The Lesser God of the Deists

Outline:

A.  Deist’s sleeping god while experiencing the violence of religious wars and the flickering of intolerance, combined with the realization of the diverse world.  The validity of Christianity is challenged.

B.  Natural Religion:  there is a supreme being who wants worship and human justice among human beings.  The Golden Rule.  Reward and punishment.  Ethical progress.  The Jeffersonian Bible.

C.  David Hume critiques natural religion.  Another writer:  Natural Religion is “ a dull affair, soundless, scentless, colorless; merely the hurrying of material, endlessly, meaninglessly, but predictably.”

El Mundo, April 25, 2003.  “Playing at Being Gods?”  “The dignity of mankind is not a fact but rather an enormous project undertaken by the human species.  From the viewpoint of nature, we are merely intelligent animals.  But we strive to be animals with dignity … We are inventing ourselves as a species … Dignity comes at the end of our history, not at the beginning.  It is a creation that is tentative, progressive, and precarious – a project that can easily collapse.  In the case of a new technology, just as in the case of a new social organizational form or an economic system or way of sexually or affectively relating to one another, what we must ask ourselves is whether it contributes to the great ethical project or whether it represents an obstacle.

D.  Voltaire:  fighting “priestly exploitation, superstition, intolerance, persecution.”  He hoped to live long enough to see the last king strangled with the bowels of the last priest.

E.  Europe secularizes as Protestant preachers turn didactic and abandon “Catholic customs” and Catholics turn to “rational supernaturalism.”

F.  Descartes turns to rationalism