I find that there is such stark difference between your position and the ideas I have and am committed to, that in relation to your position, I cannot see a way forward.
I agree.
I would ask for you to extract from the Gospels you refer to the specific scenes or quotes that support the positions that you define. Is it possible that you write out a brief outline of who Jesus Christ was and what he set out to do? If you did so I would better understand your position and why you have it. Did Jesus Christ have a mission and a plan? If so, what was it?
I won't, or rather
can't. To do it right would demand a commitment of time I won't take away from my kid and that I can't afford to take away from my work. I got 24 hours a day like anyone, and a good chunk of it is for
him and
it (and
he and
it are never on the table for short-changin'). As compromise, I suggest Jefferson's cut & paste experiment. His result isn't perfect but strippin' away all supranatural elements allows one to get to the meat of the man, and His morality. At the same time, from a more conventional Christian perspective, becuz His divinity is taken off the table for consideration, Jefferson's work might be thought of as rootless. It would be the same, I figure, if I wrote an essay. Right off the bat someone would complain I've
neuter'd the hound and rendered Him useless.
I am confused by another element: Jesus Christ is defined by the Gospels, and through the Gospels, as being -- literally -- the Godhead incarnated into a man's body. Jesus Christ is, therefore, God incarnate. Do you hold that view?
No. I don't accept His divinity. As I say: my interest lies in the morality of the man which I find elegant (but not without flaw: many Christian Anarchists were, are, pacifists,
turning the other check. I will not, not figuratively or literally, turn the other cheek. All in all: were I Christian -- orthodox, so to speak, or anarchistic -- I'd be a bad one).
And if you do hold that view why then, or on what basis, do you define yourself as a deist?
I'm a deist becuz of a conundrum : how can man be a free will in a deterministic universe? He is, and it is, and each precludes the other. And yet here we are, free willed men and women livin' in a universe that ought not allow for us.
Then there's natural rights which I sum up as
a man belongs to himself; his life, liberty, and property are his. Each man, every man, any where, any when,
knows this is true. He
knows he is his own, and he
knows it's wrong for another to murder him or leash him or abuse him or rob him. As I say: even the slaver, as he fixes prices to men, knows this about himself.
While this knowledge, this deep-in-the-bones
intuition may be simply a
brute fact it seems far too clean and direct to just be some
adaptive trait.
So the impossible reality of man as free will coupled with man's natural claim to himself and no other (plus some illuminatin' conversations with a dear friend, a Christian) moved me from a dead end atheism to (a peculiar kind of) deism.
Do you see Jesus as representing a Law (a set of demands and proscriptions) or do you imagine that Jesus-God allows any particular thing (in the sense of being lawless or 'open to anything' or perhaps unconcerned). If you clarify some of this I will likely be beter able to understand how you orient yourself.
As I see it: God built man with reason, free will, and conscience (to think & feel, to exercise causal & creative power, to be moral & morally discerning). He built man with this, as I say, deep-in-the-bones intuition or
knowledge of his own self-possession or
ownness. What it comes to: man self-directs, self-relies, is self-responsible. He recognizes himself as sumthin' more than an animal. He chooses to recognize the same of the other guy (to be moral) or he chooses to ignore that recognition (to be immoral).
Vanilla deism sez God is indifferent. He may be absent, but, as He made man as a creature with a moral aspect, it does not seem to me He is indifferent to what man does over a lifetime.
I could write more, explain more, but I'll spare everyone and stop here.