(June 6, 2020 at 10:04 am)The Grand Nudger Wrote: Either way, can or should a deist god heal amputees? It doesn't, by definition, but that's not the item in question. There's no ground for retreat here. It's the same ground.
Isn't deism, or at least modern deism, pretty much invention of post industrial revolution people of 18th and 19th centuries who clang to growing scientific explorations of the natural phenomena which pushed away God but wasn't yet able to explain the very beginning of the universe, so they just left that moment to God while rejecting all other later godly implications? They even rejected holy books, including the Bible, and rejected religious mysteries and miracles.
So with the coming of even more modern revelations in science like evolution and big bang, Deism is redundant if not completely nonexistent. I mean do you really think that Thomas Paine would have been a deist today? Or Ben Franklin? They would be agnostics or atheists.
teachings of the Bible are so muddled and self-contradictory that it was possible for Christians to happily burn heretics alive for five long centuries. It was even possible for the most venerated patriarchs of the Church, like St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, to conclude that heretics should be tortured (Augustine) or killed outright (Aquinas). Martin Luther and John Calvin advocated the wholesale murder of heretics, apostates, Jews, and witches. - Sam Harris, "Letter To A Christian Nation"
