-Ron DeGoth

I fear God and next to God I mostly fear them that fear him not.
-Saadi, Persian Poet


The fear of God is not merely something that you keep in the back of your head- it is relevant to everyday conduct. One who fears God greatly will go to great step to avoid angering that God. For many revealed religions, fear of God is a critical part of the ideology; The potential wrath of God is a tool used to keep the faithful in check. Who would piss of a deity that they truly believed was omnipotent and vengeful? Historically, hierarchical organized religions stress the fear of God as a means of maintaining power. From shamans in the neolithic era to Modern Christian Churches, those who can claim to know how the wrathful deity will behave have power the believer. While it is an important tool for religious control and power, fear isn't inherently a fundamental part of humanity's relation to the divine.


Consider the Panopticon. It is no ordinary prison. From the top of the Panopticon, it is possible to observe any prisoner inside. In it, prisoners would have to act as if they were being watched, because at any moment, the warden's gave could fall upon you. Without actually watching anything, the Panopticon efficiently subjugates all of it's prisoners. The deities of many organized religions create a Panopticon for the believer; the threat of the omniscient deity turning their gaze upon  the believer imprisons them.


What reprieve can one achieve from the Divine Panopticon? I contend that the fear of God creates Atheists. The simplest way to free oneself from the Panopticon is to refuse to believe that the warden exists. In the same way, those people whose lives are burdened by the fear of God simply reject the idea of a God. Rather than being a matter of philosophical inquiry, it becomes a matter of personal emotion.


There are Deists out there would would use the idea of a belief rested on personal emotion as a means of ridicule, but I would not take that path. The truth, at least how I see it, is that no matter how much we claim our beliefs are based in reason and facts, at the end of the line all of us fit our beliefs into our emotional and personal state. It is a matter of who can come to terms with their inner selves and who cannot; i vastly prefer the former.


However, truth be told most of us, at least those of the freethinker community, prefer belief systems deriving from logic and reason and facts. The fundamental problem that drives people to outright reject God as a way to escape fear is that they have only one conception of a God- the one the dominates their community, those common wrath and terror-filled Deities of the Abrahamic faiths being the most prevalent. This dichotomy, a God of fear or no god at all, is perpetuated by those who stand to benefit, the clergy and the atheists. It is the job of the true freethinker, someone who is dedicated to eliminating such tyrannies of ideology, to spread the recognition that a divine being isn't inherently something to be feared . This conception is real; it is the conception that I and many other deists hold.


I do not advocate for this in hopes that it might change someone's belief. I advocate it in the name of those whose fear of God has been replaced by the fear that their beliefs are not legitimate. The reason Saadi fears someone who does not fear God is because they  have the power to define their own life. That is a right all must have, and a society that represses the Deist belief that a God can not be an object of fear, a society that refuses the complete liberation of it's members, cannot be held to be a free society. 

Did you think I was kidding when I said I wanted to make religious discussion more accessible to non-intellectuals? If you don't play League of Legends, I'm going to warn you that this post may seem a bit like gibberish to you. 

MOBAs are a pretty interesting culture. In fact, I'd argue that they have pretty close parallels to religion. Everybody thinks that there way of playing is the one and only correct way to play, they blame those who do not follow that one way of playing for all of their problems, scapegoats of all kinds are abundant, and those who choose poorly are, of course, the worst of the worst. One of the most obvious examples is in the jungler.

Recently, one of my friends told me that they wanted to learn how to play. I agreed, because my clan was in need of a jungler. So, I set up a smurf  and queued up with him. I told him  everything I knew about jungling and how I though junglers should work. At this point, it might be hard to guess where I'm going, so I'll be direct: This is about indoctrination.

So, my friend CHOSE to have me impart my values (such as camping mid) onto him. When it comes to religion, very few people have a choice in what religion they are taught from an early age .  What makes the sort of "indoctrination" that I did acceptable was the element of free will. Nobody forced my friend t listen to my speech about why ganking bot is never, ever a good idea. Religious and political indoctrination are ingrained into our society to the point where we don't even think about it, but that doesn't make it acceptable. Let those who seek the opinions of others get those opinions, and let those who choose to balze their own path do so.

Godliness is an interesting topic. For obvious reasons, every religion takes a different stance on what it means and takes to be like God. Ultimately it falls back to how each religion views God.

The Christianity a sort of love-hate relationship with the concept of God. On one hand, we get constant reminders to act as Jesus did. On the other hand, we are not supposed to infringe on God's sphere of influence. The Tower of Babel story best illustrates this. From what I've seen,  throughout history and today, the concept of Godliness is used as a form of coercion by Christians and as a cover for the fear of progress. Godliness is the excuse Christian leaders use to get us to follow their teachings. They also use at as an excuse for instilling fear of scientific research into topics like Genetic Engineering. While there are legitimate arguments for and against, the most commonly repeated arguments is that it is playing God.

Let's look at ourselves for a moment. How do we view God? The question is hard to ask without making generalizations about Deists  (which, due to our incredible capacity for diversity, is something I dislike doing).  I will, hopefully safely, assume that we all believe that God was at the very minimum the creative force of the universe. Some view God as an entirely neutral, uninterested being. Others give him a more paternal role to the universe. I personally believe we should at least treat him with respect. Nevertheless, I reason that in order to be like God we should seek to create new things and discover more about the universe. 

Where does this leave us when we hear "Playing God?" The negative connotations of the phrase seem rooted in the concept that God is a being to fear. Deists, as I have discussed in previous posts, DO NOT FEAR GOD. We have no reason to be afraid of progress solely on the grounds of fearing God. Deism liberates us from unreasonable barriers to human life and progress. Ultimately, I would argue the in order to be like God, we MUST continue progressing.

Hopefully this will be the first post of my return. I feel like I need to explain my absence. 

I guess the immediate cause was a complication in my personal life. I had a decreasing time to write and think about Deism. But that doesn't really explain it all. I was getting increasingly frustrated and I couldn't really put my finger on it until a few weeks after I posted my last post. I discovered the reason, and it was very apparent in hindsight: What we're doing ISN'T working.

We've been sitting at our computers blogging, sitting at our computer making podcasts, sitting at our computers writing forum posts, and sitting at our computers THINKING. We haven't been getting the word out about Deism, we haven't done ANYTHING to effectively spread Deism. I don't mean preaching or evangelizing, I mean telling people what Deism is or correcting people when they say that Deists believe in an absent God. Nothing has changed. We have no lack of thinkers or bloggers, we have a lack of ACTION.

I think what surprised me most about my break is the amount of people who emailed me. I assumed I would be left in silence, but there were a large amount of people who contacted me. I think it was ultimately them who brought me back. People still had faith in me. I'd like anybody who has something to contribute to this site email me at [email protected]. In the next few weeks, I'll be making a few changes to the site and post the as much as I can. But I have achieved nothing if I don't have guest writers. More than anything else, I'd like to give voice to those who previously had no other venues. 

But this will never be enough. We need to mobilize, we need to act, we need to progress. Please, share with me your thoughts and ideas. It must be through collective action that we move forward. 

In recent months, there have been many discussions about religious liberty. People have claimed that the contraception mandates violates religious liberty. Schools are constantly dealing with conflicts about religious freedom. Churches like to claim that the government must protect their rights to preach in schools. Churches claim that governments must protect secular institutions's "religious rights."

Where does religious freedom end? When does someone lose the ability to justify their actions with religious freedom? The line is apparent to me. You can't use your religious freedom to harm other people or infringe upon their rights. This line exists with other constitutional rights. Hate speech, gun crimes. 

So when you decide that an someone shouldn't gain access to the healthcare they need because of your religion, you are in the wrong. If that person chooses not to take contraception because of their religion, that is fine. But they shouldn't make that decision because of someone else's religion. If you think that it is okay to deny gay and lesbian people the right to marry, you are in the wrong. You can't decide that your religion is more important than someone else's when it comes to that other person's life.

As for schools, the guideline is thus: If it is the students who are doing something religious independent of the school's staff, it is okay. But the school shouldn't force a religious belief on someone. Nobody should. Churches like to think that they have this right. Nobody does. Nobody has the right to stop someone from exercising their religion. But there is a broad difference between the two that some people can't see.