Reply #101: Former Protestant Christian, now Deist, and just on the believing side of agnostic

[MikeH]

I selected I believe in God, or energy, or a higher power but no particular faith or sect (or deist).

I used to be a Christian, but found that the Christian faith, and my supposedly having a personal relationship with Jesus Christ, had not been of any help to me in enabling me to deal with any source of pain, frustration, or unhappiness in my life. That being the case, I am definitely not a Christian any more.

However I do not consider myself to be an atheist. I think that there are reasons which, even if they do not prove the reality of God or some higher power or intelligence, at least make the idea of God or some higher reality or intelligence to be not entirely absurd or ridiculous.

One of my favorite authors when I was a Christian was the noted apologist C. S. Lewis. I no longer accept his arguments regarding the person of Christ or tenets of the Christian faith, but I have always liked his argument that our sense of reason and our moral sense must be rooted in some intelligence higher and greater than our own, and in some reality higher and greater than ourselves and the natural universe. He makes this argument in the first six chapters of his book Miracles.

I would now consider myself to be a Deist, and I think I have arrived at being such by a process of elimination as much as anything else. I accept the idea that there might possibly be a God or an intelligence higher and greater than ourselves. However I do not accept any alleged revelation from God, such as the Bible or the Koran, as actually being such. I think there are many more problems than benefits from actually believing that the Bible (or the Koran) is an authoritative revelation from God. (One obvious problem is that Christians consider the Bible to be the "Word of God", and Muslims consider the Koran to be the revelation from Allah; who is right? I refuse to believe that any "salvation" or any bliss in any future life depends on a person guessing correctly that the Bible, or the Koran, is the correct revelation from God. If that is the case then God is simply an arbitrary tyrant.)

I also consider myself to be just on the believing side of agnostic. I realize the fallibility of human reasoning. Even if I might personally find that my reasoning leads me to conclude that there might be a God or a higher intelligence, I also realize it is possible that I might be mistaken in my reasoning.