Arty - I don't wish to shortchange your latest response, but unfortunately I can't spend a lot of time this weekend maintaining my end of the discussion. Nonetheless I wish to raise one question in regards to your comment about human 'impetus' (as opposed to the rational thinking that formulated the rules established to reign it in.) Certainly we can study the 'spiritual' aspects that motivate us to do certain things, but if spirituality/religion didn't exist (for some reason we hadn't formulated them), then wouldn't psychology be the logical secular discipline used to examine such matters?

How does psychology (with a side dish of ethics) differ from spiritual inquiry?

One of the beauties of being a deist, as opposed to an atheist, is that one is entitled to wonder, After the universe was built, where did God go? You know you can't pray to him and expect a bike, or a car. He's not going to pay your bills. He didn't prevent the Holocaust. Basically, you've got two choices: existentialism whereby you're ceaselessly disappointed in this world, or to try and understand God as an engineer designing a project. Following the logic of the latter view, you're thinking, that poor Guy is either busy building other universes (to do a better job?), being prevented from intervening in this one (by his God?), or struggling to repair the damage - call it entropy if you want to avoid moral implications - already done by a faulty design that's greatly limited by the circumstances, or as physicists refer to them - the laws of physics. In a way, it's not unrelated to a rabbinical exercise, or a Jesuitical tutorial.

The great benefit to Deism is that it allows you to cultivate a sympathy for God rather than an awesome dependency. Accordingly, God is not omnipotent or omniscient - concepts that animated primitive people praying to the gods of rain, vegetables and fertility. The deist God bestowed the gift of life, as well as the godlike capacity for intelligent life to greatly control human destiny. This underlies your letter deluxe, which Jefferson underscored in "On Religion" - "Question with boldness even the existence of a God, because, if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of reason than that of blind faith." Zeke, this is the great wisdom that's the foundation of our great yet flawed democracy.

Reason was the lance Enlightenment philosophers used to deflate religious authority. It was going to be the secular version of the Holy Grail, the miracles, the Resurrection, Nirvana, and the Rapture all rolled into one. And on paper, Reason is a beautiful thing. Why rely on 1st century thinking, ancient proscriptions such as kosher diets and eating fish on Fridays, when you could figure out how to be moral if you just applied sufficient amounts of Reason? After all, if the ham's cooked well enough, there are no worms. If you have a steak on Friday it's still possible to sacrifice for the Lord in other ways. In other words, as the atheists implore the rest of us, Think your way to salvation, whatever that may be.

At the end of the nineteenth century Harvard made a bold move, allowing William James to teach psychology. Until that time, even among the best schools, theology was supreme. Alas, psychology was to be the secular antidote to the traditional reliance on theism and theology. And what did they find out? Freud's subconscious, or in other words the seat of instinctual impulses tempting humans to, not sin since that was no longer valid, but act neurotically, which is simply another way of framing devilish temptations.

The psychologists, following Freud's discovery, began looking for secular demons via psychotherapy, mostly for upper class individuals with a lot of time on their hands. Check out Thomas Mann's "Magic Mountain" for the European equivalent. Or check out "Catcher in the Rye" and "Franny and Zooey" by Salinger for a textbook examples of the failure of psychological exploration.

There's a problem with Reason that is different from the problems with religion: It requires deep thinking; there are no shortcuts, no Profundity for Dummies without incrementally working out these conflicts over time. Emerson, a thoughtful secularist and a unique American mind, pointed to the challenge: "What is the hardest task in the world? To think."

Quite simply, America has not cultivated a society that inspires widespread, ongoing deep thinking. Presidential races are conducted on the fly, based to a great extent on 30-second ads. Now Nightline (ABC) features 3 stories in 30 minutes instead of concentrating on one. It's the custom of pundits to shout down guests who offer different views. Where's all the Reason that Jefferson hoped would materialize? Karen Armstrong has been around a while now and many smart readers are first encountering her here on Salon. Where has the rest of the media been? TomKat's baby?

How many people do you know who read Marx, Dostoyevski and Sartre, loved "Waiting for Godot," and worship at the secular altar of artists like Picasso and Pollock but yet when faced with child rearing, reach back to their pre-secular existence and rely on religious principles for moral guidance? For example, little Johnny comes home with Billy's train, or socked Mary in the nose because she wouldn't let him play with her ball, and now the parents have to lay down the rules. Are they going to haul out Jung, explain the wicked potential of the Super Ego, talk about Maslow's self-realization? Probably not, because the coercive threat of hell and the notion of disobeying the lord are far more dramatic, and more importantly, expeditious than lengthy bouts of Reason. For many, it boils down to a matter of time, which in a 24-hr. period is limited. And then so too is reason.

So, deists wonder, why a 24-hr. day? Did God not want us to think? Or is it possible, from the very beginning, when that ball of essence exploded into the Big Bang, that the cosmic goup would, according to the laws of quantum physics, settle in unpredictable ways so that some galaxies had two suns, some planets had 120-hr. days, and then, for that planet where intelligent life was going to develop, space, matter, and gravity capriciously determined that a 24-hr. day would rule (though it was longer in the past)? If you're sympathetic and listen closely on still nights, you can actually hear God curse the 24-hr. arrangement, realizing that, above all, the limits of time are preventing the grand potentiality of human existence to be realized. Maybe in those other universes, those more recent inventions, that problem has been solved. One can only wonder.