Intercepting God through Reason

If you are looking for a dogmatic definition of God, you will not find it here. You, the reader, are responsible for making sense of God for yourself. What I provide below is the way I, personally, intercept God through reason. We are necessarily limited by our current understanding of the universe, its origin, its underlying structure, and the rules governing it. I acknowledge, up front, that my understanding of God will change as humanity’s knowledge expands. This acknowledgement is a fundamental principle of Reasoned Spirituality. 

As a Deist and member of several Deists sites and communities, I think Rich Deem's "Why Deism Fails as a Philosophical Paradigm of the Universe" misrepresents Deism. You can read the original article at the "God and Science" website (http://www.godandscience.org/apologetics/deism.html).

This is a excerpt from a book that I'm currently reading.

A community is defined as: "A social, religious, occupational, or other group sharing common characteristics or interests and perceived or perceiving itself as distinct in some respect from the larger society within which it exists."

“I believe in the equality of man; and I believe that religious duties consist in doing justice, loving mercy, and endeavoring to make our fellow-creatures happy.” – Thomas Paine

The scale and complexity of the Creation is phenomenal.  Whereas some see random mutation and lucky coincidence, Deists often see order and purpose.  Though we may not yet understand the ultimate purpose, it is logical to believe the Creator built the components of the Universe for a reason.  Why should suffering be any different? 

Our flagship site UnifiedDeism.com is a mash up of Wordpress, phpFox, vBulletin, and CometChat. Our previous social networking site was based on phpFox. It is actually a decent social networking script, but it's activity stream is a bit weak and the forum was awful. Since the forum was they key element of our previous communities we knew the forum had to be strong. We chose to go with the best commercial forum script around, vBulletin. Through the use of a plug-in provided by Brodev we were able to get basic connectivity between the social networking platform and the forum. This became the source of the first major complaint: unreliable member login and logout.

Reflective reason is one of the key ways in which Unified Deists arrive at or reinforce their belief in God. But reflective reason applies to much more than just our analysis of the God question. Reflective reason is a tool we Deists can use in every aspect of our lives.