Alternative Religious Views

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Hi all. I know that religion is a touchy subject for some, but I just wanted to discuss alternative religious views. I have discovered a few theories and views online that coincide with what I feel that I believe, and currently use those terms to explain myself, until better terms or understanding of myself comes.

To my knowledge, I believe that the world was created by a deity of some kind, and then that deity left. It seems that this is structurally similar to Deism, but I feel that I also exhibit traces of Ietsism, which signifies an internal belief in a deity, but an external reluctance towards common religious beliefs.

Do you have any odd beliefs, or perhaps you understand how I feel and can relate?

To be fair its probably easier to speak of personal hypotheses or the hypotheses that different people have come up with on an individual as well as less-known institutional level as philosophies rather than religions.

There's a lot of ways to look at the term deity, I'm personally starting to wonder if the term God has too much Abrahamic baggage to be appropriate in most instantiations of that term. For example if we think of the Epicurean challenge to God regarding evil we have to admit that the challenge of Epicurus was toward the worship of a divine law-giver, not whether or not we cease to exist after we die or whether or not there might be an immortal or near-immortal being who lets say was benevolent but didn't have the power to stop evil or a being which has the power to stop evil but either has its attention too wide-spread or has too much of a relativist or wide-spread view to care for our suffering, or may even see our suffering as crucial to the unfolding of the universe.

As far as some of the umbrella philosophies you have pantheism - ie. all is God, panentheism - God is all universes plus more, deism as you described where it's particularly inattentive to us, or atheism which could connote either physicalism, non-physicalist views without a chief deity, it could even really apply to polytheism if you think that these deities are just hapless beings like us who just happen to have a bit more power and longevity. In other words the terms are really imprecise. Interestingly enough you can even believe in a personal genius, daemon, or higher-self of sorts without believing in a universal deity - that also is a thing.

I guess that's just saying this conversation can get pretty deep and there are a lot of very interesting traditions you can draw on in terms of discussing your metaphysical viewpoints regarding consciousness, consciousness outside the body, etc., etc.

In the religion I follow, Jainism, there is/was no creator God. We simply believe the universe was always here and will always exist. Our main goal is pretty much the same as the medical code - First Do No Harm.