He derived the ideas, in fragmentary fashion, from Bolingbroke, who was an amateur Deist and optimist of the shallow eighteenth century type, and so far was Pope from understanding what he was doing that he was greatly disturbed when it was pointed out to him that the theology of the poem was
Deistic rather than Christian [Footnote: The name Deist was applied rather generally in the eighteenth century to all persons who did not belong to some recognized Christian denomination.
There is this difference between me and
deistic philosophers: I believe; and I believe the Gospel.
He was no evangelical or pietist, but Thompson cautions against reading
deistic tendencies into Washington's silences on religion.
For instance, we found, after watching the three-hour finale, that this narrative ended up not only
deistic but confusingly so.
Some have suggested that the Founding Fathers used the term "Providence" as an impersonal term for a
deistic god who is not involved in human affairs, but in fact its meaning is the opposite.
(40-49) The speaker, who describes himself at the opening of the poem as having been "nurs'd by careless Solitude" (8), wanders solitarily in search of the essence of
deistic Nature, an essence that he finds expressed in the nightingale's sad song.
For Jayne, the key commotion between Lincoln and Jefferson is their shared belief in what he terms "
deistic idealism (p.
Cell biologist and author Kenneth Miller illustrates such a
deistic ideology in this, "To some, the murderous reality of human nature is proof that God is absent or dead.
contrasts a classical "grammar of participation" with a modern,
deistic "grammar of representation" (21-40).
The spirit of the liberal democratic and
deistic tradition in which America's founding documents were conceived was partly that of what bell hooks contemporarily calls "white supremacist capitalist patriarchy." White supremacist capitalist patriarchy as a matrix of social-political-cultural arrangements that endure over time comes complete with the canonical authorities of reason, science and religion, which allegedly undergird the "nature" of human beings and their individual/communal lives together.
The Declaration of Independence mentions the Almighty only twice, both in a
deistic sense.