Deism is an ideology about God being completely transcendental to the Universe.

It is usually associated with scientists, pantheists, Gnostics, new age, Buddhists, agnostics, and, theoretically, also with anti-theists. Deism implies accepting God created everything and left it running without intervening in the functioning of the Universe or life. Aside from the atheists, who state either that there is no God, or that no convincing proof of God has been made, deists acknowledge that no speculation about Gods nature can be made. Therefore, we are not able to provide any evidence for or against God, nor any correct description of God. Firstly, I think many people would feel very comfortable with the deist worldview had it been no pressure from theism, more precisely for certain religions, especially Christianity. Deism is neutral and requires no intellectual of physical effort. It involves no commandments, rituals, or dogmas. People would not become atheists had the only religious worldview been deism. People probably have no problem with being created by God, as long as God does not tell them what to do. But people resent being told what to do because they perceive that as an absurd infringement to their liberty and not as a guidance, as it was intended. I will explain that further on. Why is deism important? Well mainly for two considerations: modesty and rationality. Modesty means a fair and just evaluation about the possibilities of people to know fundamental truths of life. Rationality means a fair and just assessment of the knowledge we do have. Is it possible to have rationality on both the deist side and theist side at the same time? Could two people look at the same data, yet draw two distinct (not incompatible) interpretations? I believe so! And this is where deism becomes really important! It is generally accepted that we have two means to know God: reason and faith. Both of them are powerful tools that we must use very wisely. Misuse of the reasoning could degenerate in underestimation of the faith, ultimately into atheism (this is actually a very important point to make in the combat against evolution theory, that most of its followers become prone to this misuse of reasoning). Misuse of faith could degenerate into underestimation of reasoning, ultimately into bigotry or dogmatism (on the other hand, this point is essential to make too against the negative influence of the Church in religion). As intellectual people, we are not to think that we should dispraise either our rational part, or our emotional part. Ok! But where does deism come into the play? Here it comes! The trouble with information is that it does not automatically provide knowledge, and the problem with knowledge is that it does not automatically provide wisdom! True wisdom comes when the owner of knowledge places himself into the appropriate position to that knowledge, in both attitude and action. For example, I might be a very knowledgeable medic, yet not use my knowledge to improve my own health. This is knowledge, but lack of wisdom!

It is the same with religion! Someone might be well learned about religion, yet not moved by it and could finally give it up altogether. Sadly, this is another worrisome phenomenon today (next to sheer ignorance of religion). However, for someone with modesty and reason, the lack of a default position towards religious knowledge usually leads to various flavours of deism to agnosticism. What is the connection between this positioning and faith? There are two fundamental aspects: one is the innate feeling of the sacred and the other is ones experience of the sacred (transcendental, spiritual). But what is the sacred, or the transcendental, or the spiritual? We sometimes hear atheist saying that they do not lack spirituality, but that their spirituality arises from humanism and not from religion. However, one must be aware as to how do the atheist actually define their spirituality. As opposed to religion, atheisms spirituality does not allow for an immaterial component of the human life (soul). Therefore, the spirit is considered just as an emergence of matter. Moreover, the spirit is not considered of divine origin, but as a by-product of biological evolution. Consequently, the spirit of the atheist has nothing transcendental about it, it is not a connection to an ultimate reality, there is nothing sacred about it, there is not even something supreme about it, if you realise it is just an extension of the sensorial gratification. If the spiritual is subordinated to the material, that it is not more than a mere need or pleasure! Of course, you could have atheists enjoying classical music and poetry, but you cannot actually have one creating it! That is because you might at best have an atheist being spiritual from time to time, rather as an entertainment than as lifestyle, than to have an atheist being spiritually all the time, being a spiritual person. It is unimaginable to have an atheist who sacrifices a bit of his materialistic interest for his or someone elses spiritual progress. Lest an atheist gives his life to save his spirit! And what is the end, the goal of spirituality anyway? Is it a mere pastime? Just something to do among all other worldly things? Ok, as we have established what is not the sacred, we should note that the fundamental distinction between a deist and a theist is the experience of the sacred. As earlier said, based on his innate feeling of the sacred (call it a feeling of purposefulness), the deist has the power and will to appreciate the beauty of the creation. However, mere observation and awe towards the sky would not get one from deism to theism. Why not? Because there is just one ingredient missing: the experience of the sacred! There is an ocean of difference between the mere feeling of the sacred and the experience of the sacred. The feeling state is passive. The deist is contempt with the thought that you cannot know God, he therefore has no action to take in this direction. But, as shown earlier, an even better position with respect to this knowledge can be taken. That is commonly known as search for God, which is the cornerstone of faith and the building block of the experience of the sacred!

What is faith? Faith is of two sorts: we should call one aprioristic faith and another retrospective faith. The former is so outrageously common and so commonly outrageous, that I am going to criticise it strongly. While the latter is authentic and fulfilling. Aprioristic faith is faith learned in school, at home, in the Church etc. What about it? The establishment of it is the cult, the denomination, the religious institution. The wicked thing about it is that it a mere form. It is the outer layer of the cosmic feeling, or the feeling of the sacred. It is what you see (people praying, gathering inside the church, wearing religious symbols, performing religious duties etc.), and not what you feel (the transcendental soul in that person). Aprioristic faith is nothing but a lie, a meaningless word, and a blasphemous one! What does faith men after all? When the Sunday churchgoer Christian says he believes what does he mean? If you believe that God said you should live your life a certain way and you do not live just like that, does that mean that you believe in God? Is there anything more important than doing Gods will? If there is nothing more important than doing Gods will, than what logic might one have as to do anything but Gods will? As you sin and not strive not to sin, how could you say of yourself that you have faith and doing Gods will? You should give your life doing the will of God, yet you use your life to sin! You are a liar. You have no faith. Actually, there is no such thing as faith. Retrospective faith is the fundament for the experience of the sacred. Retrospective faith is introspective in the human essence. It does not concern itself with the form, as the aprioristic faith does. Retrospective faith is really a gift of God. It is what Jesus called to be born again, that which Buddha named enlightenment even what Muhammad named to submit yourself to the will of God (Islam). Retrospective faith is the fulfilment of the feeling of the sacred it is that experience of the sacred, that which makes the leap from a deist, who just acknowledges the sacred, but does not know it, nor experiences it to a real theist, he who fully experiences the sacred. We have just returned to the main topic: how do we get from deism to theism? Let us leave the philosophy aside and take a look at the facts! As we are able to establish scientifically that the world having been created is the best explanation for what we observe, how can we infer anything about the Creator? It is, on the other hand, counterintuitive to think that creations understand their creators (does the computer understand the man operating it?) or that lower life forms understand their higher counterparts (be it more intelligent, more evolved and so on)? It seams to me there are only three possible ways to address this issue, of acquiring knowledge about God. I start with the third (according to the selected criterion) because I am not going to go into details right now, but later. That is human experience of the divine. It is frequently considered akin to Gnosticism.

But the first and foremost is the investigation of the creation itself (from the large scale of the Universe, down to the ecosystems on our planet and, the best candidate for analysis, the human intellect). The second most popular means of investigation are revealed Scriptures. However, sacred texts as the Bible, the Quran, the Vedas are written by people claiming divine inspiration thousands of years ago. Generally, we know very little about their authors, lest to be able to analyse their divine inspiration status. However, from the texts themselves (ignoring for starters the alterations that have occurred during the time of copying, translations and so forth), we can draw some interesting conclusions. The suggested method I describe as follows. The problem is that you have some texts that bear very little in common. We should only consider the Bible, the Quran, the Hindu scriptures, as well as the teachings of Buddha. You take them all, put them in an Eratosthenes sieve, and start grinding them! You should be able to remove the later additions, the translation and copying errors, the foreign influences from cultures they might have come into contact etc. Of course, I would not be able to describe the process here. As a matter of fact, this process constitutes an important step into ones transcendental experience, therefore a matter of introspective discovery, not of teaching. We should be able to finally extract some very important religious principles, which we could somewhat test. Two such categories come to my mind: first and most popular being prophecies (events foretold or trends, phenomena that occurred later in human history), the second is wisdom, meaning teachings that constitute both the basis for religious ethics (how to live in the world) and for human life experience (how to acquire both best life on Earth and, most important, spiritual progress and salvation). The fundamental issue about deism is actually rationality itself! As a deist, you start with the hypothesis that you cannot know. Therefore, you seclude yourself in this worldview, you are a rationalist dogmatic! Your dogma is limited human reason! But think of it from Gods perspective! If you create a toy robot would you not want to play with it? Actually, why do you create it at all? It is completely counterintuitive to create something that serves no purpose. Indeed, the purposes might not seem obvious to the created being itself, but you yourself know that purpose! In a distinct article, I will explain why omniscience and omnipotence lead necessarily to omnibenevolence. A nice metaphor I thought of: not just that God creates toys to play with them, but also He creates the toys as such as the toys enjoy when God is playing with them, and the toys themselves play with God! But give me that: if you create something, it is expected you have best intentions with it. It is somewhat natural too, because, unless you are insane or innately evil, you would not create something to hurt something or somebody, unless there was a pressure on you. I might be idealistic, but humans would not have created weapons, had the imminence of the war not been at hand. If they have enough to eat, are in peace and happy, they probably start building churches!

So, you are creating something and it is expected that to have a good purpose. Would you allow your creation to have a hint what your purpose was? That might be dependent on the purpose itself. For example, when you practice agriculture, you raise animals in order to eat them. You would not tell your animals that you are going to kill them, would you not? But such purposes are not good by definition, because they arise as need and pressure (to eat) act upon you. If you did not need to eat, than why would you kill the animals? On the other hand, if you create an intelligent life form for a purpose, the situation might just arise that that created life form helps you achieve that purpose you had with it. Or, even better, you just program it to do that (to cooperate with you on achieving your purpose)! However, creating intelligence is tricky (it seems for God too). As we understand intelligence today, it has the ability to perform complex tasks and so on, but what is it? We cannot understand intelligence without the connection with some form of individuality. We say an intelligent machine, but it is not a mere automaton. Had it been something purely deterministic, you would lose your ground to call it intelligence. Everydays experience shows us that different intelligences come up with different solutions to similar problems!! There is just a minuscule step to postulating that intelligence requires the freedom to make its own decisions! The best thing you could create is such an intelligent creature, which not just helps you fulfil your purpose (like creating a shovel to dig a hole), not just cooperates with you in achieving your purpose (like creating an automatic shovel that digs the hole itself), but the supreme thing is that you create such a creature that enjoys helping you, and, even much-much better, it itself has exactly the same purpose you have! Sounds a little bit like cloning:) But, as weve seen a minute ago, in order to serve your purpose (as its own), the intelligence has to have some sort of freedom to do that. You might speculate that, as an outside observer, you know that the intelligent life forms lack actual freedom, because you created them to serve you and they will do just that because you have created them to do that! But now swap perspective again! Could you know that as a created being? Of course not! Unless the Creator decides to tell you! However, the debate determinism vs. free will is a completely distinct topic. There might just be a way for you to program that into your intelligent creations, so that, by making their own free choices (free from their perspective), they actually eventually come to serve your purpose. However, that is somewhat mind-boggling. If that is true, I cannot yet comprehend it. If you can, please explain it to me. However, if this is true, jolly good, it means that we all are going to succeed in making Gods will and also fulfilling our lifes purpose!

But if it is not true, than, two situations arise: either, by making their own choices, they succeed fulfilling your and their purpose, or, by making their own choices, they fail. You would become very frustrated had the second situation be the case. It would actually mean that you have forfeited your purpose yourself; your creation is useless and purposeless! You certainly would want to avoid that. And, as you are omniscient (at least with respect to the creation, including the ability to foretell its future we cannot actually define omniscient without a definition domain: to know everything about what? Similarly, we cannot define omnipotence but on a domain: to be able to do anything from a class of actions a certain type of interactions), you would try to avoid that. It seems to me you only have two ways of doing that. The first is you program your intelligent beings so that, by making their own free choices (free from their perspective), they actually eventually come to serve your purpose, which I admitted not to comprehend. If this is so, then we must ask ourselves how do you define interference (this is a subtle issue our knowledge is based on a reference frame, we know somewhat about something, our mundane and scientific knowledge is not transcendental. We cannot imagine, for example, something without a cause, or something that exists solely by itself, with no respect to anything else in the Universe. It is almost by definition that God is that reference frame of our existence, therefore the way the reference frame interacts with the Universe might not be called intervention but this is a distinct topic)! From your perspective, of course you interfere with them, because you know they are not free to do anything but your will. But from their perspective, they would not know that! To them it would seem they are free to do exactly as they please, without knowing that you created them with the illusion that they are able to disobey you. And that they eventually obey you without acknowledging doing that. Again, this is overwhelming to comprehend! The second means by which you create them, grant them freedom (from actually obeying you), and still fulfil your purpose and their purpose is to intervene! You have to be very delicate in your intervention though. You cannot intervene that severe to sever their freedom (the possibility to disobey you, and therefore forfeit their purpose and therefore forfeit yours). But you must intervene enough in order to balance their freedom with something else! Something very subtle, not to infringe their feeling of freedom. Yet something not very weak, that it could just be ignored while exercising freedom. That is the feeling of the sacred! That is the actual interaction of God with the world, both continuous and maintaining, but not discrete, in the sense of stepwise. God does not actually intervene in the world, because an expansion of God actually always manifests in the world. It has not started to manifest itself at some point (as common Christians say that the Holy Spirit has descended into the world at Pentecost), it has always manifested in the world, Vedic science defines it Supersoul. The famous Romanian scientist Mircea Eliade defines it as the feeling of the sacred. I am fine with both terms. Scholars call it consciousness (although I think this is a cause-effect issue here, therefore consciousness being a limiting term). Even atheists refer to it as some innate sense of morality (this is the poorest definition of all). Unlike this cosmic feeling (Supersoul), which has always been with humankind, Scriptures have come to be at a specific time. According to Vedic science, Scriptures were inspired to

special messengers. This definition is ultimately based on a scripture, so we just use it without building arguments upon it. My theory is that the Scriptures are some sort of excrescence of the feeling of the sacred in action! Again, you could speculate that, in the original blueprint, you could set a mechanism that determines the necessity for revelation and causes a messenger to arise naturalistically. Mind-boggling as this is, I have no problem with that. It does not matter what caused the messenger, but what the message is! Scriptures are very important, because of their cultural role. We must not that, as strange as it would sound, without any Scripture or any religion at all, how would we know about God? How would we know that we are created and so on? Someone must have originally had this thought, about God, and there it all starts! Again, it is not about the book itself, but the concept that God has revealed (through the complex and subtle mechanism described above) a message to His creation. This idea could not be a by chance thought inspired by the Supersoul. The Eratosthenes sieve study of the Scriptures should some complexity that explains this. It might just be that, in various people groups, the Scriptures have been written at some point in history when a special messenger had, by means of the Supersoul, felt the need to balance the effects of the freedom by creating the Scriptures. Or it might be that God has revealed His message to someone who He wished to. Or even incarnated Himself! The idea is that there are multiple levels of interaction of God with the world. The must subtle of all is by means of the Supersoul and I think this best explains most of the issues at hand. The Scriptures, no matter how they were created, operate at a lower level than the Supersoul does. The Supersoul just balances your freedom. Whilst the Scriptures, based on their normative laws and commandments, actually explicitly hinder your freedom. However, again, the beauty of all this is that you have the choice to ignore the Scriptures! The Supersoul is very subtle and you merely have a hint of its existence. But the Scriptures are coarse and you could take action against them if you feel they hinder your freedom! Therefore, by the existence of the Scriptures (practically a euphemism for the actual revelation), your freedom is not lessen, because the actual decision to respect or ignore them is yours! In light of all this shown so far, I conclude that the experience of the sacred is the annihilation of the freedom. It is the supreme choice one makes to surrender to the will of God, to submit his life, to assume Gods plan as his own and willingly pursue the fluffiness of Gods plan as his own. As I hope to have shown that some level of guidance is necessary for the achievement of the purpose of the creation, let us analyse the nature of these guidelines. Again, these guidelines must not be too strict as to infringe on the freedom of the created beings, yet they must form a complete and coherrent set of instructions in order to live a godly life. They must not be at variance with the innate nature of the created beings, requiring

supernatural powers in order to be obeyed. Moreover, they must be just as simple as all created beings to be able to pursue them, without requiring special innate or acquired abilities. They must be consistent among themselves and consistent with the logic of the creation, not to appear as being mere caprices or absurdities. They must be comprehended by the created being, otherwise submission would lead to slavery and not to the proper acknowledgement that Gods purpose is also ones purpose! These guidelines must be accessible and universal, therefore the Scripture part is also important. But are these guidelines difficult to follow? Generally, it is believed so, for mainly two reasons. Ignorance and refusal. We easily observe that people fail to live godly lives, even those who desire and sincerely try to do so. When can you have a misconception about some topic? It is simple: either you are not informed on the certain topic, or you simply disagree on that issue. As already shown, failure to comply with the guidelines, either because of ignorance or refusal, leads to one forfeiting the purpose of ones life. Moreover, we have already stated that the following the guidelines should be accessible to anyone sincere. They would not require someone to do physical effort (e.g. going to the Church or fasting), as some people would be unable to do so (e.g. disabled or sick people), they would not require special intellectual abilities (e.g. memorising texts, philosophical speculation), as most of the people actually do not posses them (e.g. uneducated or unintelligent people), they would not require special effort with respect to other people (e.g. proselytism, paying charity), as some people might not be able to do that (e.g. poor or austere people). The most unlikely would be that such guidelines would take a form as such to create division among created beings. For example, a specific religion (accepting dogmas as the Holy Trinity or the redeeming sacrifice of Jesus Christ, belief in miracles) or specific cultic practices (baptism, praying). Of course, the cultic practices are not to be deemed as plainly wrong. They are helpful, at the novice stage, for creating a piety state, favouring the transcendental initiation. Of course, the religious duties have been perverted and exploited by the Church for political reason. But we assume to have made a clear separation between those unwanted influences and the core of the religion on the Eratosthenes sieve! I will stick with this brief overview of the guidelines, without further enquiry as to specifically what these guidelines are. This is a completely separate topic! The only alternative to the guiding system is to build in a mechanism that ensures that by mere life experience, the created beings would acquire the knowledge necessary for fulfilling the purpose of the creation (some sort of biological and cultural evolution). Although this mechanism sounds interesting, I need not argue against it actually been put into practice. One needs only to take a look at the world today to imagine that, simply put, you have no basis to state that this state of affairs (or, in this respect, any previous historical state of affairs) seems to fulfil any purpose at all! Further speculating on this matter, as the Damocles sword lays above our heads the question: but why would God not have made the world in such a way not to allow any evil in the world? No satisfactory answer could be provided but that this is either the only, or the best

possible world you can build to accomplish maximum freedom and maximum salvation! Of course, this statement is not falsifiable, but it must be accepted as a common ground for discussion. Otherwise, the burden of proof lays one someone to demonstrate than such another utopia world might exist! The last point I want to make is about the transcendental experience. As announced earlier, transcendental experience means the end of freedom. When explaining the creation mechanism, freedom has been defined as the possibility of a created being not to participate in your plan, therefore forfeit both your purpose as a creator and its own purpose as a created being. Transcendental experience ultimately means to break any attachment to the worldly things and only preoccupy oneself with the divine! The divine being defined here as following the guidelines for fulfilling ones life purpose, assumed the same as Gods purpose. Of course, the argument that concerning oneself in the worldly matters is incompatible with the divine is far from easy to make. However, it is thoroughly studied by Vedic science. First of all, I must explain that, by religious experience, I have nothing to do with those hallucinated people having dreamt the hellfire, repented and so on. Transcendental experience, as the name suggests, is transcendental. This poses a barrier to the discursive logic and any attempt to explain it. It can only be understood by introspection and, of course, revelation. You cannot explain the nature of that experience, because that nature itself is transcendental (not discursive), therefore not of this world. It is obvious that you cannot explain things of another world to someone who has not seen it. Transcendental experience is not quantifiable in words, however, I will venture! I consider transcendental experience as a time dynamic process. It takes place in the past, present and future. How is that? Well, on the one hand is it the guideline discovery process. As the aforementioned guidelines are not simply provided to someone, but require some investigation, as shown in the Eratosthenes sieve. On the other hand, you implement the guidelines into your life. These processes cannot go but hand in hand. The discovery process takes time and requires the validation by transcendental experience. Validation by experience is not try-and-fail. You do not go and kill people and then experience sorrow, therefore you know is wrong what you did, therefore not killing is a guideline by God. Validation is only made by transcendental experience. It is the realisation that this is the way things ought to be. The Church bigotry has deprived believers of the ability to think for themselves. The churchgoer Christians follow blindly what the priest tells them without comprehending why, being deprived of transcendental experience because they never inquire to understand God, but simply follow some guidelines. Of course, following guidelines is good, but understanding the guidelines (and discovering new ones) is the real process of transcendental experience. Understanding the guidelines is just as bit as important as observing them. I was inclined to refrain from providing any examples. But let us take probably the most unpopular one: fornication. Atheists say that religion subjugates sexuality. Of course, the

Church explains that this is what God said and if you do not obey, you will go to hell (Big Brother watches with whom you go to bed and the celestial dictatorship watches in what position, sadistically awaiting for you to sin, in order to punish you anyone should reach the conclusion that this description best fits an imaginary devil, and not the omnibenevolent creator God described herein). Blindly observing the commandments of the Church does not lead to understanding. Of course, theologians have attempted to explain: Christians say that fornication is a sin against the human body; Islamic theology says that it promotes unlawful relationships among men and women. In light of the previous explanations, I will go with the Vedic interpretation: fornication is the climax of attachment to the worldly affairs. This kind of promoting hedonistic sense gratification is detrimental to spiritual progress, therefore leading one astray from the path of achieving ones goal in life, the same as Gods (only by spiritual progress we are nearing to the purpose of life)! By transcendental experience being dynamic, I have shown that it is a continuous process. But how does it take place in the past, present and future? We are used to think of experience as being something actual, therefore taking place at a present moment. There is nothing actually supernatural about it, but a mere enlightenment of mundane experience. It does not involve miracles, but it leads to an understanding of why things are the way they are. For example, when you consider a sad thing that happened in the past, say that your wife left you, you no longer regard it as a tragedy, a misfortune and wonder why did that happen. But clearly acknowledge the causes and the consequences of this mere fact. For example, you realise that both of you were on your 20th personal affair, so it was very unlikely to work out anyways, or that you simply did not fit together, which you were unable to previously have seen. It is not self-pity or deceit, but acquiring a proper perspective on the facts, a solid foundation for judgement of lifes events. Based on such understanding, nothings remain merely a thing of the past, but a part which fulfils a purpose in the mechanism of life. Of course, you become able to enlighten your everyday experience, as well as future prospects, to take the best decisions based on transcendental knowledge, not just on rational thinking or faith. It is all the same with answering fundamental questions: Why do I exist? What is the purpose of life? What should I do with my life? And so on. You cease to identify yourself with the coarse body or the subtle mind, but realise the transcendental self. Having achieved that, nothing seems to lack sense anymore, but fits into the large picture of life. It is a religious feeling not based on fear, credulity or wishful thinking, but on understanding. I state that the answers to the existential questions lay in transcendental experience; it is a feeling that everything makes perfect sense. It is an active participation in life, not a mere taking part in life. It no longer constitutes a dilemma whether essence precedes existence or existence precedes essence, it becomes self evident that there is no distinction between essence and existence! Of course, it is a sort of knowledge, a sense of getting a glimpse of the Absolute Truth, which can only be personally experienced and not expressed in words or taught.