My worry
As a deist, I have a worry about my own position. Deism encourages individual thinking: no clergy, no doctrine, just each person reasoning their way to God. Christianity, by contrast, is held together by shared belief: a community, a creed and leaders who keep everyone roughly on the same page. My worry is that individual thinking has no ceiling. When everyone reasons alone, you can't know how far any one person's thinking will go, or whether it will end somewhere harmful, to others or to the faith itself. The strongest objection is that shared belief has caused far bigger disasters. Crusades and holy wars weren't led by lone thinkers; they were carried out by groups acting together on a common certainty. A lone extremist can only do so much damage without followers. That's true. But a community at least has guardrails: shared norms that catch a person before they drift too far. And that's where the real problem lies. Christians have churches, and Muslims have mosques. Where do people like us go? Deism's greatest strength, having no institution, is also its greatest weakness: there's nowhere to gather, compare our thinking and keep each other honest. Is there really a community for people like us, or are we each building our guardrails alone?