My paper is compleat... I think I do my best work under pressure of a deadline.

[smooth_operater]

So I started writing my paper around 1am and finished at 4am. With about 2 hours of reserch I did that makes a total of 5 hours. Not bad for a reserch paper. I think I should be worth more than 25 out of 500 points. Thats only 5 points of my final grade and I have to write 3 of these... Luckly I have done 2 of them now so I only have one more left

Comments

“Deism”

[smooth_operater]

The eighteenth century was a time of intellectual growth. This intellectual movement was inspired by the French and American revolutions which brought a new freedom to the people to express ideas. One of these ideas inspired by the intellectual movement was deism. What is deism?

According to Morais, the author of Deism in Eighteenth Century America, “Eighteenth century deism accepted the sufficiency of natural (rational) religion and implicitly or explicitly rejected the need or truth of divine revelation,” and a majority deists felt that Jesus was the first great deistic preachers despite their opposition to Christianity (Morais p.8 & 15). The deists opposed Christianity because they believed, “that the followers of Jesus lost sight of his teachings to an extent of replacing them with rituals, creeds and churches” (Morais p 16). Thomas Chubb, a militant deist, felt that the “true gospel of deism consisted of; (1) the practice of an eternal rule of conduct based on reason; (2) a repentance of and reformation from sin; and (3) a belief in immortality” (Morais p.41). Morais stated that, “During most of the eighteenth century, deistic speculation circulated almost exclusively among ‘rich and well-born’ liberals who used it for the purpose of overthrowing such vestiges of the old regime as the union of church and state” (Morais p.8). These upper class followers of the deism movement did not want to destroy religion, but felt they needed to reform it to something more ‘natural’ (Morais p.8). The deist felt that the upper-class used the “superstitions” of Christianity to enslave the masses. According to Morais, a rich deist wrote a letter to the editor of The Temple of Reason for the November 27, 1802 print that said:

“Very few rich men; or at least men in the higher grades of society, and who receive a liberal education, care anything about the Christian religion. They cast off the yoke of superstition themselves; yet, for the sake of finding obedient servants, they would continue to impose it on the poor.” (Morais p.14 & 15)

The deist felt that “liberty meant freedom not only from the English but from ecclesiastical interference” (Morais p.18). They felt a forced payment to an established church was “derogatory to the nature of man as well as useless and pernicious to social welfare” (Morais p. 18)

Morais felt that 1713 marked the beginning of Deism because Cotton Mather’s, Reasonable Religion, the first book on deism, was published that year and one year later the first collection of rationalistic works was sent to America (Morais p.8). Morais marked 1805 as the end to deism because Elihu Palmer, responsible for the organization of a militant deistic movement, passed away at that time (Morais p.8).

The spread of the deist movement lost momentum because many of the deists, inspired by the intellectual movement of the time period, did not fully understand the implications in supporting the deist movement and eventually returned to Christianity (Morais p.13). This is because, to be a part of the deist movement was looked upon by society as if “one were taking up a crusade against Christianity” and led to the loss of one’s respectability in the mainly Christian society (Morais p.13). Even Thomas Pain, who was respected by Thomas Jefferson for steadily laboring to secure American freedom, despite his explicit assertion “I believe in one God and no more,” was given the reputation of being an atheist because of his deist beliefs (Morais p.13 & 14). The deists were given this reputation because of the most militant of deists, Pain and Palmer, who were “determined to destroy the priesthood by putting an end to its authority; the Scriptural revelation” which in turn spread the growth of atheism and not deism (Morais p.19 & 20). In Pain’s attempt to discredit the Bible he wrote

“the Christian system of faith, including in it the whimsical account of the creation, the strange story of Eve, the snake and the apple; the ambiguous idea of a man-god; the corporeal idea of the death of a god; the mythological idea of a family of gods, and the Christian system of arithmetic that three is one and one is three…”

Re: “Deism”

[smooth_operater]

Morais stated that the spread of the “anti-Christian tendency of militant deistic ideology was too dangerous for the peace of society” because “it concealed tons of social dynamite which, if set off, would destroy not only organized religion but social order” (Morais p.14).

Today there are still a small amount of deist followers but mainly the deist philosophy has been long forgotten.