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Either way, deists consider gaining an understanding of the world to be religious work. This is another way I distinguish between a deist and an agnostic, since the agnostic considers this learning to be secular.
| Non-excellent point. One can easily distinguish 'god' from religion. Deists can be just as secular as agnostics, but they search for "whether god is just a rationally understandable universe or a rational being" through reason and not religion.
Again I think it comes down to 'a priori'.
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I think your missing my point. I agree a deist believes there is a priori proof that a god exists and that god is rational. What I was trying to say is after having reached these conclusions the deist views the study of the world around them differently than an agnostic. For instance, if a deist believed the universe was god then to a deist the study of the universe is the study of god. This is not the case for an agnostic. It is in this sense I called it a religious pursuit for a deist. I understand you don't want to use words that will confuse you with a more popular version of theist but I don't know what other words to use in order to point out this distinction other than secular and religious. My main point is that after reaching an a priori conclusion of a rational god, deists are free to make a posteriori arguments about the nature of god. This is a big difference between an agnostic and a deist.
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In the broad sense you are right. Theology is needed to reach a conclusion of 'god'. Like philosophy, theology can be broken down into many different branches. I think deist theology is not tied to religion. In general, deist theology concerns itself with the the understanding of 'god' and 'spirituality'.
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I only meant in a broad sense. I just want to point out that you say a deist concerns itself with the understanding of spirituality. Perhaps you could just use the word spiritual instead of religious in the point I made above.
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Again out of my ignorance and generalization, agnostics seem to "wait" for answers while other's purse them. Please correct me if I am wrong.
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I don't think this the right view of an agnostic. Consider that many agnostics were raised in religious families. Personally, I spent many years reading philosophy and I even read the bible twice. Still you can only spend so much time looking for an answer when there are many questions to consider. I think this view becomes completely untenable when you consider that the "typical theist" thinks god is an old man with a beard in the sky while many agnostics consider god to be a fuzzy logic category. Who has really done more thinking?
The way I view it, if god is the universe then I can eliminate the word god from my vocabulary as redundant. This is not something I think a deist would want to do. For a deist the existence of god is tightly wrapped up with their need for an objective meaning to life (their ontology). An agnostic on the other hand is perfectly willing to assign it's own meaning to life. An agnostic is very much concerned with the limits of knowledge, this is another reason it would be a mistake to view an agnostic as someone who sits on a fence waiting for answers. There are many very interesting questions in life, questions which by some may be called spiritual. To an agnostic they are simply very interesting questions. This is, again, why I would say that the study of the universe or world is a religious or spiritual pursuit to the deist but a secular pursuit to an agnostic.