I don’t want you to think that I was insulted to be called a Deist. On the contrary, it’s an honor to be in the company of people such as you, and a great many of the founders of U.S., who also considered themselves Deists. I was just making the point, in a humorous way, that sometimes we get insulted, without even knowing what the words mean. We’ll pick a fight just for the hell of it, and then try to figure out what the other guy intended to say.

Once again, I agree with most of what you have to say. Religion can be a good thing, and can be a pathway to God, but often, it is used politically to control human behavior. Heaven and hell is a carrot and stick approach, which doesn’t make a lot of sense to me at least.

When you say that the universe contains matter, which is constructed of energy, I can relate to that as well. In fact, as I have said, one way of understanding God is to say that God is the sum total of all the creative energy in the universe. God’s energy flows through me, and my energy flows through Him.

And like Einstein, you see God in the fixed laws of nature. Einstien didn’t believe in a personal God, but he thought of God as setting the laws of nature in place, and sort of walking away from the scene. I don’t really see it that way. I think that we do interact with God on a daily basis, since we live using the energy He lends us, and He uses His energy to make certain things happen, some of them seeming like “coincidence,” but still very much reflecting His intention.

For me, God is like an artist. All you have to do is to look at some of the pictures from the Hubble telescope and realize the extent of God’s artistry. Yesterday, I visited a huge aquarium, and saw dozens of different types of frogs, each one “painted” as you would paint a porcelain toy.

If God is an artist, an artist that uses energy to make all things possible, then it would seem to me, that like any artist, He would want to know that His creation is indeed “good.” And if He created a creature like us, a creature that was able to contemplate the existence of his Creator, then it could be up to us to validate the efficacy of God’s creation. If, in the face of evil, we behaved well, then this would at least be some measure of evidence that God’s creation was indeed good. If you were God, how could you know that your creation was good, but for the behavior of your creatures, especially those created in “your image.”

I do believe that we were created in God’s image, because like Him, we too are creators. The trouble is that we often end up creating the wrong things. For example, as you suggest, we end up creating an image of God that is more reflective of our inadequacies, than of the true nature of God. We say, for example, that God is angry, because it is we who are angry.

In any event, I think you’re right, I am a Deist. I choose to know God rationally, and by using whatever common sense I possess. It doesn’t mean that it’s the only way to know God. It is one way, the way that I am comfortable with.

I also believe that at a time when the whole world is coming together economically, and technologically, and when the world is facing some global challenges, that it is time to come up with an ideological framework, based on common sense principles, which we can use to talk to one another with common sense and with a sense of personal dignity. Religion, or any spiritual path for that matter, should help us to find common ground, so that we can begin tackling some common problems. If it doesn’t do that, then we may have to step back from some of what we believe, in favor of something we can believe in even more, like, peace, prosperity, freedom, and sustainability.

I do enjoy our talks. Hopefully, we can continue down the same road together.

Yet we manifestly exist, constructed of matter, that in turn is constructed of energy. All of us animals have more similarities as than we have differences. We are motivated by hunger, the drive to survive and reproduce. The biochemistry that makes us all go, is the same.

We like to fool ourselves, because we experience individuality, locked inside our own heads, into believing that we are each a separate life. Religions, particularly Abrahimic one, like Islam, Judaism an Christianity have invented a special place for humans in the pecking order of life and ascribed to us an individual soul, that we can lose in hell, if we disobey, or send to heaven, if we do as we are told. This classic carrot and stick, to obtain human obedience is what these religions are about.

We can look rationally at the world outside of ourselves and see a whole that we are a part of. At the immediate level, this is the ecosphere in which we exist in cooperation with other creatures, but at an extended level, we are a part of a living earth, not separate from it. The earth is a part of a living solar system and that solar system is a part of one singular living universe. As a deist, I believe there is only one life and we are just manifestations of it. From my point of view God can be seen in the rules that govern physics, chemistry, biology.

When God manifested Itself in the creation of what we currently know to be our universe, It gave rules to energy, which condensed into matter and for nearly 14 billion years, that matter has been following the same rules, unerringly and without variation. Those rules that matter has followed include gravitation that has lead to hot spheres we call stars and cooler ones we call planets. Matter agglomerated into increasingly complex forms, that had the capability of copying itself, and still following simple rules of competition has evolved into what we are now.

Just because we find ourselves to be here and now, does not mean that we are an end result. We are just the current end result. Change will continue and our type of animal will continue to change.

Those who claim that “man was made in the image of God” limit God to what they can imagine. But if God is at least as big as the universe, then those who make this claim cannot possibly be correct.

Within Deism, there is the possibility of everything that we can imagine. You may well imagine it differently to me, but I still stand by original assertion that you sound like a Deist to me.

It’s a very interesting read, and quite difficult to describe in a few sentences. If you haven’t read it, it’s available as a free e-book.

Actually, I was hoping for some controversy to spice things up. So here is a corollary to the post, just to get on your nerves:

“Where there is no contradiction between the two, religion should be used to teach ultimate truth.

Where there is a contradiction between the two, religion should take a back seat to ultimate truth.”

A penny for your thoughts.