I can’t say I’ve ever met a theist who would recognize what you’ve outlined here and in your subsequent comments as a form of theism.
It seems to me that you’ve taken the language of theism and tweaked the definitions of all the words to be more reasonable. That’s all well and good, but just because you use the same vocabulary as a theist doesn’t mean you believe the same thing. It sounds to me like you’re practically an atheist but you use religious words to describe your beliefs because they are comfortable.
This reminds me of the last time someone tried to convince me of complementarianism (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complementarianism). They were a reasonable person: so reasonable, in fact, that by the time they finished explaining complementarianism, it was nothing like complementarianism any more… In that case, my impression was that this person would have been placed in a very awkward position if they espoused a non-fundamentalist view. So they kept the fundamentalist terms and made them reasonable.
I’m probably in the same boat, or a similar one, FWIW.
I can’t say I’ve ever met a theist who would recognize what you’ve outlined here and in your subsequent comments as a form of theism.
It seems to me that you’ve taken the language of theism and tweaked the definitions of all the words to be more reasonable. That’s all well and good, but just because you use the same vocabulary as a theist doesn’t mean you believe the same thing. It sounds to me like you’re practically an atheist but you use religious words to describe your beliefs because they are comfortable.
This reminds me of the last time someone tried to convince me of complementarianism (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complementarianism). They were a reasonable person: so reasonable, in fact, that by the time they finished explaining complementarianism, it was nothing like complementarianism any more… In that case, my impression was that this person would have been placed in a very awkward position if they espoused a non-fundamentalist view. So they kept the fundamentalist terms and made them reasonable.
I’m probably in the same boat, or a similar one, FWIW.
Maybe you could interpret it as heroic efforts to find middle ground, in order to bring theists on board to rationality.
(I now feel pressure to be the diplomat making promises, “If you just accept this version of theism, the theists will make concessions...”)