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Deism: Beliefs
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Deism is a sub-category of theism, in that both entail belief in a deity. Like theism, deism is a basic belief upon which religions can be built. In contrast to theism, there are currently no established deistic religions, with the possible exception of Unitarian Universalism. The concept of deism covers a wide variety of positions on a wide variety of religious issues. See the section Features of deism, below. Deism can ... refer to a personal set of beliefs having to do with the role of nature in spirituality.
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The founder of the offshoot of Deism that found a place in England during the Reformation and reached the colonies was Lord Herbert of Cherbury. [1] He came up with 5 essentials of Deism which are "(1) a belief in the existence of the Deity, (2) the obligation to reverence such a power, (3) the identification of worship with practical morality, (4) the obligation to repent of sin and to abandon it, and, (5) divine recompense in this world and the next"[2]. This was a rather odd variant mixing in many Christian virtues without Jesus, and rather foreign to traditional Deism.
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Deism does not believe in prayer requesting favored treatment at the expense of others. Such practice represents the height of religious self-righteousness, to expect that God (the "will of the people") actually has time to listen to individual requests for favoritism and that God would even consider playing favorites, least of all in a nation based on fairness and equality. The tenets of Deism, while based in faith in the human mind, do not constitute principles of faith, but rather principles of belief and duty.
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Panendeism combines Deism with panentheism, the belief that the universe is part of God, but not all of God. Although purportedly coined in late 2000 by Larry Copling in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida, earlier uses have been spotted. A 1995 news article quotes this use of the term by Jim Garvin a Vietnam vet who became a Trappist monk in the Holy Cross Abbey[5] of Berryville, Virginia, and went on to lead the economic development of Phoenix, Arizona. Garvin described his spiritual position as "'pandeism' or 'pan-en-deism,' something very close to the Native American concept of the all- pervading Great Spirit..."[38]
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Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778) presented another tendency of Deism. He combined the sentimentalism of Locke, which he accepted in the main, with the metaphysics of Clarke and Newton, after which he maintains after the manner of Shaftlebury and Diderot a belief in the inborn moral instincts which he distinguishes as "sentiments" from mere acquired ideas. He truly held this to be the true position of Deism when connecting this moral "sentiment" with a belief in God, and protested against the separation between the two. Then "sentiment" became a basis of a metaphysical system built from data experienced under the influence of Deist philosophy, but redeemed from formalism by constant reference to sentimentality and emotion sources of religion. For Rousseau the nature of religion was not dogmatic, but moralistic, practical, and emotional; its essence was not (like Voltaire) to be found within the cultured intellect, but rather in the naïve and disinterested understanding of the uncultured. Conscious, rational progress in civilization, no less the supernaturalism in the Church and State, was a result of the fall, when the will chose intellectual progress over the preference of simple felicity.
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Pandeism combines Deism with the pantheism, the belief that the universe is identical to God. Pandeism adopts the deistic belief that God was a conscious and sentient force or entity that designed and created the universe, which operates by mechanisms set forth in the creation. By becoming the universe, God became an unconscious and nonresponsive being. The term was coined in 1859 by German philosophers and frequent collaborators Moritz Lazarus and Heymann Steinthal in Zeitschrift für Völkerpsychologie und Sprachwissenschaft. They wrote that "Man stelle es ... den Denkern frei, ob sie Theisten, Pan-theisten, Atheisten, Deisten (und warum nicht auch Pandeisten?)[36] ("Man leaves it to the philosophers, whether they are Theists, Pan-theists, Atheists, Deists (and why not also Pandeists?"). Charles Hartshorne, a student of Arthur Whitehead, examined this concept along with Deism, and ultimately preferred Panentheism, stating that "panentheistic doctrine contains all of deism and pandeism except their arbitrary negations".[37]
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