Deism vs Theism

Deism is the more logical approach to the belief in God. It is not based on holy books, divine revelation, prophets or miracles. It is based on one's personal observations of the world around them (nature) and/or the study of the cosmos. To a deist, they see design and purpose in nature/cosmos, not randomness. Contrarily, theism relies on holy books and divine revelation. Those holy books were not written by God, but rather by humans. When referencing both Judaism and Christianity, the original scrolls that would become the Old Testament were destroyed when Nebuchadnezzar II burned Jerusalem in 587 BCE. Those original works are referred to as the Autographs. Since they no longer exist (and haven't for ~2,500 years) no one can say with absolute certainty that the Bible that is read today is infallible. Humans make mistakes all the time, and it is because of human error that the Bible is not absolute. Furthermore, divine revelation means that someone is interpreting a dream or voices in their head. You can't prove divine revelation in any shape or form. You have to take it on blind faith that the person speaking is being truthful and has no agenda that they are trying to push on others. That is part of the reason for so many different denominations; difference of opinions and biblical interpretation. If God wanted to protect His book and keep it infallible, then why in the heck are there numerous translations, many of which disagree with the text? The answer is very simple; there's big money in religion and publishing houses have copyrights. Once again, the human influence. Another aspect that clutters up theism is the language-time barrier. When reading the Bible in English, you lose the cultural idioms of the ancient Hebrew and Koine Greek. We are removed from that era by thousands of years, and what we understand a verse to mean is often completely different than its intention. For example, if you were to get zapped back in time to 1100 CE and saw a knight in full plate armor on horseback, you might say "that's so cool!" The knight would look at you funny because it is August, 95 degrees, he is burning up and sweating his butt off. He would not understand the idiom of "cool!" The Bible contains many verses talking about fascinating stories and/or miracles. I will touch on a few of these. Garden of Eden: we did not come from a single pair of humans called Adam and Eve, and certainly not 6,000 years ago. Genetics has already shown that it would take 10,000 original humans to account for all the diversity in the world today. Furthermore, no one has ever seen the cherubim with a flaming sword, guarding the way to the Tree of Life. No satellite imagery has ever captured it. The Exodus: there is no archaeological evidence to suggest that the exodus ever happened. Over 1,000,000 people wandering around the desert for 40 years, yet nothing has ever been found. Also, the common English translation regarding the exodus is that they crossed the Red Sea, but the actual Hebrew means the Sea of Reeds, which is a swampland. The chariots could not follow, even if the story was real. Jesus' Miracles: throughout the NT we read about Jesus performing miracles. Driving out demons left and right, raising the dead, healing the sick, etc. The only problem is that those "demons" were actually just medical conditions that people did not understand 2,000 years ago. Take epilepsy for example. Someone would fall to the ground and their body would shake violently. Those people did not understand what it was, so they defaulted to the supernatural and blamed demonic possession. We now know better. In summary, the Bible was not meant to be taken literally. It is a collection of stories that tell a lesson about morality or compassion, along with some mythological history as to how or why something was done. Most likely, those stories started out around a campfire when a child asked an elder, "why do we speak different languages?" The elder cooked up a story about a tower and it went from there. If you read the Bible as a book of metaphors and allegory, then things become much simpler and you don't have all the baggage that comes with theistic dogma.