Deism rejects the notion of Divine revelation; the claims of revealed religions are, therefore, considered counterfeit. For Deists, all religions, including Deism, are man-made: God is the object, not the founder, of Deism.
As a human belief system, Deism appeals to reason in fathoming the laws and evident patterns in creation, positing God as the ultimate source. As such, God is beyond our partial understanding, so while we can have intimations of the Divine it is beyond our ken to define.
Revealed religions claim the direct word of God is recorded in Holy Scriptures, which the faithful must acknowledge, even if they defy reason. This is a dangerous concept as it relegates reason, the source of science and learning, in favour of unreasoned faith.
Ethan Allen, in “Reason: The Only Oracle of Man”, wrote, “Such people as can be prevailed upon to believe, that their reason is depraved, may easily be led by the nose, and duped into superstition…”
So, with reason being central to Deism, what are Deists to make of Christmas? A virgin pregnancy and birth, angels, shepherds and Magi, an immobile star, the stable and manger, ox and ass, all the stuff of school nativity plays. Reason, at the very least, questions all of this.
Or it would if there is a requirement to accept it all without question because it’s written in the bible. However, reason does rather more than challenge such assertions to declare them false. There is the metaphorical and the mythic to be considered.
In the northern hemisphere, especially in the more northerly regions, December has been a time to mark the dying of the old year around the winter solstice, and the rebirth of hope and the new year. Christendom simply appropriated such festivities.
The annual fuss in the media over some hapless local authority opting to call its celebrations a “Winter Festival” rather than Christmas is actually misplaced: such a council is actually recognising a venerable truth. This is what has been celebrated in a variety of forms over thousands of years.
An advantage of a “Winter Festival” is no one is excluded; those of all religions and none can participate and enjoy proceedings without having to compromise their own beliefs or, worse, pretend to subscribe to the prevailing orthodoxy.
Thomas Paine in his “Age of Reason” wrote, “Infidelity does not consist in believing, or in disbelieving; it consists in professing to believe what he does not believe.” How many participate in church carol services and yet have little or nothing to do with Christianity for the rest of the year?
Much of what constitutes the Christmas nativity story can be found in a variety of other religions and cultures. Visitation by celestial beings (angels), miraculous birth, the appearance of a God-King on earth who will ultimately be killed and then reborn (resurrected), the bringing of gifts by the humble and the highborn, an occasion marked astrologically.
Gospel writers were not historians, they were charged with propagating an idea. It was the custom of the time to achieve this by including apparently biographical details that were in fact traditional memes indicating the special nature of the person being written about.
Such memes predate Christianity by thousands of years repeatedly reappearing dressed in the guise of the prevailing culture. This is no different to how our society has adapted Christmas to include Santa Claus and fir trees, neither of which appear in the New Testament accounts.
Sceptics occasionally compare God and Santa Claus: a comforting idea, but not real. This is to confuse an image with the essence. Santa Claus is an idea, or a bundle of ideas, personified. Children identify with the personification, but as they mature they develop a more sophisticated appreciation of the “spirit” of Christmas.
Similarly, God has, historically, been presented as a figure in tangible form, but this is reductive, no more than an idealised extension of a human being. Deists understand any meaningful use of the word God is in the way of the “spirit” of creation.
The use of “” around the spirit is to denote that it is a problematic word and could be taken to indicate a supernatural association. This is not the case: the usage is more analogous to games being played in the correct SPIRIT, that is, sportingly.
Christmas can be a celebration of the miraculous, the natural miracle, that is, of a coherent universe giving birth to sentient life with reason enough to appreciate and even to come to some understanding of it.
The essence of the nativity is that a baby is created spontaneously, in that no actual cause and effect conception was involved, rather in the way the universe appeared from not-being, a void made pregnant with potential. As Deists cite God as the source of the latter, they can relate to the former as a personification of the process.
So, sing the carols, attend the school nativity plays and know that, while they may not be factual they do contain truth in the way art does.
And behind the Christian façade, and that of other religions, there is an underlying point of agreement, belief in God. Potentially, Deism can reach out to people of all the varying faiths and identify the principle that unites, rather than divides, them. Look beyond the bible and learn to read the natural gospel of creation.
Deism may have been born small, but wise men, and women, seek out this lone star shining through the darkness of superstition and dogma, bringing the gift of their reason. The flock desert the shepherds who’ve kept them penned for centuries and find their way individually to God.
Happy Christmas from Deism.
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