... Mr. Paine knew God very well, as well as a man can know God on this plane. Mr. Paine was very smart, and very courageous. To him the American Revolution was a revolution in government and religion. Deism is a beautiful philosophy that sees God through nature. Our God-given reason speaks to us of this Creator. I think a lot of people are Deists, believing in God, but not the madness of mind ...

Larry Carter Center replied to Bruce Long's discussion 'Deism is still effectively theism, and the clear logical an ontological distinction between atheism and agnosticism is problematic for deism as it is for theism' in the group No Nonsense I prefer to be more charitable with Deist Thomas Paine, arguably better than the ...

... though outwardly I have confessed my belief in Theism, inwardly I have been practicing a form of Deism. Outwardly, I have admitted to the immanence of the Godhead, that He is present with me at all times, but inwardly I have practiced a form of Deism, which keeps God in His place, very distant from me, in heaven. For if I truly believed that the Lord is near, that He is always ...

... that if the accusation stuck, your works might get burned and you might end up in prison, as happened on more than a few occasions. It's also interesting to see the rise of deism -- and even 'militant deism' -- in this period as an acceptable philosophical stance. This is the milieu that produced the Founders of the US (not that Israel is concerned with that). But many of these ...

... He was, in effect, refuting all other belief systems, including pantheism, polytheism, deism, and new-age thinking. When God says, "I am," He is revealing that He is a ... can reconcile God and humanity—the man Christ Jesus" (NLT). In contrast to the teaching of deism, which says that God has no interest in the affairs of men, the first commandment shows us that we have a God who ...

... world. Talk of sin was plainly muted in the 1960s. The sexual revolution influence much more than culture as the church embraced one revolutionary idea after another. What has been rightly called therapeutic moral deism replaced a robust doctrine of sin and grace. As a result much that has all the trappings of Christianity has now become nothing more than a consumer product, albeit a religious one ...

... religions as well. While Science could provide cold, hard facts – the how – religion move to answer those things left unanswerable by science – the why. Yet, in the 19th century, when deism started to give way to pre-atheism, fundamentalism arose. The author makes the point, as so many have recently, that fundamentalism arose as a reactionary measure against what many felt like ...

... more sense to me if I imagine my relationship with it as being a bit two-way. So I tried other religious constructs on for size. Buddhism. Various forms of paganism. Vaguely Jeffersonian deism. General mysticism. None of these other religious constructs turned out to be any more convincing than Christianity. And I couldn't deny that for me Christianity still seemed more meaningful. I now ...

... ways dealing with the church's hard teachings (hard for our culture to take, I mean), most American Catholic parishes are functionally AWOL. It's Moralistic Therapeutic Deism all the way down. And not just in Catholic churches, I hasten to say! The idea that poor, put-upon gay Catholics are having to sit there every week and hear priests denounce their affections from the pulpit is simply ...

Compromise of any sort begins with an assault on the truth. Relativism is but one weapon that pounds away, day after day, on the notion of absolutes. As America’s new religion has been dubbed by some as “Moralistic Therapeutic Deism” one understands that for most people, God is a nice idea but He’s not someone they want to be bothered with on a regular basis.