...but I find myself more intrigued by atheists than the deists. And better able to communicate with them. Their dogma tends to be easier to cut through since they tend to believe that they don't have any...which is a mistaken belief, but, hey, I'm easy.

In the first place, concept=label=word. Concepts REQUIRE boundaries between what the concept IS and what it is NOT. In order for God to be worth anyone's trouble, that God would have to be omniscient. There goes the whole boundary issue.

There goes the concept.

There goes the label.

There goes the word.

Thus spake Zarathrustra.

We can't talk intelligently or coherently about, "God," unless we also add, "as you, or we, or I, understand Him, Her or It." Everyone's belief about God is different and this is actually GOOD for human beings to get a handle on. Everyone's path to this center point, this intellectual point of origin, is also going to be conspicuous to the individual and their experiences.

Secondly, everything we experience as humans is an intellectual experience. No human being ever has absolute, direct contact with any THING of ITSELF, save one's own thinking or stream of consciousness. So everything, absolutely everything, we discuss as human beings exists in the realm of the intellect and is, therefore, a metaphor.

We might reasonably quibble about the precision of our analogies and our metaphors, but that is all we can hope to achieve.

God = intellectual point of origin. Most atheists tend to believe that their mothers and fathers created them. But if the intellectual origin of human experience is correct, then mind makes all the rules, not matter. Matter is a subset of mind. Mind uses matter. And, of course, atheists would probably disagree with the thesis that mind rules over matter.

At this point, I would have to agree that we have collected a large body of evidence that strongly suggests that the mind has no absolute control over matter. I would ask the atheists and the deists alike to hold that thought in abeyance and live in the question for a moment.

Just settle in to the Void for a spot. Maybe have a moment to observe your fingers flying over keys, music striking your eardrums, or a breeze blowing on your face. That's right. Just relax and empty your head...which should be pretty easy since it is empty most of the time anyway....

We collect evidence in support of what we want to believe. See how easy that was?

We WANT to believe that we are our own intellectual point of origin, that we created ourselves out of whole cloth, but that belief only works when things are clicking along relatively well in our lives. It's those moments when our asses get kicked downstairs next to the Big Nothing, the Void, the Abyss, that we find we need something greater than whom we know ourselves to be to latch onto. We need that hope. Otherwise, we're dead when we hit an obstacle that completely challenges our view of the world.

If you've never had one or more of these mind-benders, shut the hell up and let the old farts who have offer you some sage wisdom: you better believe in a power greater than yourself or you're screwed. It's only a matter of time before you get to eat YOUR slice of humble pie.

But hold that thought and your judgment of it in abeyance, too. I'm not finished making my point. Point(s). I have two more to make.

We can believe, first, and then we perceive. While most of us believe that we perceive first, there is, without any reasonable doubt, a facility within human experience that screens out, blocks or otherwise warps our ability to perceive. Some call it delusion, some call it social conditioning, some call it hypnosis, and some call it the hypnosis of social conditioning. But it's always there and always has been. It's why pigs can't fly and why the world was flat for literally tens of thousands of years.

Tens of thousands of years? Yuppers. Pretty potent stuff. Unless of course you believe that matter rules over mind. In which case, we're just stupid bags of water roaming an otherwise freakishly rare blue orb in the middle of a cold, dark nowhere.

My final point would be that just about everyone on the planet, especially deists, believes that they created themselves in their own image and likeness. If you doubt me on that score, try and lay-off a fine, upstanding Christian from their usual means of employment. Like almost everyone else, deists and atheists all collapse into a ball of lower than whale dung sadness whenever one of their cherished beliefs about themselves gets walloped by the gavel of Life. Been there, done that. It can happen at any time and without warning. And more than once.

Scary shit. A complete collapse of personal identity and, yet, here we are, once again, typing away hour after hour as if nothing ever happened in the first place. Experience was gained, surely, but the basic stream of consciousness remains the same. Whatever that intellectual experience was that knocked us for a loop sure damn-near killed us, but now we're back in the saddle. Again.

Go figger.