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Click on this link & watch this short film first... Then read the essay below...
God, Religion, and Why I Converted to Deism
Having been raised as a Catholic, having converted to born-again Christianity in adulthood, and having worked in full-time Christian ministry as a profession, many people have asked me why I converted to Deism. This essay will answer those questions. Benjamin Franklin said, "I find it impossible to believe that the Creator endowed me with the gift of Reason, and then expected me not to use it." Thomas Jefferson said, "...the opinions and beliefs of men...follow involuntarily the evidence proposed to their minds." Thomas Paine wrote, "...when the Divine Gift of Reason begins to expand itself in the mind and calls man to reflection, he then reads and contemplates God and His works, and not in the books pretending to be revelation...Creation is the Bible of the true believer in God." All these founding fathers of the United States of America were Deists, not Christians, as many would like us to believe. George Washington was a Deist, as were John Adams, Ethan Allan, Paul Revere, John Hancock, James Madison, Samuel Adams, James Monroe, John Quincy Adams, Alexander Hamilton, and Abraham Lincoln. As a matter of fact, America was not founded on Christianity at all, but on the freedom to practice whatever religion an individual wants to practice, without interference from the government. This is the exact opposite of a Christian country, wherein the Christian faith is claimed to be the religion of the nation as designed by the founding fathers. Other famous Deists are Aristotle, Marcus Antoninus, Copernicus, Francis Bacon, Galileo, Descartes, Newton, Peter the Great, Queen Caroline of England, Bach, Alexander Pope, Voltaire, Frederick the Great, Catherine the Great, Mozart, Napoleon, Wordsworth, Byron, Victor Hugo, Emerson, Tennyson, Kierkegaard, Thoreau, Whitman, Mark Twain, Thomas Edison, Oscar Wilde, William Taft, Arthur Connan Doyle, Gandhi and hundreds of others. (See link at bottom of article for complete list of famous Deists.) In my youth, Catholicism was all I knew, because that is the way I was raised. I no more questioned those teachings than I questioned the existence of gravity. But when I reached puberty in my early teens, I found myself in church looking at teenage girls instead of the altar, and entertaining "impure" thoughts about them instead of spiritual thoughts about God and Jesus. The tremendous guilt immediately following those thoughts was horrible. This religion-inspired self-loathing expanded to encompass and categorize virtually every conceivable earthly pleasure as sinful. The ensuing never-ending conflict left me feeling perpetually dirty, ashamed, and frustrated. Finally, at the age of seventeen, I gave up the struggle between religion and what felt natural, and abandoned Catholicism. For the next fifteen years I lived my life as a good man, partying, making love, and enjoying life. My "Church" was Nature itself, and my worship was the wonder I felt whenever I took a deep breath of the miracle of Creation. I oftentimes got away to a creek, a field, the mountains, a lake or reservoir, or any place that would get me closer to Nature, so I could feel the one-ness with Creation such excursions always brought me. I felt closest to God at these times, not while in "Church." Like many young men, I learned a lot of things the hard way, such as the consequences of living too extremely, to the point where one's life spins out of control. But I was free of the guilt that always results when one is trapped between their natural desires and proclivities, and their religion's teachings and mandates. In my early thirties, as a married man with young children, I became increasingly focused on my own mortality, and fearful of what would happen to me after death. With no other frame of reference, I returned to Catholicism, the religion of my youth, and the only option of which I had any knowledge at all. I threw myself into my Catholic religion again with passion, and studied the Bible intensely for years. The one constant I had accepted as truth was that the Bible was the inspired Word of God, and that it was absolute Divine Truth. I reached a crossroads in my spiritual journey when my studies revealed to me that the Catholic church had departed from the Bible hundreds of years ago, and half of the Catholic religion was now based on tradition, dogma, and ritual, none of which appear anywhere in the Bible. So, as a result of Reason and evidence, I left the Catholic church, and sought a church that was Bible based, with no departure from the Scriptures whatsoever. This led me to a non-denominational Christian church in Tracy, California, where I dove into Christianity with all my might. My passion and zeal for my faith burned brightly, and I soon found myself immersed in ministry, having joined among other organizations the Christian Motorcyclists Association. This evangelical lifestyle continued for years, until the dawning of the realization that I was not happy in my life or my marriage, that it had become routine and empty, and that my heart was not in any of it; I was going through the motions; I was stagnant. My career had peaked, and my wife and I had grown apart and become strangers, and I had begun fantasizing about having a different life, one where I was not so sad and frustrated with the way things had turned out. I wanted to be more myself, to ride my motorcycle, to play my guitar, to visit Nature more often, and to be with a woman who was more like-minded with me. I wanted to be the person I had always been underneath it all, not the person who society or religion expected me to be. These thoughts ran in direct opposition to my Christian faith, and so my pre-existing conflicted, ashamed, and frustrated feelings intensified exponentially. Ultimately I had an affair, left my job, and left my wife to be with my lover, a relationship which did not work out. These decisions resulted in my being stripped of my ministry, being expelled from my church, and being shunned by my Christian friends I had known for years. The overwhelming guilt that followed eventually led me to suicidal thoughts, and absolute despair. After my lover and I divorced, I went back to church, because again, I didn't know what else to do. Without any other frame of reference, again I began attending a Christian church which offered a divorce recovery program in Manteca California. I again denied who I really was, and tried to fit into the "Christian" lifestyle. I walked the walk, and talked the talk. I even believed I had overcome my natural self, and had assimilated my Christian self, that which was expected of all who claim to be Christians. I made many friends as I went through my healing process once again. I realigned myself with Christianity unquestioningly, blindly accepting everything I was being told by pastors and friends as absolute truth. I even taught the faith after a time, and again became a Christian leader in ministry and outreach. I had a certain amount of peace. Against the advice of my instructors and friends, I began dating and eventually married a woman from my divorce recovery class. We weren't planning to marry right away, but the Bible and Christianity told us that if we wanted to have sex, we had to be married, and we were so attracted to each other by that time that our relationship had reached the stage of physical intimacy. So we decided to go ahead and marry, because we were planning to do so eventually anyway. We figured if we were Christians that our marriage would be fine even if it were rushed, because God would take care of everything, and our faith would pick up where He left off. We were wrong. Immediately after marriage, it became obvious our lifestyles were completely incompatible. A delicate, quiet, reserved, sweet, and conservative woman, she was simply not prepared for life with a social, risk-taking, extreme high-energy man like me. She responded by burying herself in her career, and I eventually entered full-time ministry as a profession, ministering to the biker community, thus effectively ignoring the problems. We were both sad and trapped. There seemed to be no way out, after numerous attempts to repair the relationship. Ultimately I found myself so overwhelmed with the rut we were in, with my frustration and her sadness, that I asked myself why we were hanging onto a marriage that had left us both miserable and lonely. I was angry at God for establishing a situation that there was no way out of except through death or "sin." I didn't want to divorce again. I left my ministry because I now felt hypocritical. Here I was teaching others that Jesus is happiness, and my life was sadness. I became ill, very ill, and it was believed I would soon die. I had a long look at my life, and thought about the things I had experienced, and the lessons I had learned, and my spiritual journey along the way. I asked myself why I believed the things I believed. I asked myself what I would do differently if I had my life to live over again. I began to question every aspect of my existence, including my religion. I asked myself if it makes more sense to live a life of regret, guilt, and sadness because your religion tells you to hang in there, because the next life will be better, or does it make more sense to extract yourself from a situation that just doesn't work, and seek happiness and fulfillment in this life, the only life you have right now? I was unable to find a compelling reason to waste an entire existence in misery and self-doubt. Nietzsche wrote, "They have called 'God' what was contrary to them and gave them pain; and verily, there was much of the heroic in their adoration. And they did not know how to love their god except by crucifying man." It seemed to me that we are here now, so we should live now. Reason dictated that anything that stands between one's serenity must be eliminated, or at least moved out of the way, if one is to experience peace. It was clear that if one's existence is unhappy, then one's life is wasted, and there is nothing noble or pious about that. We know that tomorrow is not promised to any of us, and the satisfaction and serenity we deny ourselves today may not be available tomorrow, because tomorrow may never come. I had finally come to the conclusion that my religion no longer worked for me, because it expected me to either deny myself, or live with the prospect of eternal damnation, and neither one of those options made any sense to me any more. What I had spend a lifetime believing was not in synch with Nature or Reason. It was time to move on to the next level. These core issues occupied me, and so my spiritual journey continued. Plato wrote of Socrates, "It is a wise man who knows what he does not know." Kierkegard wrote that father Abraham, when he went to sacrifice his only son to God, was either a man of great faith, or a madman. Thoreau wrote in On Walden Pond that a man must find his own way, and reject that which is impressed upon him by parents, society, and religion, thus using Reason and Nature to determine what is really truth in his own existence. At the core of my belief system was the conviction that the Bible was the inspired Word of God, and thus my entire faith structure depended upon that being true. If the Bible was not the inspired Word of God, and instead just a book written by wise men, then my entire faith was built on a fallible foundation. So I asked myself the hard questions, "Why do I believe the Bible comes from God?" "And if all major religions of the world make the same claim, that they are the one true faith, and that all other faiths will send the individual to Hell after death, then what if I picked the wrong religion?" As Plato suggested, I had to admit I did not know. This much I did know: That I had no idea. What I did know is that the reason I believed the Bible was the inspired Word of God was because somebody else told me so. My parents, my Pastors, and my Christian friends told me so. But none of them knew for sure, because they had no way of knowing. Therefore it was just as likely that they were wrong as they were right. No matter what research is done, no matter how strongly one believes, the simple fact is that religion is indeed a matter of faith, and as Kierkegard said, this means believers are either great people of faith, or madmen for believing in something that is false. While this does not present a conflict for believers because they take security in their faith as Truth, believable, and real, it did create a conflict for me, because I was still searching for Truth, and had not yet arrived at a conclusion. If believers truly have faith, then good for them. But I needed something deeper, more significant, something that Reason bears out and Nature evidences. I could no longer take on blind faith that which I am told, simply because I am told so, no matter how much I respect the teller. That there is a God is without question. Even prominent scientists have conceded that Intelligent Design (a supernatural, or not-of-nature force) is the only explanation for the existence of the universe. When one inherits a Van Gough painting, he has no way of knowing if it is genuine or fake without consulting an art expert. How does an art expert know? Because an art expert can identify that singular characteristic unique to that artist, as individual and distinctive as a fingerprint. The universe has the singular brushstroke of the Creator, from its smallest component, to its largest. The atom is a sphere orbited by smaller spheres. Planets are orbited by moons. Solar systems are suns orbited by planets, which themselves are orbited by moons. The galaxy has a dense center orbited by its outlying solar systems. And the universe follows the same pattern. All of this is expanding, and when its expansion reaches its climax, it begins to contract back onto itself, a characteristic which will eventually result in the universe becoming one big black hole. The same pattern, repeated over and over throughout the universe is an obvious similarity that is indicative of the hand of God, or as I prefer to say, The Creator, or The Supreme Being. Call it what you will, it all means the same thing. This is just one of numerous and countless examples where Nature evidences God through Creation. So, yes, I do believe in God. Reason and evidence leads me to do so. What God's role is in our mortal lives is the remaining question. I do not see evidence in Nature or Creation that The Supreme Being has a hand on the infinitesimal, day-to-day, minute-to-minute, second-to-second details of our lives. Rather, what is more strongly evidenced is that The Creator wound us (Creation) up like a clock and turned us loose to make the best of what we have with the time we are allotted. That is why good things happen to both good and bad people, and that is why bad things happen to both good and bad people; because there is no game plan: We are running the game ourselves, and there are a lot of favorable and unfavorable coincidences in Creation. Life is as good as we make it as individuals and as a civilization. God will not bail us out of our follies. He's more like an absentee landlord. This does not mean God cannot intervene, it means there is no evidence that God does intervene. Scriptures claim God intervenes on a regular basis in many different religions, but then we get back to the burning question regarding the origin of those very Scriptures. Nature provides no such evidence of Divine intervention, therefore Reason dictates there is none. Again, simple Reason and evidence bears this mindset out. Is God really talking to the television evangelist asking for money in exchange for a cure for your cancer? I think God would be sickened by these ploys to profit on the sufferings of others. Is God sided with Islam, Judaism, or Christianity? None of the above. All of the above. It doesn't matter. All are following a doctrine of their own construction, accepting that which they have been told for generations rather than using Reason and evidence from God's Creation, Nature, to form their own opinions and conclusions; rather than asking the hard question, "Why do I believe this, and what is Truth in my life as evidenced by Life itself?" Every religion claims to be the only one. This simple claim, combined with God-given Reason and the obvious evidence of Nature, leads me to believe that any religion making this claim is false. What supernatural being omnipotent enough to set the universe in motion would be so arbitrary as to say to a specific segment of the population, "You guys are coming with me, and the rest of these losers are going to Hell." No truly thoughtful individual can accept this view as valid. It defies Reason and flies in the face of any logic or sensibility. My son asked me once which religion is the true religion. I answered, "Son, I really don't think God cares what kind of vehicle you're in; I think He's more concerned with what road you're on. Just do the right thing. You will always know what that is." And that is indeed the simple truth: One always knows the difference between right and wrong, and all are capable of listening to the voice of Reason that lives within us all, and to lead lives of Natural morality and justice. At this point my spiritual journey needed definition. What do I call myself? I am not a Jew. I am not a Hindu. I am not a Buddhist. I am not A Christian. I am not a Muslim. I am not an atheist. I am not an agnostic. What am I? Continued study and research led me to the Deist philosophy and sensibility. So what is the Deist philosophy? These are the highlights:
This is a brief attempt to explain what I believe about God and religion, and where my spiritual journey has led me thus far. I am now at peace with myself, I now have balance and moderation in my life, I now live a life of integrity and contentment, doing good to and for my fellow man, unconflicted by the guilt and misery religion plagued me with most of my life. I am free. I have not "fallen away" from God, I have grown spiritually to a new level of enlightenment, understanding, and intimacy with the Creator through Nature, His Divine Creation. I am not damned, I have been set free. I have not given myself over to sin, I have chosen a right and compassionate and sensible path. I am not going to Hell, I am living the life I have been blessed with to the fullest. What more could The Creator possibly want for His Creation? For more in-depth information about Deism, check out... http://moderndeism.com/index.html http://www.religioustolerance.org/deism.htm Check out some of the famous Deists below...
Akhenaton; Heraclitus; Aristotle; Epicurus; Marcus Tullius Cicero; Titus Lucretius Carus; Lucius Annaeus Seneca [the Younger]; Epictetus; Marcus Aurelius Antoninus; Plotinus; Pelagius; John Duns Scotus; Netzahualcoyotl; Nicolaus Copernicus; Michael Servetus; Michel de Montaigne; Faustus Socinus; Giordano Bruno; Richard Hooker; Francis Bacon; Galileo Galilei; Lord [Edward] Herbert of Cherbury; Thomas Hobbes; Rene Descartes; Thomas Browne; Charles de Marguetel St. Evermond; Anthony Ashley Cooper, First Earl of Shaftesbury; Alrernon Sidney; Blaise Pascal; Robert Boyle; Baruch Spinoza; John Locke; Nicolas Boileau-Despreaux; Nicholas Malebranche; Henry Dodwell; Isaac Newton; Gottried Wilhelm Leibniz; Pierre Bayle; Charles Blount; Matthew Tindal; William Wollaston; Giovanni Battista Vico; John Toland; Bernard Mandeville; Thomas Woolston; Anthony Ashley Cooper, Third Earl of Shaftesbury; Peter the Great, Czar of Russia; Samuel Clark; Anthony Collins; Robert Walpole, First Earl of Oxford; Henry St. John Bolingbroke; Thomas Chubb; Queen Caroline of England; Johann Sebastian Bach; George Berkeley; Alexander Pope; Charles de Secondat Montesquieu; Lady Mary Wortly Montagu; Joseph Butler; Peter Annet; George Earl Marischal Keith; Hermann Reimarus; Voltaire [Francois Marie Arouet]; Lord John Hervey; Marc Pierre de Voyer de Paulmy D' Argenson; Henry Home, Lord Kames; Gabrielle Emilie de Chatelet; Benjamin Franklin; William Pitt, Earl of Chatham; Charles de Brosses; David Hume; Francesco Aleieri; Frederick the Great, King of Prussia; Jean-Jacques Rousseau; Denis Diderot; Marquis Luc de Clapoers de Vauvenargues; Etienne Bonnet de Mably de Condillac; Horace Walpole, Second Earl of Oxford,; Pedro Pablo Abaraca Y Bolea D' Aranda; Mark Akenside; Samuel Adams; Adam Smith; Immanuel Kant; James Hutton; Anne Robert Jacques Turgot; Robert Carter, III; Gotthold Ephraim Lessing; Moses Mendelssohn; Catherine the Great, Empress of Russia; Louis Antoine de Bougainville; Charles Lee; Erasmus Darwin; George Washington; Joseph Priestley; Christoph Martin Wieland; Jean Marie Roland de La Platiere; Paul Revere; Hugh Williamson; John Adams; John Horne Tooke; James Watt; John Hancock; Edward Gibbon; Thomas Paine; Jacques Henri Bernardin de Saint Pierre; Ethan Allen; Pierre Samuel Dupont de Nemours; James Wilson; William Paley; Thomas Jefferson; Chevalier de Lamarck; Benjamin Rush; Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi; Adam Weishaupt; Gabriel Victor Riquetti Mirabeau; Pierre Simon Laplace; Johann Wolfgang von Goethe; Stephen Girard; Henry Dearborn; James Madison; Gouverneur Morris; Jean Jacques Regis de Cambaceres; Joel Barlow; Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart; Bernard Germain Etienne de La Ville Lacepede; Alexander Hamilton; Pierre Jean Georges Cabanis; Constantin Francios Chasseboeuf de Volney; Marquis de Lafayette; Robespierre; James Monroe; Mary Wollstonecraft; Albert Gallatin; Theobald Wolfe Tone; Jean Paul Friedrich Richter; Elihu Palmer; Karl Wilhelm; John Quincy Adams; Napoleon Bonaparte; George Ensor; Alexander von Humboldt; William Wordsworth; Saint-Hilaire Etienne Geoffroy; Thomas Young; Robert Emmet; William Ellery Channing; George Gordon Lord Byron; Richard Carlile; John Tyler; Gerrit Smith; Giacono Leopardi; Miliard Fillmore; Victor Hugo; Ralph Waldo Emerson; William Lloyd Garrison; Lysander Spooner; Abraham Lincoln; Alfred Lord Tennyson; Jose De Espronceda; Theodore Parker; Jean Louis Armande Quatrefages de Breau; Horace Greeley; Robert Browning; Soren Kierkegaard; Joseph Arthue Gobineau; Henry David Thoreau; Theodor Mommsen; Walt Whitman; Richard Francis Burton; Alexandre Dumas [the Younger]; Hubert Howe Bancroft; John Lubbock Avebury; Mark Twain [Samuel Clemens]; Thomas Hardy; Thomas Edison; Oscar Wilde; William Howard Taft; Arthur Conan Doyle; Joseph Wheless; Mohandas [Mahatma] Gandhi; Stephen Crane; Albert Einstein; Gibran Khalil Gibran; Joseph Campbell; Robert Heinlein; Alan Watts; Richard P. Feynman; Freeman Dyson; Antony Flew; John Shelby Spong; Carl Sagan; Vaclav Havel; Harrison Ford; Stephen Hawking; Martin Rees; Neil Young; Paul Davies; Christopher Reeve; Carl Safina; Bill Maher; D. L. Hughley; Lance Armstrong; Michael Behe; Michael Corey; Thomas Crum; John Fugelsang; Bill O'Reilly, and... of course...
Michael G. (Dyna-Mike) Watson July 2, 2006
E-Mail: Dyna-mike@live.com Contact & Support: Donations
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