Ethan Allen on God, Reason, Prayer, & Religion

In this final installment of our special series on the Founding Fathers and their thoughts on God, Religion, & the Divine, we move to farmer, politician, and guerilla revolutionary leader Ethan Allen, who perhaps is best known for leading the Green Mountain Boys (and other fighters) in their raid and capture Fort Ticonderoga, a strategic victory which severely hampered communication between the northern and southern units of the British army.

Like Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin, Ethan Allen might be best described as a Progressive Christian Deist who believed reason must take a paramount place in religious activity. The following passage is taken from Section IV of Ethan Allen’s book, Reason: The Only Oracle of Man (1784), and deals with the subject of prayer. In synch with the philosophy of prayer that guides our free book The Living Hour: The Lord’s Prayer for Daily, Allen writes:

Whoever has a just sense of the absolute perfection of God, and of their own imperfection, and natural subjection to his providence, cannot but from thence infer the impropriety of praying or supplicating to God, for this, that, or the other thing; or of remonstrating against his providence: inasmuch, as “known to God are all our wants;” and as we know, that we ourselves are inadequate judges of what would be best for us, all things considered.

To pray for any thing, which we can obtain by the due application of our natural powers, and neglect the means of procuring it, is impertinence and laziness in the abstract; and to pray for that which God in the course of his providence, has put out of our power to obtain, is only murmuring against God, and finding fault with his providence, or acting the inconsiderate part of a child; for example, to pray for more wisdom, understanding, grace or faith; for a more robust constitution, handsomer figure, or more of a gigantic size, would be the same as tolling God, that we are dissatisfied with our inferiority in the order of being; that neither our souls nor bodies suit us; that he has been too sparing of his beneficence; that we want more wisdom, and organs better fitted for show, agility and superiority.

But we ought to consider, that “we cannot add one Cubit to our stature,” or alter the construction of our organic frame; and that our mental talents are finite; and that in a vast variety of proportions and disproportions, as our Heavenly Father in his order of nature, and scale of being saw fit; who has nevertheless for the encouragement of intelligent nature ordained, that it shall be capable of improvement, and consequently of enlargement; therefore, “whosoever lacketh wisdom,” instead of “asking it of God,” let him improve what he has, that he may enlarge the original stock; this is all the possible way of gaining in wisdom and knowledge, a competency of which will regulate our faith. But it is too common for great faith and little knowledge to unite in the same person; such persons are beyond the reach of argument and their faith immovable, though it cannot remove mountains.

The only way to procure food, raiment, or the necessaries or conveniences of life, is by natural means; we do not get them by wishing or praying for, but by actual exertion; and the only way to obtain virtue or morality is to practice and habituate ourselves to it, and not to pray to God for it: he has naturally furnished us with talents or faculties suitable for the exercise and enjoyment of religion, and it is our business to improve them aright, or we must suffer the consequences of it. We should conform ourselves to reason, the path of mortal rectitude, and in so doing, we cannot fail of recommending ourselves to God, and to our own consciences. This is all the religion which reason knows or can ever approve of.

 

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History of Humanism With Ancient Deistic Philosophers

Deism is not generally thought of as a type of humanism, but it did play an important role in the development of humanist thinking in Europe. For deists, God created the universe but then divorced itself from it and now simply contemplates the ongoing development of Creation. Sometimes this is referred to as the “watchmaker” god — a god which wound up the universe like a watch and now lets it run on its own. Thus, deists opted for perhaps the most extreme form of transcendence available, completely rejecting the idea of God being immanent and involved in any manner with Creation and humanity.

Because of this, deism supported the growing idea that humans should rely upon themselves first and foremost. Even though deists continued to believe in God, they did not believe that God had any continuing interaction with the world such that God could be called upon for assistance. Instead, only human effort, human intelligence, and human ingenuity could be called upon.

As a systematic philosophy, deism was first developed by Lord Herbert of Cherbury (1583-1648), and it would become very popular among Enlightenment intellectuals who were finding less and less reason to believe in the traditional gods but who also didn’t feel right in rejecting theism totally. Thus, it represented a philosophic and religious challenge to Christian orthodoxy, eventually becoming an important influence on political and religious philosophy through the 18th century.

For example, many of those involved with American Revolution against England and with setting up the American government after independence were deists, either explicitly or in their sympathies, and those deistic beliefs show through in their political beliefs and work.

For deists, the universe was believed to be rational and ordered because that is how God wanted it to be; God, in turn, is also a rational being with rational desires, rational goals, and rational methods which are understandable through human reason. It is perhaps obvious why such a god would be appealing to Enlightenment rationalists.

Typically, deists were empiricists rather than rationalists when it comes to religious knowledge. What this means is that knowledge about God cannot be discovered through revelation or supernatural, religious experiences. Miracles and prophecy were classified as little more than superstitions while at the same time religious scriptures became the focus of intense scholarly scrutiny and critique.

Deists were opposed to religious orthodoxy, dogma, and doctrine, all of which they have argued lead inevitably to corruption and intolerance. Deism accepted that most, if not all, religions contain within them a basic core of rational truth and understanding of God; nevertheless, all have also fallen away due to the corrupting influence of supernatural religious beliefs and superstitions.

Deists shared many important sentiments with the rationalist side of the Protestant Reformation, rejecting the various trappings and liturgical practices of Roman Catholicism as being too close to the irrational religious beliefs of paganism. However, deists also rejected the very pious and overly emotional forms of worship, which came to characterize many Protestant churches — once again, in deism, religion was a matter of reason and rationality rather than highly emotional religious faith.

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The Journey to Deism from Islam

I have an attraction on my mirror stating, “Life is not about finding yourself – life is about creating yourself.”, “commonly attributed to George Bernard Shaw". This is my statement I live by.
Many people do not understand the meaning of Deism and why I am saying it, or maybe the first thing that jump in their mind is Atheist. These two believes are totally different; Atheist is unbeliever whereas Deist is about believing in God who is identified through nature and reason. In Deism our reason and belief become happily united with the wonderful structure of the universe, and everything we behold in the system of the creation, prove to us, far better than books can do, the existence of a God, and at the same time proclaim His attributes.

It is by the exercise of our reason that we are enabled to contemplate God in His works, and imitate Him in His ways. When we see His care and goodness extended over all His creatures with that beautiful unique complexity, teaches us our duty toward each other by forgetting and feeling mercy.
I became who I am today after long journey of questions, wonders, confusions. In fact, I was born in Muslim society where questioning religion is forbidden and my parents are westernize and open minded as well. They believe on Education and knowledge. I was naughty boy who liked to ask a lot of questions that put me sometimes in trouble with others. However, I had a lot of argument about Islam in the things that never made any sense in my head; music was one of this things. I believe that music as like the language for everyone no matter who you are or where you come from or what language do you speak we all enjoy it. I love music and dance since my childhood, It was my passion with no tensions or no confusions but where I came from I was told all the time in school and public, listening to music, dancing are prohibited and celebrities are demons. I was wondering and asking myself how music that make people happy, make us fly with our emotions can be prohibited.

One time I got brave enough to ask our Islamic teacher at school some questions such as: why do we believe in Allah (God), he got angry at me and said, “Your question is stupid. You know you shouldn't ask these questions. We should believe in Allah as a Muslim without questions, Quran said that and it's our faith." I asked him again, “Did Quran say we can't ask, and how we know is Islam the only right religion, why not Christian?” He looked at me with wide opened eyes and full of anger, said "If you don't stop asking these questions I will punish you, put you failure in this subject and tell the school director to kick you out of the school." I was scared because my parents would be upset.
Since then, I tried to search by myself looking for convince answers for my questions but I couldn’t find any satisfied answers, all I found is that religious scripts to obey and follow. I couldn’t find answer for my questions though I tried to watch T.V religious series, read Islamic books publications and did a lot of searching on the Internet. Since then, I knew Islam is not what I want to believe, as God give me brain to think and that definitely for reason. I am not going to follow these people who want me to shut up my brain and mouth to follow them like a goat without questioning, though I was forced to act like them and keep my thought for myself because I knew if I talk much they won't hesitate persecute me or harm my family. I felt scared and at the same time fed up to act like someone who not I am.

My parents started to worried about me because I started to express my thoughts about religious issues with some friends by some local religious figures in my community. Therefore, they sent me aboard to study, I went first to Germany and end in China where I got my bachelor degree. At that time, I felt relief and be myself though the previous question still wondering on my mind looking for answers.

Couple of years later I decide to study and read about religions from different perspectives as we say 'think out of the box'. I started reading, watching different documentaries and historical researches of religions such as: Islam, Christian and Judaism, but every time I dig deeper in each one I face a lot of questions. I felt like I am flying in black whole with no end. During my studies I arrived to the conclusion that religious through time been political more than faith. It's about having authority or power to control people, because logically you cannot control people thought or force them to do what you want unless you have high power or authority that make people follow without argument or rejection.

On Oct.1st 2012 I received a call from my mother telling me that my Grandpa Dr. Ali Seif was murdered in Yemen by AQAP which is terrorist group under AL-Qaeda’s Ideology, that news killed me. I loved my grandpa so much, he was my Idol. He was well educated and a great guy who used to help a lot of poor people and did a lot of nonprofit surgeries for them. When he retired in United States where he grew up, study and practiced plastic surgery, he went back to Yemen hoping to make some changes and teach them some of his knowledge on medical and plastic surgeries but at the end he was killed just because he was an American citizen nationality. According to Muslim stupid mentality on their believe who would agree to kill an innocent old man because of his nationality, this incident affected me a lot and made me believe that I was right about Islam.

I decided to follow my brain that lead me through this life till the day I started searching on Google website, "I believe in God, but I don't believe in any religion." There I found a webpage shows that somebody had already asked the same question. He was told that he's a Deist, and that's how I learned about Deism. I was very impressed by it, it's clear concepts about the right of freedom to think and believe on what I was always searching for. I have read about core Deism principles and I found that in Deism God gave us the reason and conscience to develop our own moral and ethical principles. Additionally in Deism all human beings should be free to find, know and worship God in their own way. At the same time all beliefs or views should be respected as long as it doesn’t cause harm or oppress others, those principles relieved me and helped me find answers that match my own way of thinking.

In my opinion, no need to practice or commit for religious rituals and customs by praying, fasting or any other kind of rituals to be a good person. I think practicing civilized human values are more logical and wiser than believe in religious rites which from my point of view collide with reason and human civilization. I want to be myself, have freedom to read, write and express myself, live my life peacefully with myself listen to my favorite music, felling content and the inner peace.

Written by Sami A. Qasem. Reviewed and approved by Dr. Ben Johnson, Doctor of Divinity

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A Panendeist's Explaination of Why Evil Exists

To understand why bad things happen, we must first imagine a world without them.

What Would Life Look Like Without Evil?

To understand why evil happens, I think we must first ask ourselves, what would the world look like if it was absolutely perfect? If you just scratch the top of that though experiment, you'll probably get some very positive imagery, maybe some picture of you running through a meadow under a perfectly blue sky, but, if you follow that thought process all the way through, you'll arrive at a horrifyingly meaningless form of existence. Why? Because there is only one perfect response and action to every choice you make, in fact, there may only be one utterly perfect thing for you to be doing - ever.

A Day in a Perfect Life

For the sake of illustration, lets imagine that there were multiple perfect things that you could engage in. Now imagine waking up in your perfect home (which is identical to everyone else's perfect home), surrounded by your perfect family, who loves you not because they have a choice, but because that's the only thing they can do - after all, they're perfect too. You get out of your perfect bed and have the perfect breakfast, followed by the most utterly perfect mid-day activities and family time. You wow as you enjoy the perfect picnic at the perfect park, your taste-buds burst in ecstasy as you consume the perfect dinner with your perfect family. After your dinner, you engage in the most remarkably perfect sex in the most perfect position with your perfect wife, and at night, you and your family all lie together in the meadow, looking up at the perfect stars in the perfect night sky - each of you has gone through the entire day in an unshakable and unrelenting mental state of ecstatic loving bliss.

Now imagine that every single family on earth is doing the exact same thing that you're doing, perhaps at different times (depending on geographic location), and all without any choice to deviate from this objective 'perfect' state of being. Imagine that every day will be exactly the same and that you will never die, nor will you ever deviate from this state of existence.

'Perfection' Eliminates the Purpose of Being and Free Will

Besides being terrifying to imagine, a perfect world, with perfect beings, and a perfect material nature cannot accommodate purpose, actual freedom, or a reason for being. In a perfect world, there are no problems to solve, no diseases to cure, no triumphs, no struggles, no tears, and no victories. In such a world, we would simply exist as choice-less beings with no objective meaningful purpose or means of defining our own existence.

Bad Defines Good and Good Defines Bad

Without bad to define good, good is nothing. When you see a beautiful sky on a sunny day, you can appreciate it because you've seen stormy skies that bring rain and destruction. In the same sort of way, when you love deeply, you can appreciate it, because you've known what it means to feel alone.

A perfect world is like a perfectly white room in which you, and everything around you are also perfectly white. In this room, you see nothing, because there is no contrast to define one thing from another. The same would be true of a perfectly black room. It is only by allowing the freedom of both elements, black and white, that innumerable variations of grey can lend form and meaning to this room and all that lies within it.

So in our perfect world scenario, you can't really love or really enjoy anything, because you have nothing to define what makes anything worthy of love or enjoyment in the first place. Everything you do, and everything that happens around you, is simply a set of incomprehensible actions that take place without anyone ever having chosen to do them.

The Scope of Good and Evil

Since good and evil are two parts of an integral whole and necessary to define one another, we must consider that the greatest possible experiences of love, joy, or attainment exist in polarized contrast to equally powerful capacities for hate, sorrow, and failure. We, our world, and the universe it occupies are free, and such freedom requires both good and evil to exist as unrestricted elements. To limit the scope of how bad things could be, would be to limit scope of how good they could be also, ultimately this would diminish our own freedom and depth of experience.

Because Evil Exists, We Have Purpose and Meaning

As humans, it is our transcendent purpose to choose good over evil. When we choose to engage in things like love, friendship, creativity, caring for our fellow beings, or improving the world around us, we find unison with God, and we feel the transcendent beauty, good, and meaning of it.

Written by Benjamin F. Sullivan, Published with Permission via Panendeism.org

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Why Deism is Not a Religion

Deism is not a religion, but a religious philosophy. It advances the theory that God exists, that He created the universe, but does not intervene in the affairs of humankind.

Deism emerged during the Enlightenment in the 17th and 18th centuries, initially in England, later in France and other European countries, and also in America.

Deism serves to rationalize the existence of God with newly surfacing scientific discoveries and belief in the existence of free will. Deists generally place their trust in reason and disdain revelation as well as the teachings of a specific church. Some elements of Deism survive today in Unitarianism.

Washington, Franklin, Jefferson and Paine were prominent deists in 18th century America.

Franklin summarized much of the philosophy of deism in his Articles of Belief and Acts of Religion, which he published in 1728 at the age of 22. It began:

For I believe that Man is not the most perfect being but One, rather that as there are many Degrees of Beings his Inferiors, so there are many Degrees of Beings superior to him.

Also, when I stretch my Imagination thro` and beyond our System of Planets, beyond the visible fix`d Stars themselves, into that Space that is every Way infinite, and conceive it fill`d with Suns like ours, each with a Chorus of Worlds for ever moving round him, then this little Ball on which we move, seems, even in my narrow Imagination, to be almost Nothing, and my self less than nothing, and of no sort of Consequence.

When I think thus, I imagine it great Vanity in me to suppose that the Supremely Perfect, does in the least regard such an inconsiderable Nothing as Man. More especially, since it is impossible for me to have any positive or clear Idea of that which is infinite and incomprehensible, I cannot conceive otherwise, that He, the Infinite Father, expects or requires no Worship or Praise from us, but that he is even infinitely above it.

---- Selected Quotes ----

Ethan Allen On Deism

I have generally been denominated a Deist, the reality of which I never disputed, being conscious I am no Christian, except mere infant baptism make me one; and as to being a Deist, I know not, strictly speaking, whether I am one or not, for I have never read their writings; mine will therefore determine the matter; for I have not in the least disguised my sentiments, but have written freely without any conscious knowledge of prejudice for, or against any man, sectary or party whatever; but wish that good sense, truth and virtue may be promoted and flourish in the world, to the detection of delusion, superstition, and false religion; and therefore my errors in the succeeding treatise, which may be rationally pointed out, will be readily rescinded.

Preface to "The Only Oracle of Man", 1784
By Frank Lloyd Wright

I believe in God, only I spell it "Nature".

- - - Books You May Like Include: ----

The Faiths of the Founding Fathers by David L. Holmes.
It is not uncommon to hear Christians argue that America was founded as a Christian nation. But how true is this claim? In this compact book, David L...
God of Liberty: A Religious History of the American Revolution by Thomas S. Kidd.
Before the Revolutionary War, America was a nation divided by different faiths. But when the war for independence sparked in 1776, colonists united un...

Deism Is Not A Religion.

Reviewed by Dr. Ben Johnson, Doctor of Divinity-Original author unknown.

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