My pastor told me…
1. My pastor told me that Rational Deism® is non-conforming to dogma and allows “individual” separatist thinking apart from the accepted divine “teaching” and this is the work of the “devil.”
Response: What your pastor told you is the seed of argument and war, not peace, and all of the history of the world proves it. Individual faith and personal revelation are never the issue, but rather social condemnation of others. It’s not the faith, it is the religious condemnation that stems from presumptive self-righteousness.
Each religion tends to profess its righteousness by relative condemnation. No human being is a heretic to self-dogma, but only to the dogma that is someone else’s dogma.
A human being must make a free choice. If the human being chooses freely, it must be rational. Choice is a function of rationality. Your pastor is indoctrinated in one single dogmatic narrative that is perpetuated by social “Like-type validation“; it survives because it is an attempt to socialize the meaning of life. You must accept your pastor’s premise of the narrative first, but the narrative does not prove the proposition.
Your pastor’s statement is logically flawed. The premise must be proved first, but it tries to justify by its own bootstraps. Start fresh and determine the relative merits rationally. There are many paths to the same destination of peace and many rooms in the home of love.
Thusly, said Gandhi correctly, setting aside religious dogma, I am a Hindu, Muslim, a Christian, a Buddhist, and a Jew.” And thusly Abraham Lincoln said in substance correctly, setting aside religious dogma, “I would join any church having love as its only requirement for membership.” And thusly Socrates said correctly, setting aside religious dogma, “He knows nothing, and thinks that he knows; I neither know nor think that I know. In this latter particular, then, I seem to have slightly the advantage of him.” This rational wisdom is the basis of Rational Deism®, which is good, because the tree is known by the fruit.
If revelation with the Ethereal is personal, it does not condemn; if there is no presumptuous knowledge of the Ethereal (divine), it does not condemn, because it cannot condemn by ruleset. The Three Tenets of Rational Deism® do not condemn faith, but only the delusion that one faith is fact, which makes any non-conformity “wrong.”
2. My pastor told me that his ancient religion is better than Rational Deism® and true.
Response: Statistically, your pastor is an XY-male. And there is a reason. Stop, and think about that fact for a minute, carefully. Ancient dogma that refuses to go away. And this man (statistically speaking), who has been “ordained” in purported knowledge of divine things with self-professed purported “holy” metaphysical powers, will tell you that men must be or should be pastors, priests or rabbis, and, irrespectively, will also perform all sorts of other “holy” rites and rituals (like making water holy, or rendering blessings from the divine, or circumcising), self-proclaiming indoctrinating professions of some special “holy” metaphysical power. Ancient incalcitrant dogma that is not supported by rational social equitable goodness, but rather a delusive attachment to an ancient religion that is distinct from the faith it purports to reflect.
Theistic faith in the Ethereal is distinct from religion. Faith is personal, religion is social. In 2025, millennia later, we are much smarter than the uneducated medievals. We can read and think for ourselves. We no longer require or accept social delusion as a form of social constraint, which is to think faith is a fact.
We are now more intellectually and socially sophisticated: We don’t need to control people as a group by divine imprecations.
Of course, this is not to say there is not good attributes in some religions, but that is not our question. The question is not whether a religion can be good, the question is whether the presumptive self-righteousness of one religion is “right” and all others “wrong” which requires perfect knowledge of divinity, which the Rational Deist believes is unobtainable in a social context, but only by personal self-revelation, if at all, which if at all is not and cannot be professed socially.
3. My pastor told me that it is impossible to have faith and to deny its truth as suggested by Rational Deism®.
Response: Your pastor is greatly misguided and misguiding, rationally. Faith is to believe something to be true, understanding lucidly that it might not be true.
As to divine knowledge, rationality cannot be reduced further than hope, faith, belief, trust and other such “maybes.”
To assert that faith is not fact, and that it must be treated as fact, is to make an opinion the same as knowledge, which is delusion. We sit in a chair because we believe that it will hold our weight. Some people may agree and others not, but they do not have to sit in the chair we choose for ourselves. See The Rational State of Why?
4. My pastor told me that Rational Deism® effectively makes faith and religion immaterial.
Response: Your pastor is greatly misguided, rationally and fails to understand Rational Deism®. Faith and religion are different issues.
Faith is personal, religion is social.
Faith is a personal connection to the Ethereal (god for theists), as “the kingdom of god is inside us,” said Jesus. Religions, or perhaps the teachings upon which religions are based, can serve an important purpose, as they provide opportunities, wisdom, and perspective, to a point. But many religions tend to delusion, which is not true faith.
To a Rational Deist, religion offers a beginning framework like a player beginning to learn piano or musical instruments. It is a beginning, but the end, if serving the human being, is personal revelation that is sourced from the internal and not the external. Revelation is freedom, untethered to an external standard. The player who can only play another’s composition is not bad, as such, and can be quite good, as such. This is where we tend to start.
Ultimately, personal revelation, like a person’s appearance and a person’s expression of self, is perfected by something unique and personal. That is the match of personal humanity and The Ethereal, being the meaning of life, which is not and cannot be socialized, but is as unique and personal as each of us. There is a lot of different music that is good, albeit different, and someone who loves music, loves all music.
Loving a song and loving music are not the same thing, but only the latter includes the former. Faith is faith, religion is religion, revelation is revelation. One song is good, but condemning all other music as wrong, not so much. That is the beginning of disguised hate, not love.
5. My pastor told me that Rational Deism® allows anyone to justify anything as a personal revelation, and thereby do all sorts of things against society on that basis.
Response: Your pastor is greatly misguided, rationally and fails to understand Rational Deism®. Personal revelation and social conformity to law are different issues. Since the cave man, and through ancient religious structures, religion was the means of civil order. Perhaps others, but the United States of America, rebelling from the horrors of god-based civil government, rejected the concept. Rational Deism® separates personal revelation from civil obedience, with some presupposition that civil government is ascendant enough to allow free-thought revelation that is not itself a violation of law (reverting to the condition that it formerly abhorred). Rational Deism® might have criminals as adherents, but unlike many religions, Rational Deism® does not endorse social activity. The only violation of Rational Deism® is for the Rational Deist to condemn the personal revelation of others, or otherwise to violated the Three Enlightened Tenets. Rational Deism® leaves crimes to the civil structure because it is 2500 years more advanced than the ancients recognizing the separation of church and state, whether by Jefferson or Jesus. Rational Deism® does not have a zealot social attribute as to any dogma and therefore cannot be a social cause of action. Rational Deism® respects the personal revelation. Society can judge the action.
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