Secular Sunday School first episode:

As this is the first episode of Secular Sunday School, I find it important to establish a vocabulary.

The reason I want to do this is to go over some of these tricky terms that people often use in various ways. Such as the term atheist, this term ( or label ) is often applied in many different ways. So what I am going to do is to go over the dictionary definitions, the philosophical definitions and the common usages. From those, I will also establish the way in which I apply these in the discussions I am going to have on Secular Sunday school. Now you may apply these labels or use these terms in different ways than I am establishing for this show.

If you have an issue with the way I am going to be using these terms I encourage you to reach out to us on the various social media outlets. Such as @secularethos on twitter or https://www.facebook.com/secularethos/ You can also email me via [email protected]. Or you can go to the show notes at https://www.secularethos.com/show and click on the episode title, scroll to the bottom and leave a comment there. We also have a contact page @ https://www.secularethos.com/contact

I appreciate all of your feedback and will address it as soon as I can.

Now we can start on our terms. The most important terms I think will be the terms: theism and deism.

So first for theism,

Merriam Webster gives the definition of theism as:

belief in the existence of a god or gods; specifically : belief in the existence of one God viewed as the creative source of the human race and the world who transcends yet is immanent in the world

This is a straightforward definition of theism, and is close to the way that I will be using this term.

I use Theism as traditional theism which is the western ideas about god.

Open theism is the fairly new idea that god is not only the creator and maintainer of the universe, but is also seeking a relationship with the people in it. In this view god wishes for the people to have free will. It also provides that god is all knowing in that he knows all that can be known. This is counter to the idea that god can know the future. God only knows of possible futures in this view, but does not know which particular future will be the one experienced. God is also all powerful, in that he has all of the power that he can have. Which means that the trope of, can god make a rock so heavy that god can’t life it, is not possible. Because god can only do what is logically possible.

Closed theism is often referred to as Calvinist, whereas god has perfect knowledge which means that not only does god know the future, but has set up a particular future that can not be altered by any action.

Open and closed theism are types of theism closely related to a Christian type of theism, but there are others that are more philosophically based than a christian theism. One of which is called process theism, which gives the view of god is part of the universe and exists within the same temporal space. This is counter to the space less timeless god of more traditional theism.

These various categories of theism will be topics for future episodes, and I will stop here with theism and move on to the next terms.

Theism is often used in the traditional way to draw a distinction from deism whereas deism is a more vague rather than specific god.

Merriam Webster’s definition of deism seems less like the way I have heard people use it. And I will give you that definition here:

a movement or system of thought advocating natural (see 1natural 8b) religion, emphasizing morality,