Non-god gods

I Comment again on pantheism and Taoism and transcendentalism and Spinoza's god and deism and all these things that to me are much the same as they see the existence of some sort of force in the universe but not a purposeful God, or at least with odd purposes from our point of view.
The problem I have with them is that they create the problems created by theism and offer no better solution.  The problem of suffering being the main one.  If you assert the existence of any of these forces, how do you explain suffering (evil is another issue --- one can have suffering, and there is plenty of it -- without postulating evil).  The only escape is to assert that the force doesn't care or has some longer range intention -- and that is the essence of the theist escape from this issue.
They also strike me as ways of concealing what is in effect another invocation of the god of the gaps.  The theists at least are honest here -- they say God did it -- and we know the problems of this and how unacceptable this it is, in the end, but isn't all these other approaches much the same thing, except putting the entity at a greater distance and calling it something else?
Again, the issues of absence of apparent purpose in the world or of an ethical authority -- these theories (if I may call them that) have the same problems that outright theism has.  If purpose comes from God, then there is no purpose but God's purpose, and what happens when he achieves it?  If right and wrong come from some force why not call it God, and why follow it anyway?  What if it tells you to do something wrong?    We much generate our own purpose and reason out our own ethics as best we can, disregarding authority, culture, and so on and depend entirely on philosophical reasoning (the Utilitarians, Kant and Socrates [Plato] are good helps here, as is basic Buddhist teaching, none of which are based on any claim to any sort of external being or force and which are based only on thinking the good and the bad of things in as much detail as possible, without a claim to either special knowledge nor to assurance that one will always be right.