturbing business. But it made me aware, even more, that it won’t come by chance. There’s work we have to do on ourselves. And computers can do a great deal for us, but they can’t help us to deal with all this inner stuff, and that’s what religion is about, really.

http://www.straight.com/article-262616/karen-armstrong

[ShepherdsDog]

$1:

With logic you can disprove things. For instance, God and free will. If God is omniscient, then He knows what is going to happen. If He knows what is going to happen then the future of the universe is deterministic. If the universe is deterministic there can be no free will.

Some have suggested that God exists in a quantum state. Knowing all possible outcomes of all the descisions made. This does not rob creation of free will. However, if a being/deity is omniscient and omnipresent(or exists outside of time), they will know the outcomes of all choices made, before they are ever made by the individual. It's the non interference in the choice, by the 'deity', despite it knowing the outcome, good or bad, that makes it free will. the outcomes are known, the choices are not.

[CanadianJeff]

That kind of interpretation implies a destiny. That all our lives are known or predetermined before birth.

That has some very heavy implications. I've seen enough people change over time or undergo such dramatic changes in personality that I am willing to call that into doubt.

Split personality disorder and people with certain types of brain damage having a dramatic change in personality are both things that make me call such destiny into question.

[Zipperfish]

ShepherdsDog ShepherdsDog:

Some have suggested that God exists in a quantum state. Knowing all possible outcomes of all the descisions made. This does not rob creation of free will. However, if a being/deity is omniscient and omnipresent(or exists outside of time), they will know the outcomes of all choices made, before they are ever made by the individual. It's the non interference in the choice, by the 'deity', despite it knowing the outcome, good or bad, that makes it free will. the outcomes are known, the choices are not.

I've heard this argument, but I think it has its difficulties. In quantum mechanics, the probability of a certain outcome is known, but it is a matter of chance as to which event, of those possible outcomes, actually happens. So although you've successfully moved away from a deterministic argument, now the future is based on pure chance--still not much room for free will there. This is what caused Einstein to say "God does not play dice with the universe" in his criticism of quantum physics.

It's a rich area of philosophical enquiry, outlined here: Wiki: Dilemma of determinism

The fact that I believe in free will is one reason I'm a deist, as opposed to an atheitst/materialist.

[ShepherdsDog]

From a Deist perspective, God made it and said, 'now you're on your own!'. Sort of the watchmaker god that deism advocates.....by Crom

[Wada]

The nice thing is that God/ gods/ He or She can be anything we as individuals can imagine.