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The Modern Deist Podcast
The Modern Deist Podcast is done about once a week by the founder of ModernDeist.org. That founder would be me, my name is Jack Spirko and I have been a self professed Deist for many years. My childhood was spent as a Roman Catholic and was also heavily influenced by one set of his Grand Parents who were Ukrainian Catholic. As I grew up many questions arose about inconsistencies in religion, but yet I found a lot of comfort in the concept of God.
For a number of years I effectively lived as an Deist without knowing it, believing in God but not in religion. In time I began once again reading the bible, and sent several years believing in the baptist school of thought, though not going to church. I then joined a Methodist Church once I met my wife. Her family was Methodist so it just seemed like the right thing to do. The Methodist Church was quite comfortable, I called the Church jokingly (not insulting in anyway) Catholic Lite. I quickly rose in the church as a leader and was recognized as a good teacher and spent a lot of time teaching and participating in classes in the Church.
In the end though, the more I learned about the bible the less I believed. In the end I realized I didn’t believe any of the biblical “facts” I was teaching and professing. I eventually just silently left the church and wished the best for its members.
The complicated part is all along this journey from teenager to ex Methodist and beyond was my constant research and study of everything spiritual. I read the works of people as diverse as Richard Bach, James Kavanaugh, Deepak Chopra, James Redfield, Carlos Castaneda, Robert Monroe and more. I studied eastern faiths, pagan faiths, shamanic faiths, you name it I looked into it.
By 2007 I had pretty much given up on ever having a “home” or a word to describe myself. I used the old cliche, “I am spiritual but not religious”. I came to peace with it and decided to just keep learning and growing on my own, I was okay being spiritually nameless, with no label. I have also always been fascinated by the scientific side of the mysteries of the universe. I remember being 7 years old and having detailed discussions about relativity and quantum mechanics with my father and being able to keep up with him intellectually.
It was science that often led me to question religion, yet I saw science as mostly a secular religion. They were every bit as guilty of the fallacy of appealing to authority as religion was when faced with tough questions like, how do you know this is all an accident? Or what existed before the “big bang” and if you say nothing, were the hell did everything come from? How can you explain quantum entanglement or the two slit experiment?
Again I just decided to be at peace with myself and remain unlabeled and not part of any group. Then one day I was talking to a Christian friend, she was trying to save me by quoting bible verses and the like. It didn’t take long for her to accept that I actually knew the bible and scripture far better than her and that there was no sense in pushing further. She asked me how I knew so much so I related the story above. She said, you sound like a Deist.
Deist? What is a Deist? I asked. Her response was “a Deist believes in a God of sorts but that God is not the God of any religion, just God, sort of like a clock maker that created the universe then checked out and left it to itself”. I told her, sure, I guess but I wasn’t really on board I just wanted to end the attempt to save me from myself. This was a work friend and I needed to end this diplomatically.
Later that day I googled Deist, and found that the clock maker analogy was very short sighted, something used to explain Deism swiftly and write it off as a fringe religion, sort of an agnostic lite explanation. I learned about American founding fathers like Franklin, Jefferson and Payne that were Deists. The big thing is I learned that Deists were diverse from some that pretty much fit the clock maker definition, to highly spiritual and that there was no definite definition, Deists simply believed in some sort of a God. That God could be a man like Deity, a Spirt, a Force, anything that was behind the creation of all that is.
I had “the movement” so many Deists have had, that moment when you say almost like a scientist cracking a code, “that it, I’m a Deist!”
On my journey after that I have read everything I could find about Deism. I looked for podcasts and blogs and while there were some decent ones, nothing was really an on going project. The newest articles, podcasts and videos were years old. So I created this site and started blogging about Deism in September of 2012.
I blogged infrequently because this site was simply a hobby. I am actually a full time professional Podcaster which is how I make my living producing a daily show called, The Survival Podcast. I am known there as a Deist publicly but don’t talk about it that much. I stick to more secular topics. The concept of Deism though is one of my passions and this site just would not let go of me. I wanted to blog more but I work so many hours it was just hard to do. Plus if you read this site you know while I am okay content wise I am not a good technical writer. My skill is in speaking, but I just didn’t have time for a second podcast, especially a non commercial one which would make no money.
But then I thought about it, every morning I spend 15-30 minutes filling up kiddie pools for the ducks on my small farm. Why not just do a podcast using my iPhone, do no editing and just upload it to this site. With that I could easily do 2-4 episodes a week, it would not take up any real time and I could share my knowledge and journey far more consistently than I had been in writing articles. With that the Modern Deist Podcast was born.