Deism - Why It Makes Sense

So I'll start off by saying this - your Protestants believe what they believe. They study their teaching and scriptures and stay true to them. Your Shi'ites believe what they believe - again, studying their scripture and staying true to it.

However, you could get fifty Deists in a room and you have a guarantee that none of them agree exactly on their beliefs. Why? Because Deism isn't a religion. Similar to Atheism, it's an intelligent school of thought rather than belief or faith.

My personal beliefs? As a Deist, I believe that the nucleus of each atom is a universe, and that the splitting of an atom in a dimension above ours (where everything is a googolplex bigger than it is in our dimension) caused the big bang, which created our universe. Essentially, I believe in a series of infinite dimensions inside atoms, each dimension being a universe with galaxies and planets and life.

That doesn't sound very supreme-beingy, I know. But I can't, in good conscience, class myself as an Atheist, because although I think the notion of a god is frankly ridiculous, I believe that in the dimension above ours, there are beings that are godlike compared to us, bigger and more powerful than us in every way both imaginable and unimaginable. And I also believe that in the dimensions below ours, in all the atoms of our universe (and the dimensions we have created by splitting atoms) we are godlike to those creatures. I don't believe that before the big bang was nothing, I believe it was precipitated by a/many supreme being(s), if you will. Perhaps it was the detonating of a device similar to our atom bomb. I don't know.

Now that's enough about my beliefs. However, more about Deism. Deism is increasingly being embraced by a young generation as a sort of 'logical' choice, people who accept the truth of the theory of evolution, people who understand that the human genome is mapped and many of whom accept and understand that there is no form of afterlife, they begin to think about the origins of the world. Nothing - or the nothing we are being told existed before the big bang - just doesn't seem right to this generation. So we teenagers start thinking, and imagining, and eventually we come up with a belief (not faith) system that seems right to us, that seems to make sense.

And as wrong and unprovable as these theories may be, (how am I going to prove there are worlds inside our atoms?) Deists will fight to defend them based on logical principles rather than based on two thousand-year old books teaching murder, violence, an eye for an eye, and yet and peace.

Sometimes there are other reasons behind Deism, however, that are not rooted in logic - my grandmother, who lacks modern education in modern sciences and technologies, refuses to believe in carbon-dating, the theory of evolution, natural selection, or even human chromosomes - and sometimes they stray into the ridiculous or just for fun, for example the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster. 

The fact that each individual works out their own sort of Deism shows an increase in individuality over the past few centuries of Deism being on the rise - the logic of not believing in old books and stories, but cold hard science, mathematics, theories and hypotheses could mean to some a moral decline, however. Some people believe that without the Bible or the Torah telling us to love our neighbor, we wouldn't do it. As long as we have the sociopolitical belief of humanism, the valuing of human life and condition thereof, this shouldn't be the case. 

As much as I'd like to say that perhaps the technological boom of the past three hundred years was due to the freeing of religious ideals and the introduction of Darwinism and other new schools of thought, I'd be lying - it's all about who has the biggest guns, the best computers, the satellite that can spy the best. Technological advancement has damn near nothing to do with Theism or lack thereof, so don't listen to anyone saying otherwise - sorry, but you can't pin both moral decline and the arms races of the 20th century of the commies, Mr. USA. 

But we can still be glad that we have now much looser controls on an individual's theological beliefs than five hundred years ago, and this is a good thing. I just wait for the day when people choose to do the right thing not for some eternal reward in the afterlife, but because it is right.