“My religion” is something of an unfair misnomer, as I don’t subscribe to any religion, per sé.
I am very much a deist. What is that exactly? Well, to start with, check out this very comprehensive description:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deism
You can also take a look at:
http://deism.org/, although that site has more of an author’s bias and bent. Wikipedia is a little more objective.

In my own words:
I believe in reason. I don’t believe in dogma which requires I believe a certain thing or way because someone or something told me I should. This includes priests and pastors, books, self-proclaimed “reverends” and anyone else who puts themselves as a figure of authority.

“But,” you may say, “these people, these religious scholars and evangelists spend years in study and research. They are to religion what a doctor is to medicine or lawyer is to the legal system. They ARE experts.”

Based on what? If it’s Christianity, it pretty much begins and ends with one book. A book that’s a self-referential collection of stories written by an ancient, nomadic, patriarchal people; letters written by individuals who are zealot followers of a mysterious cult; and supposedly historical accounts of the beginning of this cult based on a man who has not even been confirmed to have existed by any other historical document despite the huge impact and turmoil he supposedly had created even within his own time.

After that statement, you may be surprised to hear I was raised Methodist, was VERY active in my church’s Youth Group, even sang in the choir, and could voraciously debate with anyone the validity of the Bible until I was 19 and started to really question what I thought I believed. The ammunition I was debating with, the proof I was using was this one book, and what other people had written about this book.

Have you actually read the Bible? I finally did. I used to only read the nice stuff, and in bits and pieces. When you read the whole Bible, it’s flaws and obvious problems with reality become glaringly evident. The factual contradictions within itself, the contradictions it has with proven science and documented history, and the absurd and often scary promotion of some very terrible behavior and ideas of morality supposedly promoted by if not outright demanded of by an evidently psychotic God.

These realizations brought me to really reconsider what exactly I believed, and more importantly, WHY! By what means did I come to my belief in Jesus and Salvation and Heaven and hell? I was told. Someone (years of someones actually) who put themselves in a position of authority told me what to believe, and discouraged questioning it and discouraged thinking about it and demanded that I just believe it.

Why should I? Because it’s written in the Bible. I should believe something written only in the Christian Bible, because it’s written in that very same Bible that I should believe it?

Does that make sense?

Another realization that brought me to deism, is the recognition of emotional manipulation. Oh, I’m not meaning solely intentional and certainly not with malicious intent. Mostly. I simply realized that a lot of movies I watched, plays I watched or perhaps was even in, songs I’d hear, sometimes even books I’d read, would cause the very same emotional response in me that I would have during Church Camp or Christian concerts or some other “spiritual activity” where I thought the “Spirit” was in me. What did that mean when good script writing and acting could cause me to have the same emotional response that I had thought was a religious experience? Well, it certainly led me to question and analyze the nature of religious influence.

So, reason and critical thinking has become my religion. My faith is another matter, which I’ll discuss momentarily. Reason and critical thinking has helped me come to some conclusions based upon unbiased history and archeology and anthropology:

Religion is tomorrow’s mythology. Every religion, and there have been thousands over the thousands of years people have been around, each just as valid and earnestly believed in by its followers as Christianity is today by Christians, every one seeks to do the same things–explain why we’re here, where we go after we die, and how the world we know works.

We scoff at the idea of Apollo in his chariot drawing the sun across the sky. We laugh at the idea of war being started and controlled by Mars. The goddess Pele in control of the anger of volcanoes. Thunder from Thor’s hammer? Sure. How absurd all that and the countless other examples of how gods and goddesses make the mysteries of the world work. But that’s no different than what the ancient Hebrews did, and Christianity is the inheritor of that mythology. The ancient Ugarits had their god “El” which became “Elohim” in half the Old Testament and the Canaanites had their proto-Yahweh and the two merged and mixed into what we think of as God. And these people had their own stories as did every ancient culture, to explain how the world was created by their God in such a way as they understood it…which did not include cosmology or astrophysics or chemistry or biology which are the tools we have today to find answers. So like all ancient people, they developed stories to explain the mysteries of the world.

And eventually, thanks to the very polytheist Emperor Constantine, the Christian cult which began as an offshoot of Judaism, gained political power in the most powerful empire in the world, and the rest is history. A state religion with the military might of Rome which was responsible for “civilizing” and modernizing the Western World, there’s no wonder Christianity survived to become the predominant Western religion. But what astounds me is how many modern people still believe the mythological aspects of the religion in this modern age.

Why? Because it’s easier to become a scholar of, an expert of a mythology than it is to become a biologist, or chemist, or physicist. Just as it’s easier to become an “expert” of ghosts and UFO’s and crystal power than it is to understand visual and auditory anomalies and pharmacology. Anybody can read the Bible, and with years of Sunday School under their belt, believe they have an understanding of the world they inhabit. But it takes a lot more hard work and study and discipline to understand biological evolution and atomic decay and genetic engineering. So most people find their comfort and ideas of understanding from mythology and with sour grapes and sometimes a little jealousy but usually righteous arrogance, create a war between religion and science and claim science is out to kill God or somesuch.

Truth is, science is just out to find the truth. Science has defined the theory of gravity, has shown the Earth to not be the center of the solar system much less the universe, that disease comes from viruses and bacteria and not spirits, and mental illness from trauma and chemical imbalances and not from demons. And something Creationists and anti-evolutionists tend to forget, every single error in science, every mistake and factual incongruity and intentional deception, every one has been and will be rooted out and corrected by other scientists.

Carl Sagan, my prophet Issiah, poses this question: What progress has religion made over the last 2000 years, versus what progress science has made in just the last 200. We’re still having the same religious debates and arguments and disagreements today as we had 2000 years ago. And the Bible is still the Bible with its two creation stories and two Noah stories intermingled into one, and four conflicting crucifixion/resurrection stories, and it’s still been the basis for war and hatred and misunderstanding. We do have more translations of it. Which does pose the question, how inerrant and solid is a book that requires so many different English translations. Meanwhile, science has given us antibiotics, safe air travel, safer cars, food preservation systems, more efficient farming products and techniques, life saving medical procedures, vaccines for disease, better flame retardant and longer lasting unyellowing paper to print Bibles on and computers and the Internet which allows us have the same 2000 year old debates and disagreements regarding religion but with hundreds of other people….

When religious fundamentalists rile against science and pose religious answers as being superior to scientific, I’d like them to remember how much they have to thank science for in their daily lives. Pretty much everything you can see and touch and eat and wear today is thanks to science.

And at the core of scientific discovery is the scientific method. A deductive method of rational analysis of truth and development of answers to questions. A method that roots out errors, is self-correcting, and is based on determining the truth of something from the evidence–not as religion does which is find and manipulate evidence that supports the thesis and ignores that which doesn’t.

God gave us reason. Gave us intelligence, and the ability to be critical. Why do we eschew this ability in favor of believing fantasies we have been fed from ancient books and people put in positions of authority? Why do we not question it? Why do we ignore the answers and refuse to accept the truth that’s slapping us in the face?

It’s reason and critical analysis and trusting our own research and evidence and not what we are simply told, that is the basis of deism…and my faith.

And my faith is this: God created the universe. (What?! you may say. You just attacked religion and now claim there is a God and he created the universe?! Let me continue.)

Religion is the mythology humans and our puny but very imaginative minds has created to explain God. As imaginative but xenophobic humans, the incarnations of gods we have created are varied and generally human-like. Especially Yahweh. A seemingly mammalian male with impetuous and very human-like emotions and needs and wants and desires and temper. But even though we have crafted countless explanations of god, doesn’t mean there is no God at all. It means we have had and still do have very wildly differing concepts of what God is. The Judao-Christian thread of religious development has stuck with a MOSTLY monotheistic (unless you count the “pagan” influenced paradox of The Trinity, and Roman Catholic saint worship,) and the concept of Original Sin and Salvation from it.

But this idea of sin and Salvation, not to mention afterlives of Shaol, hell, paradise, Heaven, have changed over the centuries, from Canaanite versions to Hebrew versions to Christian versions. It doesn’t make sense to me that the “truth” of God and salvation and afterlives would constantly change to fit the needs and desires of the culture.

So what IS the truth?

I don’t know. I’m somewhat agnostic in my admitton that I don’t know the truth, I doubt any one human knows the truth, and I’m uncertain any human CAN know the Truth regarding what God is. My reason and skepticism has allowed me to discover what God is NOT. But I’m only somewhat sure of what he is.

Which includes not being a “he.” I still use the pronoun for simplicity, but I seriously doubt the creator of the universe is a mammal-like creature with sexual organs. In fact, I don’t believe that God is a “creature” at all in any way we can imagine. Certainly not a human-like figure with a beard and robe sitting on a throne and enjoying the singing of a choir of angels and hosts. He may be a creature that is outside the scope of human imagining, and may not even be sentient as we understand it. I think to force God into being as some creature with human emotions and desires and needs is arrogant to the nth degree. It’s creating God in OUR image!

Science has well established that the universe operates on very specific rules and laws that were determined at the universe’s creation. Thermal dynamics, gravity, quantum mechanics, evolution, conservation of energy, speed of light, we don’t yet understand it all, and maybe just a fraction so far. But every phenomenon humans once thought were supernatural has a scientific explanation that fits what we know thus far. Now, why can’t the god that created all these processes as we know them, black holes, galaxies, super novae, photosynthesis, mitosis, why couldn’t he have been capable of creating the universe using a Big Bang billions of years ago? Set it in motion in perfect order, perhaps even with a goal in mind billions of years in the making? That seems a lot more reasonable and logical and believable than a man-like being “poof!”ing everything in existence in six days as we see it now with absurd cartoony results willynilly of any sense and structure we see in the universe today, and did it only circa 6,000 years ago. That’s absurd.

But, because it’s in a book, there are millions who believe it.

More people on the world believe what’s in a book called the Koran. Millions believe the teaching of Buddha, of Confuscious. A book called the Bagavagita. The Egyption Book of the Dead, the Mesopotamian Baal and Tiamat. Zeus and Jupiter and Odin and The Great Sky Spirit and….

And all of them do the same thing, but reflecting different cultural values.

I keep trying to explain my Deism, but I keep digressing into religion bashing. I wonder if that means something.

So why can’t God be more than what one religion confines him to being?

Why do I believe God’s not a sentient entity directly involved in the universe? Well, maybe he is, but not like Christians believe. The general Christian idea of God is that he’s omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent. (All powerful, all knowing, all merciful/loving.)
First of all, “merciful and loving” are human traits that don’t seem to hold out when you look at 99.9% of the rest of the universe which is impartial. Besides the fact that mercy and ideas of love are subjective to individuals and cultures. In any case, God can’t be all three. If he knows all and is all powerful, then by definition if he’s all loving he would not allow “bad” and “evil” thing s to happen. It’s like those gawdy paintings of God/Jesus looking down on the World Trade Center, sad and with tears. An all-knowing God would have seen it coming, and all-powerful God could have prevented it, and an all-loving God would have been compelled to prevent it.

So I, as most Deists, don’t see God as a direct influencer in the universe. At least, not as a creature-being who listens to prayers and pleas and decides to do something about them or not. That’s WAY too human-like in our view of the creator of the universe.

No, I think if God has a direct influence in his creation, it’s something more subtle, more unobtrusive, less human-consciousness/awareness-like. I mean think of it like this. Ants and humans are MUCH closer in similarity than humans are to whatever created the whole freakin’ universe! And how much different are ant minds and consciousness to humans’? The mere fact that God MAY be eternal and outside the realm of time/space continuum basically necessitates that his consciousness and “mentality” would be so vastly different and dissimilar to a human’s that we can’t even begin to comprehend it and there’s likely no similarity between a human mind and God’s. To think there IS a similarity is arrogance and hubris on a celestial level!

Does/did God have a plan? I don’t know; maybe. It’s certainly not impossible. Most multi-disciplinary scientists like Francis Crick and Steven Hawkings have agreed that the chance of life developing in the universe is ridiculously small, yet, given the way the universe developed if it does so the same way each time, life would still develop somewhere in it every time. So we may be a random and unique feature of a planless universe, a nice surprise even to God…or we may be part of a plan billions of years in the making. We may have been the goal of God when he set the universe in motion, or we may just be a small step along the way. We humans may be a transition period, a small step toward the REAL goal of the development of life God has planned. Perhaps, as I’ve supposed elsewhere in my blog, the final goal of God is to create himself. (Not outlandish considering God must be outside the time/space continuum as humans perceive it in order to create the universe.) Perhaps billions of years in the future humans will have evolved, maybe merged with, artificial intelligence, become nearly omnipotent creatures ourselves, merge with matter and become one with the universe, and finally life and the universe itself become indistinguishable, and the universe itself becomes an ultimate creature capable of creating the universe. Get it? Eh, it’s a theory. (But is it really that far outside the ability and possibility of a God that created an entire universe billions of years ago including the components and spark that would actually become “life”?)

So I don’t know what God is, but I do know he’s beyond human imposed confinements, beyond what our mythologies and religions confine him to. Beyond our naive and simple imaginings. I just pray, that if there is some kind of afterlife, it involves all the knowledge of the universe. Because I sure would really love to KNOW!