The following is based on, “Why Pandeism is Better than Theism: an Essay” by K.M. is posted on www.koilas.org.
Part 3 – Religion
So, why religion at all? Human beings, it seems, have intuitively used religious ideas to express what is essentially inexpressible. Through pre-history, a far longer period than that of recorded history, it appears mankind speculated on metaphysical matters.
Recorded history is a worldwide litany of spiritual visions, encounters with god(s) and divine communications. These became culturally modulated into a variety of faiths and formal expressions, usually spawning a priesthood as guardians and interpreters of religion.
The sceptical reductionist would dismiss all such notions as being the product of pre-scientific understanding; that revelations only occur in the minds of recipients, apparently answered prayers being grossly outnumbered by those unanswered and miracles are either delusion, coincidence or fraudulent.
Evolutionary biology may concede that past religious belief may have conferred some competitive advantage, while insisting they are expressions, ultimately, of fear. Such reductionism, though, demands that every religious event or notion in the entire history of humanity is an error or a fraud.
It has to be accepted that the wide variety of metaphysical or religious claims often conflict, supposedly eternal truths become modified to incorporate new factors and that a significant number of people have not and do not have religious experiences or sensibilities.
Religions and religious affiliations are undoubtedly culturally determined. Any one particular faith is largely made up of those born into it. Nuanced varieties do develop within a given faith and people do convert, while those who fall out if faith become apostates and atheists who continue to hold at least the moral and cultural precepts of their former faith.
An alternative explanation for the multitudinous and often conflicting mutually exclusive faiths is that they are the imperfect partial reflection of a greater, perhaps ineffable, truth. Humanity has an intuitive, subconscious awareness of what is an undefined and undefinable divine creator and creation.
A religious manifestation that is cross-cultural is mysticism. Through meditation and even mind-expanding/altering drugs there seems to be a common replicable observation of oneness with the universe that has a spiritual nature bound up within its very fabric.
It maybe the concept of religion has become so tainted by its inflexible and exclusive expressions that now it is more alienating than attractive to many, perhaps most, people. Deism may be able to buck this trend or maybe needs to transcend religion(s) and present itself as the rational philosophy it actually is.
Pandeism in particular can appeal to both the materialist and idealist as neither is refuted by the notion that the universe is the creation and only expression of the divine. Whether as a religion or a philosophy Pandeism can accommodate people from all religious backgrounds and none, while transcending previous religious expressions.
deismuk 