107 Sentences With "deistic" | Random Sentence Generator

Remarkably, though, the Diderot character never counters his opponent with references to God or grace or natural law or even the abstract Deistic divine.

This change is construed by the Catholic Church as moving towards a Deistic view.

Any deistic God is not around for prayers, miracles or to intervene in people's lives and that because of this it is unpopular with monotheistic religions.Steve Stewart-Williams, p. 71 Deistic Evolution adheres to the concept of some form of God, but denies any personal God.

In his view rationalism in religion became the deistic philosophy that some historians associate it with the high Enlightenment.

The Theophilanthropists ("Friends of God and Man") were a deistic sect, formed in France during the later part of the French Revolution.

Deistic evolution is a position in the origins debate which involves accepting the scientific evidence for evolution and age of the universe whilst advocating the view that a deistic God created the universe but has not interfered since. The position is a counterpoint to theistic evolution and is endorsed by those who believe in deism and accept the findings of science.

His communications to the Public Advertiser republished as Essays on Public Worship, Patriotism, and Projects of Reformation, 1773, were so deistic in tone as to put an end to the scheme.

In 1993, Bob Johnson founded the World Union of Deists (WUD) which offered a monthly paper publication THINK! and two online deist publications, THINKonline! and Deistic Thought & Action! In 1996 WUD launched its web site deism.com.

Spinoza lay the foundations for pandeism. Giordano Bruno conceived of a God who was immanent in nature, and for this very purpose was uninterested in human affairs (all such events being equally part of God). However, it was Baruch Spinoza in the 17th century who appears to have been the earliest to use deistic reason to arrive at the conception of a pantheistic God. Spinoza's God was deistic in the sense that it could only be proved by appeal to reason, but it was also one with the universe.

He argues that there was no fixed body of "deistic" thought before 1700, and it is often difficult to distinguish deism from theological rationalism and naturalism in general. He argues plausibly that irenic recoil from the fratricidal divisions and intolerance of Christendom contributed greatly to the formation of deism. He concludes that Montesquieu's and Voltaire's moral philosophies altered deistic expression far more than anything original in their "religious" criticisms or theological speculations. On all of these issues, and on a large number of minor topics of scholarly interest, he engages prior historical and literary studies with fairness.

Deistic evolution is not the same as theistic evolution, yet they are sometimes confused. The difference rests on the difference between a theistic god that is interested in, if not actively involved in, the outcome of his creation and humanity specifically and a deistic god that is either disinterested in the outcome, and holds no special place for humanity, or will not intervene. Often, there is no discernible difference between the two positions—the choice of terminology has more to do with the believer and her or his need for a god, than fitting into a mostly arbitrary dictionary or academic definition.

His uncle, Charles Backus, was a Congregational minister at Somers, Connecticut. Azel was fitted to attend College under his instruction. In 1783, he entered Yale College. While he was in the Yale, he grew deistic opinions and graduated in 1787 from there.

The Deistic arguments intended to eliminate the belief in a supernatural revelation through the criticism of the trustworthiness of the canon of the Scripture created by humans, as sources of final truth. Instead, Deists try to focus on what is obvious. Miracles do not occur.

He was a member of a United Reformed Church, which he described as teaching "a traditional deistic picture of the universe". He was awarded the Dirac Prize and Gold Medal of the Institute of Physics in 2015 and the Gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society in 2016.

In Christian Theology, by Millard J. Erickson, 2013, is written: “deistic evolution is perhaps the best way to describe one variety of what is generally called theistic evolution.”Millard J. Erickson, Christian Theology, 2013, page 398. He describes it as the belief that God “began the process of evolution, producing the first matter and implanting within the creation the laws its development has followed.” Following the establishment of this process, this Creator then “withdrew from active involvement with the world, becoming, so to speak, Creator Emeritus.” The psychologist Steve Stewart-Williams in his book Darwin, God and the Meaning of Life (2010) states: Stewart-Williams further writes that deistic evolution strips God of what most religious believers consider central.

He was a Commissioner of Public Accounts between 1694 and 1697. His Essays on Several Subjects have been described as openly deistic. He also published a remarkable biographical dictionary and other works.Thomas Pope Blount in A Biographical Dictionary of Modern Rationalists He was created a baronet, of Tittenhanger on 27 January 1679.

Monroe was raised in a family that belonged to the Church of England when it was the state church in Virginia before the Revolution. As an adult, he attended Episcopal churches. Some historians see "deistic tendencies" in his few references to an impersonal God. Unlike Jefferson, Monroe was rarely attacked as an atheist or infidel.

In his historical essays he often made positive references to the Reformation. It led to him being called a Protestant and unbeliever by Hovhannes Chamurian (Teroyents), a contemporary conservative cleric. A Constantinople-based conservative journal declared him a heretic. Nalbandian's religious views have been described by Vardan Jaloyan as being essentially deistic and liberal Christian.

Humans are believed to already have the endowed capacity to create synergies and contribute in some way toward the development of fairer societies on Earth, whether it be through scientific understanding or spiritual enlightenment. However, Christian deists also strongly oppose the mainstream deistic notion that sacred texts like the Bible contain no revealed truths.

There are at least 10 Hindu temples in Newark's surrounding area. The remainder of Newark was spiritual but not religious, agnostic, deistic, or atheist, though some Newarkers identified with neo-pagan religions including Wicca and other smaller new religious movements. There is one Wiccan group in the city. Devotees of Santa Muerte are also in the city.

Militaire philosophe's system of constructive deism was welcomed by Voltaire. The deistic writings which date from before 1700 must be regarded as isolated precursors, and that the books so often regarded as the earliest works of the Enlightenment, Montesquieu's Persian Letters and Voltaire's Lettres philosophiques, were written when the first phase of French deism had come and gone.

In conjunction with deistic perspectives, Christian deism incorporates Christian tenets. Christian deists believe that Jesus Christ was a deist. Jesus taught that there are two basic laws of God governing humankind. The first law is that life comes from God and we are to use it as God intends, as illustrated in Jesus' parable of the talents.

Daniel Eaton was put on trial in May 1812. During the trial, in which he was accused of being an atheist, as well as the aforementioned "blasphemous libel." In defending himself, Eaton claimed that his beliefs were not atheistic, but deistic. He attempted to argue that scripture was open to the type of critique that Paine had leveled in Age of Reason.

Deism is the philosophical belief in a deity based on reason rather than religious revelation or dogma. It was a popular perception among the philosophes, who adopted deistic attitudes to varying degrees. Deism, in this respect, is very different from atheism, which denies the existence of a deity altogether. Voltaire, for instance, was convinced that the existence of god was a demonstrable fact.

546 The majority of the three million Nazi Party members continued to pay their church taxes and register as either Roman Catholic or Evangelical Protestant Christians.The Nazi Persecution of the Churches, 1933–1945 By John S. Conway p. 232; Regent College Publishing Gottgläubig was a nondenominational Nazified outlook on god beliefs, often described as predominantly based on creationist and deistic views.

Mann was born in Yorkshire. Little is known of his education except that he seems to have imbibed deistic ideas in his youth. He left England about 1754 and went to Paris. Here the study of Bossuet's Discours sur l'histoire universelle exerted a profound influence upon him, and in 1756 he was received into the Catholic Church by the Archbishop of Paris.

C. J. Betts's study of early deism in France is an intelligent study. Betts examines the prehistory of deism, from 1564 to 1670. He looks at "the later seventeenth century," from Saint-Evremond to Bayle and discusses the first French deists, authors of books and clandestine manuscripts written between 1700 and 1715. He also analyzes deistic ideas in the early works of Montesquieu and Voltaire.

The three works depict a number of deistic figures draped loosely in sheets, surrounding a mythical forest. The paintings’ subject matter much like Puvis’ other works such as Antique Vision are related to Ancient Greek mythology and are stylised as classical pieces. The Sacred Grove of the Paris Salon is currently on display in the European Painting and Sculpture Gallery of the Art Institute of Chicago.

How widespread deism was among ordinary people in the United States is a matter of continued debate. The last contributor to American deism was Elihu Palmer (1764–1806), who wrote the "Bible of American deism", Principles of Nature, in 1801. Palmer is noteworthy for attempting to bring some organization to deism by founding the "Deistical Society of New York" and other deistic societies from Maine to Georgia.

Criticism of Pascal's Wager began in his own day, and came from both atheists, who questioned the "benefits" of a deity whose "realm" is beyond reason, and the religiously orthodox, who primarily took issue with the wager's deistic and agnostic language. It is criticized for not proving God's existence, the encouragement of false belief, and the problem of which religion and which God should be worshipped.

The 18th century German philosopher Christian Wolff once thought that Confucius was a godless man, and that "the ancient Chinese had no natural religion, since they did not know the creator of the world". However, later, Wolff changed his mind to some extent. "On Wolff's reading, Confucius's religious perspective is thus more or less the weak deistic one of Hume's Cleanthes."Van Norden, B. W. 2002.

Bernhardt-Kabisch 1977 pp. 136–137 In terms of religion, Southey depicts a debate between Islam and Christianity. Although Julian defends his faith and attacks Roderick as a sinner, Roderick says that Christianity is a religion of forgiveness and that Julian has turned from God. Although Roderick is a Catholic, his arguments are actually a combination of Deistic theology, Stoic philosophy, and generic Christian ethics that reflect many of Southey's views.

This misunderstanding of Deism is not a contemporary issue but it goes back to the seventeenth century as J. M. Robertson explains: "Before deism came into English vogue, the names for unbelief were simply 'infidelity' and 'atheism'- e.g. Baxter's Unreasonableness of Infidelity (1655) ... Bishop Stillingfleet's Origines Sacrae deals chiefly with deistic views, but calls unbelievers in general 'atheists'... ".Robertson, John M. A Short History of Freethought, Ancient and Modern. 1915; p.

Among these were Emilie (philosophical dialogues, 1863), Die Religion des Geistes (1871), Die Fortdauer nach dem Tode (1869), Die Religion und ihre jetzt gebotene Fortbildung (1871), and Gedanken über Kunst, Religion und Philosophie (1874). In these works he attempted to develop a Deistic system of philosophy. He was also the author of an Anonymous work entitled Gespräche mit einem Grobian (1866). He is buried on the Old Southern Cemetery in Munich.

Powell contended therein that traditional forms of religion are giving way to a new cultural fusion of science and mysticism, which Powell called sci/religion. Powell felt that this was brought about to a great degree by Albert Einstein's own embrace of the deistic elements of Spinozism. Reviews were somewhat mixed, with reviewers finding Powell to have strained too hard to find a religious theme in modern science.

A version of the argument from design is central to both creation science and Intelligent design, but unlike Paley's openness to deistic design through God- given laws, proponents seek scientific confirmation of repeated miraculous interventions in the history of life, and argue that their theistic science should be taught in science classrooms.Padian, Kevin, and Nicholas Matzke. 2009. "Darwin, Dover, 'Intelligent Design' and textbooks". Biochemical Journal 417(1):29–42. . .

Deism was a religious philosophy in common currency in colonial times, and some Founding Fathers (most notably Thomas Paine, who was an explicit proponent of it, and Benjamin Franklin, who spoke of it in his Autobiography) are identified more or less with this system. Thomas Jefferson became a deist in later life, and Washington, James Madison, James Monroe, and John Tyler are often identified as having some degree of deistic beliefs.

Lamoureux rewrote his article as a 2009 journal paper, incorporating excerpts from his books, in which he noted the similarities of his views to theistic evolution, but objected to that term as making evolution the focus rather than creation, and distanced his beliefs from the deistic or more liberal beliefs included in theistic evolution. There is diversity among evolutionary creationists in explaining how these two concepts fit together.

Scholarly efforts to compare Hinduism and Judaism were popular during the Enlightenment era, in the process of arguing the deistic worldview. Hananya Goodman states that Hinduism and Judaism have played an important role in European discussions of idolatry, spirituality, primitive theories of race, language, mythologies, etc. Both religions were regarded by some scholars to be ethnic religions, and not promoting conversions. Adherents of both religions, however, are found across the world.

Christian deism is a term applied both to Christians who incorporate deistic principles into their beliefs and to deists who follow the moral teachings of Jesus without believing in his divinity. With regard to those who are essentially deists who follow the moral teachings of Jesus, these are a subset of classical deists. Consequently, they believe in a personal God, but they do not necessarily believe in a personal relationship with God.

John Locke's ideas supplied an epistemological grounding for Deism, though he was not a Deist himself. John Orr emphasizes the influence of Locke upon the Deistic movement by dividing the periods of Deism into Pre-Lockean and Post-Lockean. Locke accepted the existence of God as the uncaused Necessary Being, eternal, and all-knowing. He also believed in Christian revelation but he held that reason should be the ultimate judge of all truth.

Johann August von Starck. Johann August Starck also Stark (28 October 1741 – 3 March 3, 1816) was a prolific author and controversial Königsberg theologian, as well as a widely read political writer now best remembered for arguing that an Illuminati-led conspiracy brought about the French revolution. Immanuel Kant and Johann Georg Hamann were among his acquaintances in Königsberg. His broadly deistic approach emphasized natural religion and smoothed over doctrinal differences among the various faiths.

Spurgeon aroused controversy because of his critique of its theology, which was largely deistic. At the end of his review, Spurgeon warned: > We shall soon have to handle truth, not with kid gloves, but with gauntlets, > – the gauntlets of holy courage and integrity. Go on, ye warriors of the > cross, for the King is at the head of you. On 5 June 1862, Spurgeon challenged the Church of England when he preached against baptismal regeneration.

Finally, one can also question premise eight: why does a personal explanation have to lead to monotheistic (as opposed to deistic or polytheistic) accounts of intention?Steven J. Conifer (2001). "The Argument from Consciousness Refuted". However, Moreland maintains that questioning these minor premises is of little consolation to the naturalist as they essentially constitute intramural theist debates, and that for most westerners theism is the only viable candidate to accommodate personal explanations.

Morgan was first a dissenter preacher, then a practicer of healing among the Quakers, and finally a writer. He was the author of a large three-volume work entitled The Moral Philosopher. It is a dialogue between a Christian Jew, Theophanes, and a Christian deist, Philalethes. According to Orr, this book did not add many new ideas to the deistic movement, but did vigorously restate and give new illustrations to some of its main ideas.

This did not necessarily link lodges to the irreligious, but neither did this exclude them from the occasional heresy. In fact, many lodges praised the Grand Architect, the masonic terminology for the deistic divine being who created a scientifically ordered universe.Jacob, 145–47. German historian Reinhart Koselleck claimed: "On the Continent there were two social structures that left a decisive imprint on the Age of Enlightenment: the Republic of Letters and the Masonic lodges".

Despite the outpouring of antagonistic replies to The Age of Reason, some scholars have argued that Constantin Volney's deistic The Ruins (translations of excerpts from the French original appeared in radical papers such as Thomas Spence's Pig's Meat and Daniel Isaac Eaton's Politics for the People) was actually more influential than The Age of Reason.Mee, 138. According to David Bindman, The Ruins "achieved a popularity in England comparable to Rights of Man itself."Bindman, 129.

271 In this later work, Orc is born during the winter solstice and Urizen begins to search for him. Urizen, during this time, becomes witness to the life cycles of which Orc is a part. When Urizen finally reaches Orc, the view of the Orc cycle is described in a deistic manner, a perspective which is arguably the opposite of Blake's own theological convictions. Urizen, believing that Orc is connected to chaos, seeks predictability and order.

Robbins, 140–41; Davidson and Scheick, 58. Though these larger philosophical traditions are clear influences on The Age of Reason, Paine owes the greatest intellectual debt to the English deists of the early 18th century, such as Peter Annet.In Annet, Paine is said to have a direct "forerunner" in deistic argumentation, advocacy of "freedom of expression and religious inquiry" and emphasis on "social reforms." Annet even concerned himself with the price of one of his controversial religious pamphlets.

The Cult of Kosmos is a secretive cabal operating throughout and controlling Ancient Greece and the surrounding regions. The Cult also operates in branches compromising several Adepts, with each brand led by an individual dubbed as the Sage. Much like their Egyptian counterparts, the Order of the Ancients, and their future incarnations, the Templar Order, the Cult of Kosmos were not at all polytheistic and had a deistic belief system. They manipulated the Greek world to maintain their power and wealth.

Both the Moderate Enlightenment and a Radical or Revolutionary Enlightenment were reactions against the authoritarianism, irrationality, and obscurantism of the established churches. Philosophers such as Voltaire depicted organized Religion as hostile to the development of reason and the progress of science and incapable of verification. An alternative religion was deism, the philosophical belief in a deity based on reason, rather than religious revelation or dogma. It was a popular perception among the philosophes, who adopted deistic attitudes to varying degrees.

Anti-clerical parades were held, and the Archbishop of Paris, Jean-Baptiste-Joseph Gobel, was forced to resign his duties and made to replace his mitre with the red "Cap of Liberty." Street and place names with any sort of religious connotation were changed, such as the town of St. Tropez, which became Héraclée. Religious holidays were banned and replaced with holidays to celebrate the harvest and other non-religious symbols. Many churches were converted into "temples of reason," in which Deistic services were held.

Muhammad sent Khalid ibn Walid to demolish Wadd after the battle of Tabuk , an idol worshipped by the Banu Kalb tribe. Khalid went to Dumat Al-Jandal to destroy it, but the Banu Abd-Wadd and the Banu Amir al Ajdar tribes resisted. Khalid slew all resistance, Ibn Kalbi also mentions that among those slaughtered were Qatan ibn-Shurayb, whose mother wept at his death and fell over to his body and started sobbing until she died. Khalid demolished the deistic symbol and destroyed the entire shrine.

Doubt of a specific theology, scriptural or deistic, may bring into question the truth of that theology's set of beliefs. On the other hand, doubt as to some doctrines but acceptance of others may lead to the growth of heresy and/or the splitting off of sects or groups of thought. Thus proto-Protestants doubted papal authority, and substituted alternative methods of governance in their new (but still recognizably similar) churches. Christianity often debates doubt in the contexts of salvation and eventual redemption in an afterlife.

As of 2020, Orthodox, Conservative, and Reform Judaism were the most prevalent groups affiliated with throughout Buffalo and the surrounding area. A little over 0.5% professed an eastern faith including Buddhism, Hinduism, and Sikhism. The remainder of Buffalo and the surrounding area was spiritual but not religious, agnostic, deistic or atheist, though some Buffalonians identified with contemporary pagan religions including Wicca, Nature religion and other smaller new religious movements. Many contemporary pagans, spiritual but not religious and New Age residents attend the city's Winter Solstice celebrations annually.

Zina Weygand, The Blind in French Society from the Middle Ages to the Century of Louis Braille. Stanford University Press, 2009, p.156 However, it soon became overtaken by Theophilanthropy, a deistic sect promoted by Louis Marie de La Révellière- Lépeaux which quickly gained popularity following the Coup of 18 Fructidor in 1797. After the Coup of 30 Prairial VII and De La Révellière's resignation from the Directory in 1799, Theophilanthropy fell from favour and there was a return to the original form of the Decadary Cult.

Members of the sect included some prominent figures, such as General Hoche, the industrialist Éleuthère Irénée du Pont, the painter Jean-Baptiste Regnault, and the American philosopher and political activist Thomas Paine. Beginning in May 1798, however, the Directory began to withdraw support from the newly established deistic sect, which it considered too close to the Jacobins. The sect still had eighteen churches in 1799, but in 1801 it was abolished by Bonaparte. In Italy, the French army attacked the papal states governed by the Roman Catholic Church in Italy.

Spinoza's pantheistic focus on the universe as it already existed, was unlike Eriugena's. It did not address the possible creation of the universe from the substance of God, as Spinoza rejected the very possibility of changes in the form of matter required as a premise for such a belief. Franz Wilhelm Junghuhn was the first to articulate a pantheistic deism. 18th- century British philosopher Thomas Paine also approached this territory in his great philosophical treatise, The Age of Reason, although Paine was concentrated on the deistic aspects of his inquiry.

In the United States, Enlightenment philosophy (which itself was heavily inspired by deist ideals) played a major role in creating the principle of religious freedom, expressed in Thomas Jefferson's letters and included in the First Amendment to the United States Constitution. American Founding Fathers, or Framers of the Constitution, who were especially noted for being influenced by such philosophy of deism include Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, Cornelius Harnett, Gouverneur Morris, and Hugh Williamson. Their political speeches show distinct deistic influence. Other notable Founding Fathers may have been more directly deist.

On the other > hand, his Christian Deist will have nothing to do with sacrifices or > satisfaction,—nothing with the vicarious death of Christ,—nothing with > sacrifices and ceremonies,—with grace or election, which does not depend > upon the merit of the person elected.History of the Eighteenth Century and > of the Nineteenth, by F.C. Schlosser, p. 47 (1843) Christian deists do not worship Jesus as God. However, there are differing views concerning the exact nature of Jesus, as well as differing levels of hewing to traditional, orthodox deistic belief on this issue.

When the Spanish first arrived in Mesoamerica, they ransacked the indigenous peoples' territory, often pillaging their temples and places of worship. Beyond this, the devoutly Catholic Spaniards found the standing Mesoamerican spiritual observances deeply offensive, and sought to either cover up or eradicate their practice. This resulted in the erasure of Mayan religious institutions, especially those centered on human sacrifice and propitiation of the multi-deistic pantheon. Martial values and human sacrifice were a ritualistic core of Mesoamerican spirituality prior to European incursion, but quickly dissolved in the early stages of Imperial rule.

3: "I refer here to monodeism as the default standard concept of deism, distinct from polydeism, pandeism, and spiritual deism."What Is Deism?, Douglas MacGowan, Mother Nature Network, May 21, 2015: "Over time there have been other schools of thought formed under the umbrella of deism including Christian deism, belief in deistic principles coupled with the moral teachings of Jesus of Nazareth, and Pandeism, a belief that God became the entire universe and no longer exists as a separate being." Some deists see design in nature and purpose in the universe and in their lives.

British audiences, fearing increased political radicalism as a result of the French Revolution, received it with more hostility. The Age of Reason presents common deistic arguments; for example, it highlights what Paine saw as corruption of the Christian Church and criticizes its efforts to acquire political power. Paine advocates reason in the place of revelation, leading him to reject miracles and to view the Bible as an ordinary piece of literature, rather than a divinely-inspired text. It promotes natural religion and argues for the existence of a creator- god.

Paine's Quaker upbringing predisposed him to deistic thinking at the same time that it positioned him firmly within the tradition of religious Dissent. Paine acknowledged that he was indebted to his Quaker background for his skepticism, but the Quakers' esteem for plain speaking, a value expressed both explicitly and implicitly in The Age of Reason, influenced his writing even more. As the historian E. P. Thompson has put it, Paine "ridiculed the authority of the Bible with arguments which the collier or country girl could understand."Thompson, 98.

Dawkins debated Lennox for the second time at the Oxford University Museum of Natural History in October 2008. The debate was titled "Has Science Buried God?", in which Dawkins said that, although he would not accept it, a reasonably respectable case could be made for "a deistic god, a sort of god of the physicist, a god of somebody like Paul Davies, who devised the laws of physics, god the mathematician, god who put together the cosmos in the first place and then sat back and watched everything happen" but not for a theistic god.

Although members of various faiths cite objections, certain Christian denominations have had high-profile negative attitudes to Masonry, banning or discouraging their members from being Freemasons. The denomination with the longest history of objection to Freemasonry is the Catholic Church. The objections raised by the Catholic Church are based on the allegation that Masonry teaches a naturalistic deistic religion which is in conflict with Church doctrine. A number of Papal pronouncements have been issued against Freemasonry. The first was Pope Clement XII's In eminenti apostolatus, 28 April 1738; the most recent was Pope Leo XIII's Ab apostolici, 15 October 1890.

The fashion pantheism did not correspond to Mendelssohn's deistic reception of SpinozaAs far as Jerusalem is concerned, Mendelssohn's reception of Spinoza has been studied by Willi Goetschel: "An Alternative Universalism" in (Google Books). and Lessing whose collected works he was publishing. He was not so wrong, because Spinoza himself developed a fully rational form of deism in his main work Ethica, without any knowledge of the later pantheistic reception of his philosophy. Mendelssohn published in his last years his own attitude to Spinoza – not without his misunderstandings, because he was frightened to lose his authority which he still had among rabbis.

Tallet (1991):1 There has been much scholarly debate over whether the movement was popularly motivated.Tallet, Frank Religion, Society and Politics in France Since 1789 pp. 1-17 1991 Continuum International Publishing As part of the campaign to dechristianize France, in October 1793 the Christian calendar was replaced with one reckoning from the date of the Revolution, and Festivals of Liberty, Reason and the Supreme Being were scheduled. New forms of moral religion emerged, including the deistic Cult of the Supreme Being and France's first established state sponsored atheistic Cult of Reason,Fremont-Barnes, p. 119.

After many victories, the poem ends with Charles crowned King of France. Joan of Arc serves as a way for Southey to express his views on history and on politics; these include his republican ideals, his claims that political tyranny was a common element in Europe, and his opposition to Christian practices that he thought were superstitious. Later editions of the poem shifted from a promotion of a deistic view of religion to a more traditional view. Critics gave the work mixed reviews, with some emphasising the quality of the images and themes of the poem.

Deep time is a term introduced and applied by John McPhee to the concept of geologic time in his Basin and Range (1981), parts of which originally appeared in the New Yorker magazine. The philosophical concept of geological time was developed in the 18th century by Scottish geologist James Hutton (1726–1797); his "system of the habitable Earth" was a deistic mechanism keeping the world eternally suitable for humans. The modern concept shows huge changes over the age of the Earth which has been determined to be, after a long and complex history of developments, around 4.55 billion years.

Catharism was greatly influenced by the Bogomils of the First Bulgarian Empire, and may have also had roots in the Paulician movement in Armenia and eastern Byzantine Anatolia through Paulicians resettled in Thrace (Philipopolis). Though the term Cathar () has been used for centuries to identify the movement, whether it identified itself with the name is debated. In Cathar texts, the terms Good Men (Bons Hommes), Good Women (Bonnes Femmes), or Good Christians (Bons Chrétiens) are the common terms of self-identification. The idea of two gods or deistic principles, one good and the other evil, was central to Cathar beliefs.

The epistolary novel, which follows the life of a plantation owner (with the same surname as his friend and employer), imitates Voltaire's Candide and reflects Bancroft's deistic beliefs, ridiculing passages in the Bible and criticizing Christianity for its "detestable spirit of intolerance and persecution." In 1771 Edward married the twenty-two year old Penelope Fellows, daughter of a prominent Catholic family. A son, Edward, was born in 1772; they eventually had six more children. Bancroft was elected a fellow of the Royal Society in 1773 as "a gentleman versed in natural history and Chymistry, and author of the natural history of Guiana".

Title page from the first English edition of Part I Several early copies of The Age of Reason The Age of Reason; Being an Investigation of True and Fabulous Theology is a work by English and American political activist Thomas Paine, arguing for the philosophical position of deism. It follows in the tradition of 18th-century British deism, and challenges institutionalized religion and the legitimacy of the Bible. It was published in three parts in 1794, 1795, and 1807. It was a best-seller in the United States, where it caused a short-lived deistic revival.

Because miracles had to be observed to be validated, deists rejected the accounts laid out in the Bible of God's miracles and argued that such evidence was neither sufficient nor necessary to prove the existence of God. Along these lines, deistic writings insisted that God, as the first cause or prime mover, had created and designed the universe with natural laws as part of his plan. They held that God does not repeatedly alter his plan by suspending natural laws to intervene (miraculously) in human affairs. Deists also rejected the claim that there was only one revealed religious truth or "one true faith".

During a two-year period known as the Reign of Terror, the episodes of anti-clericalism grew more violent than any in modern European history. The new revolutionary authorities suppressed the Church, abolished the Catholic monarchy, nationalized Church property, exiled 30,000 priests, and killed hundreds more. In October 1793, the Christian calendar was replaced with one reckoned from the date of the Revolution, and Festivals of Liberty, Reason, and the Supreme Being were scheduled. New forms of moral religion emerged, including the deistic Cult of the Supreme Being and the atheistic Cult of Reason, with the revolutionary government briefly mandating observance of the former in April 1794.

Inscription on church at Ivry-la-Bataille Many contemporary accounts reported the Festival of Reason as a "lurid", "licentious" affair of scandalous "depravities", although some scholars have disputed their veracity. These accounts, real or embellished, galvanized anti- revolutionary forces and even caused many dedicated Jacobins like Robespierre to publicly separate themselves from the radical faction. Robespierre particularly scorned the Cult and denounced the festivals as "ridiculous farces". In the spring of 1794, the Cult of Reason was faced with official repudiation when Robespierre, nearing complete dictatorial power during the Reign of Terror, announced his own establishment of a new, deistic religion for the Republic, the Cult of the Supreme Being.

He then went to Laurahütte in Upper Silesia as a teacher, and while there the exhibition of the Holy Coat at Treves, used by Bishop Arnoldi of Trier to increase pilgrimage and church revenue so stirred his ire that he denounced it in print (1 October 1844) in a public letter to Bishop Arnoldi. He published in succession a number of pamphlets in which he called on the Roman Catholic laity and the lower clergy to leave the communion of that Church. These were generally understood to be written from the standpoint of deism; and in subsequent years Ronge pronounced himself more and more unreservedly in favor of deistic doctrines.

Agreeing with Stevens that their congregation needed a physical foundation to grow around, Everhart offered a lot from his development, directly across the street from his mansion on Minor Street, selling it to the Presbyterians for $420. Many of the wealthy members of West Chester chipped in, including members with no relation to Presbyterianism such as David Townsend, Orthodox Quaker Judge Isaac Darlington and his deistic cousin Dr. William Darlington. Thomas Ustick Walter designed the church, and the first corner stone was laid July 3, 1832. The First Presbyterian Church of West Chester was completed in January 1834, providing Everhart and the rest of the local Presbyterian faith a place to grow.

He was thus an early proponent of what came later to be called uniformitarianism, the science which explains features of the Earth's crust by means of natural processes over the long geologic time scale. Hutton also put forward the thesis of a ‘system of the habitable Earth’ viewed as a deistic mechanism designed to keep the world eternally suitable for humans, an early attempt to formulate what today might be called the anthropic principle. Though some of his ideas were also considered by other contemporaries such as the French naturalist Georges-Louis Leclerc, it is chiefly from Hutton's pioneering work in geology that we derive our present-day understanding of deep time.

In his "Essai sur la morale d'Aristote" (1881) Ollé-Laprune defended the "Eudaemonism" of the Greek philosopher against the Kantian theories; and in "La philosophie et le temps présent" (1890) he vindicated, against deistic spiritualism, the right of the Christian thinker to go beyond the data of "natural religion" and illuminate philosophy by the data of revealed religion. One of his most influential works was the "Prix de la vie" (1894), wherein he shows why life is worth living. The advice given by Pope Leo XIII to the Catholics of France found in Ollé-Laprune an active champion. His brochure "Ce qu'on va chercher à Rome" (1895) was one of the best commentaries on the papal policy.

Edward Rothstein, writing in the New York Times, found the production "a puzzle ... cluttered with contraptions and conceits" which, he imagined, were visual motifs which would be clarified in later operas. Keith Warner, in his 2004 production for Covent Garden, portrayed, according to Barry Millington's analysis, "the shift from a deistic universe to one controlled by human beings". The dangers of subverted scientific progress were demonstrated in the third Rheingold scene, where Nibelheim was represented as a medical chamber of horrors, replete with vivisections and "unspeakable" genetic experiments. From the late 1980s a backlash against the tendency towards ever more outlandish interpretations of the Ring cycle led to several new productions in the more traditional manner.

Although many different aspects were discussed, concerns over the Deistic approach of a belief in a Creative Principle on the one hand and the Theistic approach of a belief in a Supreme Being on the other took such a precedence as to hinder other proceedings, and it was not until 1877 that through mediation of the Swiss Supreme Council a conciliatory position on the matter was reached. Largely unknown to Freemasons these days, the Lausanne Congress and the events leading up to it, both on the European mainland and in the United States, as well as developments after its conclusion provide a remarkable insight into the politics of Grand Lodge foreign relations.

The Dutch Jew Spinoza argued for individual freedom to express personal beliefs, while discouraging large congregations unless they belonged to a somewhat deistic idealized state religion. According to Spinoza, freedom of thought, speech and expression were the core values of toleration—as such, Spinoza opposed censorship. Jonathan Israel summarized his position, that anti-toleration laws were engineered "for personal advantage but also at great cost to the state and the public", and that they exacerbated religious conflict rather than diminishing it. Spinoza constructed his theories about toleration based on a freedom to think rather than the right to worship, and was established according to philosophical principles rather than being based on any interpretation of scripture.

According to Jonathan Israel, these laid down two distinct lines of Enlightenment thought: first, the moderate variety, following Descartes, Locke and Christian Wolff, which sought accommodation between reform and the traditional systems of power and faith, and second, the radical enlightenment, inspired by the philosophy of Spinoza, advocating democracy, individual liberty, freedom of expression and eradication of religious authority. The moderate variety tended to be deistic, whereas the radical tendency separated the basis of morality entirely from theology. Both lines of thought were eventually opposed by a conservative Counter-Enlightenment, which sought a return to faith. German philosopher Immanuel Kant In the mid-18th century, Paris became the center of philosophic and scientific activity challenging traditional doctrines and dogmas.

He may have taken communion on a regular basis prior to the Revolutionary War, but he did not do so following the war, for which he was admonished by Pastor James Abercrombie. George Washington as Master of his Lodge, 1793 Washington believed in a "wise, inscrutable, and irresistible" Creator God who was active in the Universe, contrary to deistic thought. He referred to God by the Enlightenment terms Providence, the Creator, or the Almighty, and also as the Divine Author or the Supreme Being. He believed in a divine power who watched over battlefields, was involved in the outcome of war, was protecting his life, and was involved in American politics—and specifically in the creation of the United States.

2015 Spring issues of De Vrijdenker. A year before the association De Dageraad was founded, the first issue of the monthly periodical De Dageraad appeared on 1 October 1855. In the beginning, the magazine De Dageraad took on a rather autonomous, deistic approach under the influence of Junghuhn, while the association itself was open to atheists, pantheists, materialists, liberals, socialists and conservatives in the philosophical, religious or political sense. The radical chair d'Ablaing tried to publish three other magazines in 1858: Verbond der Vrije Gedachte ("League of the Free Thought", for the association), De Rechtbank des onderzoeks ("The Court of Inquiry", for Biblical criticism) and Tijdgenoot op het gebied der Rede ("Contemporarian on the Terrain of Reason", for philosophical questions).

Instead of being able to influence the new political elite and so shape the public agenda, the Church found itself sidelined at best, detested at worst. As the revolution became more radical, the new state and its leaders set up its own rival deities and religion, a Cult of Reason and, later, a deistic cult of the Supreme Being, closing many Catholic churches, transforming cathedrals into "temples of reason", disbanding monasteries and often destroying their buildings (as at Cluny), and seizing their lands. In this process many hundreds of Catholic priests were killed, further polarising revolutionaries and the Church. The revolutionary leadership also devised a revolutionary calendar to displace the Christian months and the seven-day week with its sabbath.

Jefferson was vestryman at the evangelical Calvinistical Reformed Church of Charlottesville, Virginia, a church he himself founded and named in 1777,Belies, Mark A., "Rev. Charles Clay, and the Calvinistical Reformed Church of Charlottesville, Virginia During the American Revolution", Providential Perspective, Volume 12, No. 3, August 1977, pp. 2–3 suggesting that at this time of life he was rather strongly affiliated with a denomination and that the influence of Whitefield and Edwards reached even into Virginia. But the founders who studied or embraced Johnson, Franklin, and Smith's non-denominational moral philosophy were at least influenced by the deistic tendencies of Wollaston's Natural Religion, as evidenced by "the Laws of Nature, and Nature's God" and "the pursuit of Happiness" in the Declaration.

Sherlock's tomb monument at All Saints Church, Fulham He published against Anthony Collins's deistic Grounds of the Christian Religion a volume of sermons entitled The Use and Intent of Prophecy in the Several Ages of the World (1725); and in reply to Thomas Woolston's Discourses on the Miracles he wrote a volume entitled The Tryal of the Witnesses of the Resurrection of Jesus (1729), which soon ran through fourteen editions. His Pastoral Letter (1750) on the late earthquakes had a circulation of many thousands, and four or five volumes of Sermons which he published in his later years (1754–1758) were also at one time highly esteemed. Jane Austen, wrote to her niece Anna in 1814, "I am very fond of Sherlock's Sermons, prefer them to almost any."Ross, Josephine.

The chant was composed by his son who later became a famous opera composer under the name Giacomo Meyerbeer. In opposition to Israel's radical refuse of the traditional Synagogue chant, Meyerbeer reintegrated the chazzan and the recitation of Pentateuch and Prophets into the reformed rite, so that it became more popular within the community of Berlin. Johann Gottfried Herder's appreciation of the Mosaic Ethics was influenced by Mendelssohn's book Jerusalem as well as by personal exchange with him. It seems that in the tradition of Christian deistic enlightenment the Torah was recognized as an important contribution to the Jewish-Christian civilization, though contemporary Judaism was often compared to the decadent situation, when Aaron created the golden calf (described in Exodus 32), so enlightenment itself was fashioning itself with the archetypical role of Moses.

Marius Gratidianus's popular support and cult had ended in his public and spectacular death in 82 BC, at the hands of his enemies in the Senate; likewise Caesar's murder now marked an hubristic connection between living divinity and death. Octavian had to respect the overtures of his Eastern allies, acknowledge the nature and intent of Hellenic honours and formalise his own pre-eminence among any possible rivals: he must also avoid a potentially fatal identification in Rome as a monarchic-deistic aspirant. It was decided that cult honours to him could be jointly offered to dea Roma, at cult centres to be built at Pergamum and Nicomedia. Provincials who were also Roman citizens were not to worship the living emperor, but might worship dea Roma and the divus Julius at precincts in Ephesus and Nicaea.

" Shortly thereafter, to Swedenborg's "the negation of God constitutes Hell", Blake annotates "the negation of the Poetic Genius."Both quotations taken from Erdman (1982: 603) While the Lavater and Swedenborg influences are somewhat speculative, the importance of Bacon, Newton and Locke is not, as it is known that Blake despised empiricism from an early age. In 1808, as he annotated The Works of Sir Joshua Reynolds, Blake wrote Harold Bloom also cites the work of Anthony Collins, Matthew Tindal and John Toland as having an influence on Blake's thoughts.Harold Bloom, Blake's Apocalypse (Garden City: Doubleday, 1963), 25 In a more general sense, "Blake sees the school of Bacon and Locke as the foundation of natural religion, the deistic attempt to prove the existence of God on the basis of sensate experience and its rational investigation.

The Michelade massacre by French Huguenots in 1567 During the French Revolution (1789–95) clergy and religious were persecuted and Church property was destroyed and confiscated by the new government as part of a process of Dechristianization, the aim of which was the destruction of Catholic practices and the destruction of the very faith itself, culminating with the imposition of the atheistic Cult of Reason followed by the imposition of the deistic Cult of the Supreme Being.Tallet, Frank Religion, Society and Politics in France Since 1789 p. 1-2, 1991 Continuum International Publishing The persecution led Catholics who lived in the west of France to wage a counterrevolution, the War in the Vendée, and when the state was victorious, it killed tens of thousands of Catholics. A few historians have called it genocide.

On 21 October 1793 a law was passed which made all suspected priests and all persons who harbored them liable to death on sight. On 10 November 1793, dechristianization reached what many historians consider the climax of the movement when the Hébertists moved the first celebration of the Festival of Reason, a civic festival celebrating the goddess of Reason, from the Circus of the Palais Royale to the Cathedral of Notre Dame and reclaimed the cathedral as a "Temple of Reason." On 7 June Robespierre, who had previously condemned the Cult of Reason, advocated a new state religion and recommended that the Convention acknowledge the existence of God. On the next day, the worship of the deistic Supreme Being was inaugurated as an official aspect of the Revolution.

Notre Dame of Strasbourg turned into a Temple of Reason While not gaining converts from large portions of the population, versions of deism became influential in certain intellectual circles. Jean Jacques Rousseau challenged the Christian notion that human beings had been tainted by sin since the Garden of Eden, and instead proposed that humans were originally good, only later to be corrupted by civilization. The influential figure of Voltaire, spread deistic notions of to a wide audience. "After the French Revolution and its outbursts of atheism, Voltaire was widely condemned as one of the causes", wrote Blainey, "Nonetheless, his writings did concede that fear of God was an essential policeman in a disorderly world: 'If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him', wrote Voltaire".

Leconte de Lisle's first poem portrayed Hypatia as a woman born after her time, a victim of the laws of history. His second poem reverted to the eighteenth-century Deistic portrayal of Hypatia as the victim of Christian brutality, but with the twist that Hypatia tries and fails to convince Cyril that Neoplatonism and Christianity are actually fundamentally the same. Charles Kingsley's 1853 novel Hypatia; Or, New Foes with an Old Face was originally intended as a historical treatise, but instead became a typical mid-Victorian romance with a militantly anti-Catholic message, portraying Hypatia as a "helpless, pretentious, and erotic heroine" with the "spirit of Plato and the body of Aphrodite." Kingsley's novel was tremendously popular; it was translated into several European languages and remained continuously in print for the rest of the century.

John Fielding, despite being blind by then, succeeded his older brother as chief magistrate, becoming known as the "Blind Beak of Bow Street" for his ability to recognise criminals by their voices alone.. Henry Fielding's grave in the cemetery of the Church of England St. George's Church, Lisbon In January 1752 Fielding started a fortnightly, The Covent-Garden Journal, which he published under the pseudonym "Sir Alexander Drawcansir, Knt., Censor of Great Britain" until November of that year. Here Fielding challenged the "armies of Grub Street" and periodical writers of the day in a conflict that became the Paper War of 1752–1753. Fielding then published Examples of the Interposition of Providence in the Detection and Punishment of Murder (1752), a treatise rejecting deistic and materialistic visions of the world in favour of belief in God's presence and divine judgement,Henry Fielding, 1988.

Theistic evolution takes the general view that, instead of faith being in opposition to biological evolution, some or all classical religious teachings about God and creation are compatible with some or all of modern scientific theory, including, specifically, evolution. It generally views evolution as a tool used by a creator god, who is both the first cause and immanent sustainer/upholder of the universe; it is therefore well-accepted by people of strong theistic (as opposed to deistic) convictions. Theistic evolution can synthesize with the day-age interpretation of the Genesis creation myth; most adherents consider that the first chapters of Genesis should not be interpreted as a "literal" description, but rather as a literary framework or allegory. This position generally accepts the viewpoint of methodological naturalism, a long-standing convention of the scientific method in science.

Daja, Recha und Nathan in Lessing's play Nathan der Weise — painting by Maurycy Gottlieb (1877) Moses Mendelssohn created a syncretism which combined contemporary humanistic idealism and its deistic concept of a natural religion based on rational principles with the living tradition of Ashkenasic Judaism. His adoration of the Mosaic law should not be misunderstood as a kind of historical criticism, it was based on an own politically motivated interpretation of the Torah as a divine revelation which was offered to the prophet Moses, so that he will save Judaism from its materialistic decline, symbolized in worshipping the golden calf and idolatry, by the divine law. For Moses Mendelssohn the Mosaic law was "divine", as long as the community following its principles would be just. The attribute "divine" was simply given by the law's function to create a just social fabric: the social contract in itself.

The association increased its membership and influence partially due to Hendrik H. Huisman (1821–1873), secretary from 1859 on and chair from 1865 on. Writer Eduard Douwes Dekker (Multatuli), who never formally became a member, achieved fame in this period through his popular passionate writings that criticised society. Thereafter the association suffered from internal disputes: in 1867, twenty deistic members seceded to form the social activist group De Humaniteit ("Humaneness"). Other members walked away, and the publication of De Dageraad was interrupted, which broke the national bond between freethinkers In an attempt to innovate, the association briefly changed its name to Het Vrije Onderzoek ("The Free Inquiry", 1873–1876), and jointly published a Manifesto with De Humaniteit in 1875 calling on 'all those free from faith in the Netherlands' to join forces for separation of church and state; poor relief by the government instead of the churches; and compulsory primary education.

The current picture of Masonic organizations in Spain is that of a plurality of different interpretations of Masonic regularity, with the result that one may find there many different types of lodges: liberal, conservative, traditional, secular, deistic, esoteric, regional, national, international, as well as male, female and mixed. In 1979 the Spanish Federation of Le Droit Humain continued the work interrupted in 1938 but continued in exile. Le Droit Humain is the first and oldest mixed Masonic Order and now spans over fifty countries. The Symbolic Grand Lodge of Spain (founded in 1980) also has mixed lodges and is part of the CLIPSAS alliance. The male only Grand Lodge of Spain was founded 1982, and has the recognition of United Grand Lodge of England (as well as most Grand Lodges in the United States) and has the highest number of lodges in contemporary Spain.

Because of flexibility in the term god, it is possible that a person could be a positive/strong atheist in terms of certain conceptions of God, while remaining a negative/weak atheist in terms of others. For example, the God of classical theism is often considered to be a personal supreme being who is omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent, and omnibenevolent, caring about humans and human affairs. One might be a positive atheist for such a deity, while being a negative atheist with respect to a deistic conception of God by rejecting belief in such a deity but not explicitly asserting it to be false. Positive and negative atheism are frequently used by the philosopher George H. Smith as synonyms of the less-well-known categories of implicit and explicit atheism, also relating to whether an individual holds a specific view that gods do not exist.

This argument is an inversion of Voltaire's phrase "If God did not exist, it would be necessary for man to invent Him". Political theorist and activist Thomas Paine similarly wrote in The Age of Reason, "Whenever we read the obscene stories, the voluptuous debaucheries, the cruel and torturous executions, the unrelenting vindictiveness, with which more than half the Bible is filled, it would be more consistent that we called it the word of a demon, than the word of God." He added, "It is a history of wickedness, that has served to corrupt and brutalize mankind; and, for my part, I sincerely detest it, as I detest everything that is cruel." Unlike Bakunin, however, Paine's condemnation of the purported nature of the divine from his time didn't extent to outright atheism and disbelief in all spirituality, Paine stating that he accepted the deistic notion of an almighty mover behind all things.

The French revolutionary period saw a number of attempts to establish a quasi-official civil religion, despite the formal separation of state and religion enshrined in the 1795 Constitution of the Year III. These included Robespierre's Cult of the Supreme Being, the Cult of Reason and, during the later post-Terror period, the Decadary Cult and Theophilanthropy. The rose to popularity after the adoption of the Republican Calendar in October 1793. Jean-Baptiste Matthieu, a member of the Committee on Public Instruction, presented draft legislation which called for local celebrations throughout France on all 36 of the year. Robespierre enthusiastically adopted Matthieu's plan and led a grand festival devoted to his deistic Cult of the Supreme Being on 8 June 1794, the of 20 Prairial of the Year II. The Decadary Cult was officially established by the laws of 17 Thermidor (4 August 1798), 3 Fructidor (20 August) and 23 Fructidor (9 September), and by decree of François de Neufchâteau on 20 Fructidor (6 September 1798).

The French Revolution marked a turning point for the ascendancy of atheism to a preeminent position as a cognitive and cultural stance against papal supremacy and the Holy Roman Empire across Europe and throughout the world. Now known as the atheist Cult of Reason ideology, established by Jacques Hébert, Pierre Gaspard Chaumette and their supporters and intended as a replacement for Christianity, and was replete with ceremonious destruction of Christian relics, conversion of churches into Temples of Reason and the personification of Reason as a goddess; it also held such festivities as the Festival of Reason (or Festival of Liberty), dated on 10 November (20 Brumaire) 1793. The Cult of Reason, which strongly advocated the destruction of Christian and theistic cultural influences by force, was opposed to Robespierre's Cult of the Supreme Being, which was considered a deistic cult which referred back to the theism of Christianity. The Cult of Reason was finally ended by Robespierre and the Committee of Public Safety through their execution of Hébert and several of his followers on 24 March 1794, having ascended just seven months earlier.

The term liberal, in this context, means there are no positions for life on the GLSE: every representative is freely chosen by all masons for a fixed period which is only to be renewed once. Non dogmatism, coming also from the tradition of European continental masonry, means GLSE members are not forced to be theistic or deistic; on the contrary, the GLSE considers that religious believes, or the lack of them, are part of every single mason's privacy. Therefore, the GLSE embraces the secularism, meaning that no one can impose their faith on the others and considering that defending a common and civil cohabitation space, a space in which all these believes, or the lack of them, may live together with equality, full freedom and with no privilege for anyone, is a critical matter. Furthermore, the GLSE is not only part of CLIPSAS, but also of the Masonic Mediterranean Union (MMU), European Masonic Alliance (EMA), Contribution des Obédiences Maçonniques Libérales et Adogmatiques à la Construction Européenne (COMALACE) and is a founder of the Espacio Masónico de España (EME).

Geoffrey Blainey; A Short History of Christianity; Viking; 2011; pp.390–391 Voltaire wrote this in response to Treatise of the Three Impostors, a document (most likely) authored by John Toland that denied all three Abrahamic religions. Arguably the first book in modern times solely dedicated to promoting atheism was written by French Catholic priest Jean Meslier (1664–1729), whose posthumously published lengthy philosophical essay (part of the original title: Thoughts and Feelings of Jean Meslier ... Clear and Evident Demonstrations of the Vanity and Falsity of All the Religions of the WorldFull title: Mémoire des pensées et sentiments de Jean Meslier, prêtre-curé d'Etrépigny et de Balaives, sur une partie des erreurs et des abus de la conduite et du gouvernement des hommes, où l'on voit des démonstrations claires et évidentes de la vanité et de la fausseté de toutes les religions du monde, pour être adressé à ses paroissiens après sa mort et pour leur servir de témoignage de vérité à eux et à tous leurs semblables) rejects the concept of god (both in the Christian and also in the Deistic sense), the soul, miracles and the discipline of theology.Michel Onfray (2007).