Founded in 2009, New Deism Press seeks to engage, challenge, and inspire with books promoting contemporary Deism
Beth Houston's new ebook, EXIT RELIGION, ENTER GOD, bundles her two previous books, and includes a new introduction.
What readers of BORN-AGAIN DEIST have said:
"Born-Again Deist is a superbly written and brutally honest work that will challenge every open minded, truth seeking reader to examine his or her core beliefs concerning the nature of God and how Divinity interacts with creation." -- Brian E. Erland, HALL OF FAME REVIEWER
"One of the best indictments of fundamentalism I've read.... The real strength of this book...is, over and above her evident scholarship, her incisive style.... Beth Houston writes beautifully with a deep understanding of Christianity and her personal experience." -- Dennis Littrell, HALL OF FAME REVIEWER
"[Beth] Houston raises important questions that should be addressed... [and] offers people who feel religious and those who deny religion an opportunity to rethink their ideas about God." -- Israel Drazin, TOP 500 REVIEWERVINE VOICE
"A Stunningly Elegant Read.... Tightly argued and cogent in every respect.... Thought-provoking, heart-felt, well thought out, well-written, and everywhere solid!" -- Herbert L Calhoun
"I cannot recommend Born-Again Deist highly enough to everyone who feels dissatisfied with their present religion. Born-Again Deist will revive your faith in an Almighty Power, but in way that is far different from any organized church." - Regis Schilken
What readers of NATURAL GOD: DEISM IN THE AGE OF INTELLIGENT DESIGN have said:
"Readers will enjoy this well-written book... [and] will find much in Houston's book that is instructive and thought provoking." -- Israel Drazin, Top Contributor, TOP 500 REVIEWERVINE VOICE
"I read this most excellent book twice. The first time rendered so many ideas and so many truly profound thoughts, that, as soon as I finished it, I went to the first page and began again. The second read was as brilliant as the first. Clear, beautiful prose. Fascinating ideas." -- Martina Newberry
"I would highly recommend Beth Houston's latest book, Natural God: Deism in the Age of Intelligent Design, to all readers who seek the Good God of sound reason. Her easy to read but masterful book will provide you with insight typically overlooked in today's world where Bible pounders and stuffy scientists keep alive mythical gods of the past." -- Regis Schilken
"If you are the type of person who likes to see the claims of the self-appointed 'authorities' of society critiqued, then this book is for you.... The critique of Darwinian evolution presented here is a very good one: I learned some very interesting things about Darwin I had never read before that alone were worth the price of the book.... This is a worthwhile book, and very well written. It is one of those books that some people would like to read just because it is so well written." - Verified Purchaser
From the Publisher
New Deism : Spiritual Deism (vs. "Watchmaker God" Deism)
Deism today is sometimes defined as a religion of reason and nature, period. Some Deists denigrate every aspect of religion as superstition and dismiss every form of spirituality as chimera. Many of those Deists tout the Watchmaker (or Clockmaker) God as the only authentically Deist stance toward the Divine. But such rigid slants are neither fair nor historically accurate, nor do they reflect the traditional Deist values of open-mindedness and common sense.
Many Deists, including Edward Herbert, the Father of (English) Deism, Thomas Paine, perhaps the greatest advocate of Deism, and many of our Deist Founders, including Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, James Madison, and Patrick Henry, acknowledged God as the active Creator and perpetual sustainer of existence. Many Deists, now as in the past, accommodate a Deist perspective within their own religions.
What we Deists do agree about is that the focus of Deism is on God as truth--and on truth as true. Deism is not a mythic special revelation bestowed upon a chosen spiritual elite but is a universally inclusive natural religion available to anyone via innate, God-given reason -- or in the view of Beth Houston, innate, God-given common sense, meaning all our faculties, including reason, conscience, intuition, experience, emotion, physical sensation, instinct, desire, will, aesthetic sensibility (which registers the sublime elegance/truth of Creation in the Keatsian sense of "beauty is truth, truth beauty"), and yes, spirit too.
The version of Deism that Beth Houston relates in her spiritual memoir, Born-Again Deist, assumes that spiritual experience is a commonplace reality and acknowledges that many aspects of religious worship are representations of, or calls to, that experience. Problems arise when believers mistake the representation as the thing represented, for instance, when "God the Father" is assumed to be male and therefore more or less human. Disallowing the windup absent-Father version of God promoted by some contemporary Deists, Beth Houston explains that she both objectively deduces and subjectively experiences God's active Presence in Creation, including human life, including her own life. Beth Houston believes that God is both transcendent and immanent in Creation; and by immanent she means that God is present in Creation but is not Creation itself (the way, say, a poet is "in" her poem but is not the poem or poetry itself).
At the same time, Beth Houston considers it the sacred duty of every Deist to deconstruct fundamentalist text-worship, to demystify religious myths and superstitions, and to expose the hypocrisy of spiritual con artists within all religious traditions, including the Judeo-Christian.
By its very nature, Deism is political, because it upholds as self-evident values such as equality, justice, freedom, and truth, values that are yet to be fully implemented by any government or society, including our own.
Unlike many contemporary Deists, Beth Houston is a proponent of Intelligent Design, in her view the Golden Mean between creationism and Darwinism (and neo-Darwinism). Aristotle's Golden Mean isn't a watered-down grey but is an ethically sound alternative to extremist polar opposites -- in the case of ID, ethically sound because scientifically accurate and therefore true, to the best of our current knowledge.
Beth Houston's Born-Again Deist and Natural God take the reader on a journey into the spiritual clarity it took the author decades to attain.
