Theists and deists: The ways people believe in God.

Most pagans do believe in God, y’know.

THEIST 'θi.ɪst adjective. Believes in the existence of God or gods.

2. Believes in one God, a personal being, the universe’s creator, who interacts with its creation.

[Theistic θi'ɪst.ɪk adjective, theism 'θi.ɪz.əm noun]

DEIST 'di.ɪst adjective, noun. Believes God exists, specifically as a creator who doesn’t supernaturally intervene in his universe.

[Deistic 'di.ɪs.tɪk adj., deism 'di.ɪz.əm n.]

If you believe in gods, you’re a theist. People tend to bunch theists into different classifications, depending on how many gods they believe in, and how. Both religious and irreligious people (and the Christian term for the non-religious is “pagan”) alike fall into these slots:

• MONOTHEIST: Just the One God, thanks.
• POLYTHEIST: Multiple gods. Sometimes two, a good and bad god, in a dualistic system. Sometimes three, among heretic Christians who really misunderstand the trinity. Sometimes a whole pantheon.
• HENOTHEIST: Multiple gods, but they only deal with the one, so functionally they’re more monotheist than polytheist. The other gods are off limits, bad, or have their own realms which don’t involve us any.
• PANTHEIST: The universe is God. (People often assume Hindus are polytheist, ’cause of all their gods, but really they’re pantheist.)
• NONTHEIST: No god.

There’s a certain category of theist called deist, a person who believes in God… but believes this God largely leaves us humans alone, so in return we largely leave him (or her, or it, or them if you’re polytheist) alone.

This God created the cosmos. Made the Big Bang go bang. Maybe directed evolution so humans would arise; maybe didn’t. Probably provided us some form of afterlife, so when we die we don’t simply cease to exist. May expect us humans to be good… or maybe he doesn’t care. See, pagans don’t believe in organized religion, so they don’t accept anyone else’s views—not Christian, nor Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, nor anyone—as to what God’s like. Nor do they believe we can deduce what he’s like from nature, either. Their conclusion: God’s unknowable.

Deism insists God’s too foreign, too transcendent, too far beyond figuring out… other than assuming he’s good. Generally deists agree God’s good. (Won’t always agree what they mean by “good,” but still.) Since God’s good, we should be good. Concentrate on that. Be selfless and noble and rational and generous, and strive for all those other humanist ideals.

But as for what God’s like: Don’t know, so don’t fret. He’s too different. Probably not at all interested in what we’re going through, ’cause we’re too puny and petty to be worth his worry. If he cares about us at all (and maybe he does) he’ll sort us out somehow. If he doesn’t… well, what can we really do about it? Best to just live our lives. Be good. But otherwise don’t worry about God.

I know: This apathetic attitude towards God sounds an awful lot like a nontheist’s apathetic attitude towards no God and no religion. Both groups definitely have apathy in common. But the big difference becomes obvious once deists and nontheists drop apathy. When deists finally decide to take their beliefs about God seriously, they tend to fall into a religion. Whereas when nontheists decide to take their beliefs in no God seriously, they pick fights with theists.

When we’re surrounded by sickness and evil.

A lot of the “problems” westerners go through are what we call “first-world problems”: If you’re rich and comfortable, little annoyances get exaggerated into big huge crises. Like when your phone battery dies, or the grocery store shrinks your favorite yogurt from 150 grams to 100 and raises the price a nickel, or somebody cut in line at the coffeehouse, or someone misunderstood your latest tweet and got all offended. Now your day is just ruined.

Poor people just laugh at these woes as ridiculous. ’Cause they are.

Parents of teenagers know what I’m talking about. I used to teach grammar, and my kids would write poetry, and sometimes they’d write really awful poems in which they’d bellyache about the “problems” in their largely problem-free lives. Rarely were they legitimate—like not having enough food, like fighting a difficult disease, like child abuse. Just a bunch of first-world problems. This or that kid was mean to ’em. Parents wouldn’t give them the money to waste on toys or clothes or concerts. And who needs good grades when you’re gonna be in the NBA someday? Teenage angst is largely the result of new hormones affecting a young mind that doesn’t yet know how to handle ’em. But kids assume it’s all this other dumb stuff.

Anyway. You want some real suffering, kids, you listen to David ben Jesse. Dude peaked too soon, making his king crazy jealous, forcing him into hiding for years. Once he finally took the throne he had to fight three civil wars—and that’s on top of all Israel’s external foes.

Plus, at the time he wrote this psalm, David apparently hadn’t changed his drawers in way too long, leading to a savage case of crotch rot in verse 7… and that’s the optimistic interpretation. Best I don’t speculate further. But you think your life sucks? David’s really sucked.

Yes, my translation made it rhyme again.

Psalm 38 KWL

0 David’s psalm—something to remember.

1 LORD, don’t correct me angrily, instructing me in heat,

2 because your arrows fall on me. Your strong hand has me beat.

3 My flesh’s instability from your indignant face;

my bones lack peace; my sinning moves your presence out of place.

4 I’ve more misdeeds than height! a heavy, heavy load for me.

5 My wounds all stink and rot thanks to my clear stupidity.

6 I’m twisted, bent way down; I walk in darkness all the day.

7 My burning genitals!—unstable flesh just wastes away.

8 I’m numb. I’m very crushed. My groaning heart through which I’ve cried—

9 My Master, my desires and sighs are obvious. Don’t hide.

10 My heart vibrates. My strength is gone. My eyes’ light: Also gone.

11 My loves and friends both shun my plague. My nearest: Far along.

12 Some want to trap my soul, have me wreak havoc, do what’s wrong.

They meditate on tricks to play upon me all day long.

13 I’m deaf, so I heard nothing. Mouth not open. I stayed mute.

14 Much like a man who doesn’t hear, I’d nothing to refute.

15 I hope in you, my LORD, my Master God. Reply, I plead:

16 I said, “These big shots hope to see me trip on my own feet.”

17 For I expect to fall! It’s like I’m walking on a thorn.

18 My evil I confess; my sinning causes me to mourn.

19 My enemies, alive and strong—and liars—come in droves.

20 Instead of goodness, vice; since I chase goodness, they oppose.

21 Don’t leave me, LORD! I need you here. Please don’t be far away.

22 Save me quick, my Master and my savior—come today!

Misreading and mistreating those who mourn.

Job 4–5

After Job suffered the tremendous disaster of having his children, employees, and livestock all killed in one day, three of his friends came and sat shiva with him. Jb 2.11-13 For a week they said nothing.

Then Job vented for a chapter.“Wish I’d never been born; Jb 3.3 why didn’t I die at birth; Jb 3.11 I wish I were dead.” Jb 3.20-22 The usual stuff people say when they’ve suffered an earth-shattering loss, particularly when loved ones die. Stuff we’re supposed to listen to, sympathize with… and watch these people in case they actually try to act upon any of it. (Half the time they’re all talk, but sometimes they’re not, so it’s best to err on the side of caution.)

But you know how humans are: We try to fix one another. We don’t leave it in the hands of professionals, who know how to guide people to make good choices. We tell ’em, “You know what you oughta do,” and tell them so. Or worse, we try to do it for them.

So in Job, here’s where all the bad advice begins. The first to talk was Job’s friend Elifáz of Teyman (KJV “Eliphaz the Temanite”). Therefore he’s gonna get picked on first. It is, as the LORD told Elifáz at the end of the book, wholly inaccurate information about the LORD. Jb 42.7 Yet I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard my fellow Christians proclaim all same foolish things. It’s like they never even read this book… well, beyond the first chapters and the happy ending.

Job 4.1-6 KWL

1 Elifáz of Teyman replied. He said:

2 “Are you too weary for anyone to prove a thing to you?

Who’s able to stifle your sayings?

3 Look, you’ve strengthened many, and made weak hands strong.

4 Your sayings upheld the stumbling and strengthened bent knees.

5 But now this comes to you, and you’re ‘weary.’ It smites you and you panic.

6 Wasn’t your fear of God overconfidence? Your path of integrity your hope?”

There y’go, Elifáz. Start smacking him while he’s down.

Before this disaster, Job was a great man, a wise man, full of good advice, ready to help people when they were in need. Then disaster struck, and he understandably fell to pieces. “So where’s your God now? Where’s your faith? Did you even have faith before?”

Okay. In the Christian life, sometimes we’re gonna go through crises of faith. Which is totally normal: When we don’t know any better, we mistakenly put our faith in the wrong things. Rituals instead of relationship, things instead of people, feel-good ideas instead of truth, “I now know best” instead of “I’m wrong but Jesus is right,” putting people on pedestals where they don’t belong, declaring doctrines non-negotiable when they totally are, and conversely prioritizing favorite attitudes over the real non-negotiables.

In order to set us right, sometimes the Holy Spirit has to smash these idols. Which will really discombobulate us. We thought God gave these things to us, or wanted us to believe or have them, or would never interfere with such things… and how mean it was of him to take ’em away. Like pouty children, sometimes we even don’t care to talk to our Father for a good long time afterwards.

But this wasn’t at all what Job was doing.

Job hadn’t made an idol of his kids, employees, and livestock. He didn’t turn on God; he’d made a big point of saying such behavior was stupid. Jb 2.9-10 Job had integrity: He didn’t follow God only when times were good. We get like that. We love him when we’re prosperous, but when times get rough we’re no longer sure he’s around—or if he even exists. Job wasn’t going through any such crisis of faith. But Elifáz’s words suggest that’s what he assumed was happening. He totally misread the situation.

Get hold, and get rid, of your anger.

James 1.19-21.

God is stable. Jm 1.16-18 He’s not prone to wild mood swings, nor does he have some secret evil plan where he tricks us into sin Jm 1.12-15 as an excuse to smite us—which he conceals beneath a veneer of goodness. God’s no hypocrite.

And, as is appropriate for God’s followers, we shouldn’t be that way either. Ordinarily humans are creatures of extremes. Our emotions tend to be wild, crazy, out of control… or totally repressed. If we’re the overemotional sort, we point to the emotionless sort as totally wrong, and vice-versa. The repressed person objects to emotions as wildly inappropriate, and emotional people as possible candidates for heavy medication. The out-of-control person objects to emotionless people as unhealthy and stunted, and at some point they’re gonna snap and need some of that heavy medication themselves.

But the fruit of the Spirit is prahýtis/“gentility,” or gentleness—the ability to keep control over our emotions. A Spirit-following Christian doesn’t fly off the handle at every little thing, in wrath and fury. Nor do we feel nothing… including love, joy, and compassion. The Spirit helps us keep a grip on our feelings.

But of course, Christians pretend our rage is righteous anger, or even that it’s all God’s idea. We even try to make it sound like fruit. James objected to the idea in this passage:

James 1.19-21 KWL

19 Know this, my beloved fellow Christians: Be quick to listen, everybody. Slow to speak, slow to anger.

20 Men’s anger doesn’t empower God’s rightness.

21 So gently get rid of every filthy thing, every evil advantage.

Pick up the message which is implanted with the power to save your souls.

General revelation: How to (wrongly) deduce God from nature.

GENERAL REVELATION 'dʒɛn(.ə).rəl rɛv.ə'leɪ.ʃən noun. The universal, natural knowledge about God and divine matters. (Also called universal revelation, or natural revelation.)

2. What the universe, nature, or the human psyche reveal to us about God.

A number of Christian apologists love, love, LOVE the idea of general revelation. And I always wind up on their bad side, because as a theologian I have to point out it’s a wholly unreliable form of revelation. It’s so useless it actually does pagans more good than Christians.

This, they really don’t wanna hear. Because they’ve pinned so many hopes on it.

Y’see, apologists deal with nontheists, people who don’t believe in God and are pretty sure he’s never interacted with them before. What apologists try to do is prove God has so interacted with them before. If the nontheist can’t remember any such events, the apologist will try to point to nature and claim, “See, that’s a way God interacted with you!” God made a really impressive sunset, or God not-all-that-supernaturally cured ’em of a disease, or God created one of their kids, or they had a warm fuzzy feeling which kinda felt divine.

Or, if we’ve got a more philosophically-minded apologist, they’ll try to argue that certain beliefs in a westerner’s brain can’t really work unless there’s a God-idea somewhere deep in that brain. Absolutes of right and wrong supposedly can’t exist unless there’s an absolute authority like God to define ’em. Or an unfulfilled desire for a higher power has to be based on an actual Higher Power out there somewhere.

Apologists like to regularly tap the idea of general revelation, and bounce from there to the idea of special revelation—that God actually does tell us stuff about himself, and particularly did so through Jesus.

Me, I figure all this general revelation stuff is quicksand. That’s why I like to leapfrog it and get straight to Jesus. Apologists waste way too much time trying to prove God exists by pointing to nature, reasoning, and the human conscience. But while they’re busy unsuccessfully trying to sway a skeptic, we could’ve just prophesied, proving there’s such a thing as special revelation… and now we’re talking about Jesus while the apologist is still trying to explain why intelligent design isn’t merely wishful thinking.

Why is general revelation quicksand? Because we’re looking at creation, trying to deduce God from it. We’ve began with the assumption creation sorta resembles its creator; that it has his fingerprints all over it, so when we know what it’s like, we can sorta figure out what God’s like.

So look at the people God created, and the way we think and reason. Look at the intelligence which had to go into some of the more complex things and beings in the universe. Look at the attention to detail, the intricacy, the mathematical and scientific precision, the way everything all neatly fits together. Tells you all sorts of profound things about the creator, doesn’t it?

Well, actually, no it doesn’t.