User:Dsomeone/sandbox

 New Deism 

New Deism is perhaps the only religion invested in its own evolution rather than in upholding its traditions. The only “ultimate assumption” in New Deism - and even that is recognized to be a belief deduced via common sense - is that God is the Creator and sustainer of existence as we know it.

Most people today probably remember Deism (old) from junior high or high school history class as an antiquated philosophy held by some of America's Founding Fathers and other Enlightenment intellectuals in Europe. Merely a fringe worldview that resembled scientific determinism of pagan nature worship more than any of the major world religions, Deism had something to do with a Clockmaker God who wound up the universe and left it to run on its own like a ticking clock. The pop quiz definition, with its impersonal God and mechanical Creation, IS A MODERN MISCONCEPTION of a thriving, immensely popular religion that pervaded American society during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries- a religion as thoroughly understood by early Americans as it is misunderstood by most Americans Today. Conservative Christians demonized Deist ideas during the eighteenth-century Enlightenment just as it had in the previous century. Many of us Americans were taught in our history classes that Thomas paine was atheist or agnostic, and that the Deists' "Clockmaker God" was obviously no longer engaged with nature or humanity, making God, in effect the absent Father. But in fact Paine was a passionate believer in a dynamically creating, actively virtuous God, and "Clockmaker God" was a term coined by reactionary Christians who wanted to discredit the Deist and their rational theologies.

New Deism, on the other hand, truly maintains its faith in beliefs and respects any belief that does not contradict common sense. One might even argue that common sense itself is the high priest of Deism.