Reply #53: I am in category 3

[MikeH]

I am only the second vote, so far, in category 3. For a long time I have considered myself to be just on the believing side of agnostic. Having recently (in the last year) discovered web sites about deism, I would now consider myself to be a deist.

I used to be a Christian. However I found that Christianity, and supposedly having a personal relationship with Jesus Christ, and with God through Jesus Christ, did not at all help me in dealing with any personal issue or any source of pain, frustration, or unhappiness in my life. For me Christianity did not live up to its promise of making any radical transformation in my life.

However I cannot quite accept that our reason, and our sense of beauty, truth, and goodness, are not rooted in some reality higher and greater than ourselves and (presumably) the natural universe. C. S. Lewis was one of my favorite authors when I was a Christian, and I still accept his philosophical arguments along these lines.

Given my unhappiness with Christianity I now definitely cannot accept or become an adherent of any revealed religion. Deists say that any revelation from God to a person can be a revelation only to that person; otherwise any alleged revelation from God is at best second-hand, or hearsay. I fully agree with that.

I think one of the differences between a deist and a theist is that a theist believes that God has given some kind of special revelation (i.e. the Bible, the Koran, etc.). That being the case, I would not be a theist.