WantsOfTheFlesh
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ORIGINAL: xssve
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ORIGINAL: WantsOfTheFlesh
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ORIGINAL: MissImmortalPain
Deism
I noticed that was conspicuously missing.
I reckon deism would come under one of the theist headings because it is still a belief in some sort of divinity. The categorisation is probably put in a Western monotheistic way since thats how philosophy wrestled with the issue traditionally. If you were to substitute God with gods or divinity it would probably cover all or almost all forms of religious belief.
Then you would be wrong, the critical distinction between Theism and Deism concerns to what extent the deity involves him (or her) self in earthly affairs - i.e., the deist believes the godhead to be a remote entity who does not answer prayers or punish sinners with natural disasters, it does not attribute natural phenomena, including luck, to magical processes, and as such is much more compatible with the scientific method, as it requires no proof of divine intervention in order to explain natural phenomena.
Theism, on the other hand, involves much more extensive forms of magical thinking, ranging from partial Deism, i.e., god only intervenes when necessary, to attributing virtually all phenomena to god's will, to the point of predestination, and it nearly always centers around a teleological narrative model.
Many of these people are constantly seeking proof of gods existence in order to justify their unshakable certainty, and have a big problem with scientific methodology, in that it very much challenges a subjective teleological model of reality since it deals typically with cause and effect rather than "purpose".
You would be wrong as you didn't read my short post properly. I was talking about broadening out the definition to all divinity as we understand it. Secondly there are varying definitions of theism. One is the more specialised theological defintion as you describe but broadly theism means a belief in a god or gods regardless of additional theological qualifications such as deism. I assume this is the common definition that the OP was referring to because it would be unhelpful to narrow religious belief excessively where certain common theological variations would be excluded.
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"I had lot's of luck but its all been bad"
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RE: Theism, Agnosticism, or Atheism: Which one describe... - 
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