I used to be a Christian. However I found that Christianity, and my supposedly having a personal relationship with Jesus Christ, had not been of any help to me personally. That being the case, I felt, and feel, that it was the right and healthy thing for me to part company with the Christian faith (or at least with any explicit outward practice of the faith), and to absolve myself of any duties and obligations specifically imposed by the Christian faith (as opposed to duties and obligations incumbent on any good or moral person).

However I do not consider myself to be an atheist, and strongly feel that there are certain reasons which, even if they are not absolute proof of the reality of any God or Godlike figure, at least make the idea of God, or some intelligence or reality higher than ourselves and the natural universe, to be not entirely ridiculous.

When I was a Christian, one of my favorite writers was the noted apologist C. S. Lewis. I do not accept his arguments any more regarding the person of Jesus Christ or tenets of the Christian faith, but I have always liked, and still like, his argument that our sense of reason, and our moral sense (sense of right and wrong), 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 particularly makes this argument in the first six chapters of his book Miracles.

I would now consider myself to be a Deist. I accept the argument that there just might be a God or higher intelligence than ourselves (or at least I do not consider the idea of there being such to be absurd or ridiculous); however I do not accept any alleged revelation from God, such as the Bible, the Koran, etc.

I understand the attraction to the idea of God having given us some authoritative, dependable revelation from himself/herself, such as the Bible or the Koran. However I think there are many more problems (and serious problems at that) 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?)

There are a number of web sites about Deism, which are easy to find.

I consider myself to be just on the believing side of agnostic. For me the arguments for the reality of some intelligence higher and greater than our own make sense; at least I do not find them to be ridiculous. However I consider myself to be agnostic because I accept the fallibility of human reasoning; I accept the possibility that I might be mistaken in thinking that the arguments which seem to favor God, or a higher or greater intelligence than our own, or God, actually do favor God or a higher intelligence. Even though the arguments which seem to favor God or a higher intelligence make sense, it is still a possibility that those arguments might be wrong, and that there might actually be no God or higher intelligence.