Posted May 29, 2009
The Agnostic Review

The Origins Of Agnosticism:
How I Fell from Grace...

AGNOSTIC
Pronunciation: \ ag-näs-tik, əg-\
Function: noun
Etymology: Greek agnōstos unknown, unknowable, from a- + gnōstos known, from gignōskein to know
1. a person who holds the view that any ultimate reality (as God) is unknown and probably unknowable: broadly one who is not committed to believing in either the existence or the nonexistence of God or a god...

I really can't count the number of times I've been asked, "Do you believe in God?" There was a time I wouldn't have hesitated to answer yes. But I find the cynicism born of a half-century of experience (did I REALLY just say "a half-century?") coupled with the contradictions of religion, and the hypocrisy that follows behind as if it were the Pied Piper, has raised doubts and questions about the true existence of a God. A God that would allow His "children" to suffer through a world full of disgust and violence while at times appearing to reward the most vile among us. I've seen no physical manifestation of God in ANY form short of a sunrise and the birth of a child. I've personally witnessed no miraculous healings.
Most importantly though, I've found it increasing more difficult to justify the terms by which God allows up to spend eternity in paradise. I found the following recently that somewhat summed up the rational argument many agnostics and atheists alike share in common. In a roundabout way I want first to explain why I am NOT an agnostic. It may help in providing answers for those who are still confused:

I am NOT an Agnostic because...

I hate God
I prayed to God and my prayers weren’t answered
Militant/fundamentalist atheists converted me away from God
I worship science and the works of man instead of God
I’m rebelling against God like I rebelled against my parents & teachers in high school
I think I’m better than God
I had a bad experience with a priest or church or religious person
I can’t decide which religion to subscribe to
Agnosticism is my religion
I think religious people are idiots
I worship Batman
I worship Satan
I’m immoral/amoral and would rather do what I want
I want to destroy religion

Hopefully one can see that the reasons behind agnosticism are somewhat complex taken in definition beside each bullet. I didn't just wake up one day and say to myself, "Well, that was fun, let's be agnostic for a while", but rather slowly drifted without recognition that my mind was seeing things around me that were tipping the scales in favor of a universe created by something but not what mainstream Christianity may believe.
I have ALWAYS believed religion would be the death of Christianity. As I look around me I see more and more people becoming disenchanted with its interpretation, its abuse and its specific discrimination against individuals whose relationship with God as they see him is tantamount to a banishment from paradise. The reasons for me are not much more varied than those of others who have genuine concerns and questions, mainly...

• religious people often tend to pick & choose from, or “interpret” their holy texts, discarding what does not conform to modern standards of morality, law & political freedom; they then bizarrely imply that modern morality, law and political freedom rests on the foundations of their particular religion...
• many Christian churches seem primarily concerned with attracting money and keeping it rather than using it charitably, building huge monuments to themselves...
• as well as innumerable separate religions; there are so many separate & often violently opposed sects within each that it is more likely that none of them are correct rather than just one of them being so...
• there is such a wide spectrum of religious belief & adherence to dogma, ranging from light, barely-existent deism to the kind of rigid fundamentalism that oppresses and kills many, many people in its name, that it leads me to conclude that either their God wasn’t clear enough with his message, didn’t spread it to enough people or that humans have basically made their religions, and associated rules, up as they went along and have been in conflict with each other about them ever since...
• many religious people & groups attempt to cherry-pick science (as they do their scriptures) for those parts which conform to their belief system while actively denying others, e.g. creationists agreeing with “microevolution” while denying “macroevolution” (which is like believing that matches cannot start bushfires) or attempting to use the Second Law of Thermodynamics to debunk the theory of evolution (which is like adjudicating a baseball game with a cricket rulebook)...
• some religious groups deny the efficacy of modern medicine in favor of treating an ill person with prayer, a practice which has led to many preventable deaths, often of children...
• they all make extraordinary claims based on their scriptures, provide no evidence beyond referring to their (unsurprisingly) self-confirming scriptures and then insist that the onus is on non-believers to disprove their claims...
• many religions have become inextricably intertwined with the laws of the patriarchal or tribal cultures which spawned or adopted them, leading to divine justifications for such horrors as female circumcision and “honour killings”, which more often than not punish women, already under the thumbs of domineering males, for seemingly minute transgressions of law...

That, I hope, clearly sums up both why I am NOT an agnostic and some of the reasons why I find it difficult to have an across-the-board, blind-faith attitude in my beliefs about who God really is. And in a parochial defense, I'm exploring more reasons each day as to why I should return to the embrace of a belief I once held firmly and defended.

This is not an easy road. When you look into the mirror of belief, what you find staring back may not always be the person you want to see. I'm the only one that can make the decisions that cement the foundations of my relationship with God and while I have had unbiased support from a wide variety of people, its taken some time to sort out the contradictions.

Faith, in its purest form, is a blind dedication to an understanding that can't necessarily be proven by reason or intellect. There's no physical manifestation that confronts you with undeniable truth. Maybe that's my problem. Maybe I'm become, in the latter years, cynical of the world around me. Maybe I can't have faith in the deity of a god because I just don't have faith in myself...

Will there be some blinding light that strikes me as it did the Apostle Paul, waylaying my doubts and concerns? I tend to believe not. I believe everything I need to seek out the truth in undeniable terms is right in front of the my eyes already. But that distance between the heart and mind, as I've stated already, is one of the longest and most difficult journeys I have to make, blindly heading toward a destination that can't be zeroed in on with GPS.

The spiritual implosion that left me where I am today can only be restructured once the past has been bulldozed from the site and the groundwork laid for a new foundation. Only then can I begin to rebuild a relationship I once had. But I know beyond a shadow of a doubt, it will be an all or nothing proposition, no half-hearted hypocrisy, no half-ass efforts on my part... Maybe I should be glad there's a carpenter on my side.