I would like to begin by expressing my respect for the faithful. I have had this argument enough times to realize that there are plenty of religious folks out there who have questioned their beliefs and found them sound. I really only have one qualification for granting respect when it comes to religion: did you come to your religious convictions blindly or through your own investigation and introspection? If you came to your beliefs on your own thought work, then power to you. I have friends and family who are Jews, Christians and Muslims of such ilk and I both love them dearly and respect their beliefs. I don’t think they are idiots or brainwashed. My father is a devout Catholic, my mother is a Born Again and somewhere in my family tree we a have a few Mormons floating around. It is my belief, however, that if you blindly accept any belief without thinking or question, I think that you are a dangerously credulous individual who can be persuaded to do just about anything…like blow up an abortion clinic, fly a jumbo jet into a sky scraper or drink the Kool Aid at Jonestown.
I rejected religion between the ages of four and twelve. My earliest memories of religious rejection were the feelings of utter revulsion that I had at the notion of God, Satan, heaven and hell. I was given a Catholic School education until about six. I received numerous books from church and this school and I read them through. I read the bible at twelve. As my mind, intellectual faculties and personality formed during these formative years, my revulsion towards religion took on a more definite shape. I heard what everyone else heard and read what many faithful never bother to read and what happened was that my interpretation and instinctive reaction towards Christian articles of faith was very different from the way my parents, my church and my religious teachers intended.
I am an agnostic. I have explained this choice and my quest to understand faith in an earlier article, which I wrote at a fairly vulnerable time in my life. I have had many a good conversation with people of various faiths during the past few years and everything I hear and experience reaffirms a few key beliefs that I hold. I am an agnostic and not an atheist because I do not believe that there is any proof that there is no God. What I mean by proof is logical and empirical proof-not the self-reported feelings, intuitions, experiences and coincidences that people have throughout life’s winding journey. What you feel in your gut when your look at your infant daughter or the setting sun might be pretty but it doesn’t hold up in court as proof of God. There is no proof either way and I think that it is unacceptable to affirm God’s existence or non-existence without such proof. In every other endeavor of human existence we would find the concept of faith to be ridiculous speculation-not a peculiar symptom of virtue. Still with me so far, people? Remember, this is an OPINION about a highly subjective topic.
I am an agnostic for another, deeper, more personal reason. I don’t like authority. I view God as the ultimate authority figure-a self righteous finger wagging entity that seeks endless fear and adulation. When you describe God I see Marlon Brando from Apocalypse Now: a being of endless power lording it over ants. I’m agnostic because I don’t want there to be a God. I reject the notion that my body or “soul” (which I believe is just a combination of mind and emotion) belongs to anyone other than me. I reject being part of another being’s plan or subject to that being’s judgment. I had one childhood when I was subject to the will of another and that is enough for me. I am by no means infallible; don’t get me wrong. I make mistakes all the time and I try to pay for them. I have my own code of morality that I try to live by for my own self respect and sense of justice-not for fear of divine or legal consequences. I refuse to abase myself in ceremony, worship or prayer in a bid to achieve eternal bliss.
Thus far what I have laid out are my instinctive and logical reasons that I don’t believe and don’t worship. I view religious conflict as a difference of opinion and what I laid out above, however loathsome to some, is my own opinion. I have questioned it. I have sought God-called out to him, prayed to him, read about him, talked about him-and in the watches of the night I feel absolutely nothing in response. I have no sense of a divine will, presence or love. To me the heavens are cold and dead.
Articles of Faith: I went on retreat once with my best friend when I was 20 years old. It was a relaxing spring weekend of silence, contemplation and nature. There were a number of books in the library that I perused while observing the rule of silence. One of them was called “The Gods of Atheism.” I remember reading this book, a catholic priest’s objective précis of a number of religious treatises written by atheists. I gleaned a number of ideas that I had always thought and believed but never put into words. Later when I read the most influential author in my whole life, Ms. Ayn Rand, I experienced a similar though more powerful reaction. These were my humanist moments of clarity. It occurred to me then that non-believers have certain articles of faith in what is essentially a secular creed-humanism. Atheists and agnostics can experience a sense of meaning and purpose. There is a heaven and hell for non-believers. There is even a God.
Man as God – I quote Yoda; “Luminous beings are we. Not this crude matter.” The humanist God is human potential. Man, the lowest common denominator or the average man, is by no means worthy of worship, but the highest strivings of mankind deserve a great deal of respect. Man is a finite being of limited life span, power and intelligence. When a human being overcomes his or her fear, laziness and limitations to write a symphony, design a sky scraper or master a principle of mathematics, I find that to be noble. My humanist saints are Shakespeare, Galileo, Mozart, Curie, Beethoven, Newton (who was a believer, I know), Einstein and countless other human beings who have widened the circle of light that is human understanding. I am the harshest critic of man’s shortcomings and pettiness because there have been such stellar examples of what people can do when they believe in themselves. My morality is grounded in the quest to achieve mastery over emotion and desire and to thus use human potential to its fullest.
For me heaven is the exaltation of creation. I get my greatest thrills overcoming my own limitations by travel, experience, learning, writing and love. Hell is wasted human potential when a mind is extinguished through mindless acceptance.
Man is a beautiful creature capable of so much good. The evil that men do in the world only accentuates the greatness of those who do good. I don’t believe in man’s essential worthlessness in the sight of God as Jonathan Edwards asserted during the Great Awakening or that humans should apologize for their frailty, limitations or their tendency towards sin. If you combine two common theistic articles of faith: that man was created in God’s image and that man is essentially a sinful being, then you can bravely come to the logical conclusion that man’s “design flaws” are the flaws of the creator.
I do not believe that, if there is a God, man is accountable to that God or belongs to him. God’s very perfection-the lack of all human limitations-invalidates God’s right to judge man. How can an infinite and perfect being judge an imperfect one? It reminds me of a trust fund baby bemoaning the laziness of the homeless.
Rejection of Original Sin – Morality revolves around choice. Good and evil can only exist when a person has a choice between the right and the wrong. A person does not have a choice about being born or being a human being. Since they made no choice, they committed no wrong. In a court of law there is no guilt by blood relation, only by action. There should be no such sin, then, for human kind. This idea, incidentally, is entirely Ayn Rand’s.
Self-Abdication is Dangerous – The ecstasy that so many people experience from their religion is the ecstasy of self-abdication. Many religions encourage people to abandon their egos, personalities and desires to the collective. The danger, however, is that once man has abdicated the self, he becomes an empty vessel. Such an empty vessel can always be filled by a powerful collective idea. Not all such collectives or religions are dangerous but when a German views being German as belonging to a master race he becomes a Nazi. When a white man abandons his own better interest to the interests of the race as a whole, he becomes a foot soldier of white supremacy. Cults revolve around this kind of self-abdication.
A person’s first and highest duty is to him or herself. Ayn Rand once said that when you hear a talking head going on about sacrifice, chances are that behind the scenes he or she is collecting the sacrifices for his or her own gain or to attain a political agenda. A person ought to live their own life to the fullest by attaining education, experience and wisdom. A healthy, enlightened individual who does the best he or she can at being a citizen, a worker and a parent will do the world far more good than any commune of believers of any creed who give up their own will, time and money to the guiding intelligence of some other being. If people did a far more effective job at caring for themselves rather than relying on divine or human intervention, then the world would be a far more efficient place with less crime and poverty.
Under the guise of humility, people claim that their own judgment is inferior and unfit to grapple with reality and thus they require guidance from something higher than themselves. It’s easy to do this; using your own judgment requires courage. Letting others do your own thinking is an easy way to avoid this responsibility. I say, be noble. Keep your own judgment, your own self and your own interest and work hard to make yourself happy-not the mindless gratification of material things and senses but a sustainable and active life filled with work, exercise, thought and conversation.
Let There Be Uncertainty – Ok, I don’t know what or who created the universe. I readily admit that. I’m stumped. God is a convincing explanation for creation, but only one possible explanation. Why doesn’t anyone pose an alternative explanation for creation than God? All we really know is that every effect in the universe has a cause and by this logic something must originate all causes-the theory of the prime mover, the a priori, the uncaused cause.
This is the gap in human understanding that is exploited by almost every religion. What created the universe and what happens after we die? I don’t know. I’m OK with that uncertainty, however. I won’t try to bridge the gap with faith, which I consider to be a glorified guess and a crime against logic, reason and science. If there is an after life and I am to be judged, I will readily admit that I did not believe because according to my best gift, my mind, I could not find the necessary evidence by which I base all my other decisions in a world grounded by reality.
What I so often hear as a secondary proof of God is the order of the universe-the “Watchmaker” argument. People of faith often say that the patterns and orderly systems in nature necessitate a designer. I have two problems with that. First, you cannot ascribe any adjectives to the universe because there is no alternative universe that is less orderly to compare ours against. Secondly, there is plenty of chaos inherent in nature. Photosynthesis, for example, is only 3% efficient. The overwhelming majority of human DNA codes for absolutely nothing. The mammoth space of our solar system and the known universe is filled with giant rocks devoid of any purpose relative to our planet.
From human uncertainty stems the demand for God and religion. Our lives are so brief, bright and painful. We all want more and we all want to feel like it had a reason. I believe that the notion of God grew out of these human insecurities. The danger is that what was, for the ancients of Greece, Egypt and Rome, a difference of opinion about ontology has grown into an endless and often bloody war that divides people and closes minds. Chris Rock said in Dogma that you can change or question an idea but not a belief. Many people hold their beliefs to be so sacred that they find it evil to even consider alternatives. I regard such people as public enemy number one in a world filled with strife and terror. I reiterate, however, that those intrepid souls who have examined their faith and find no fault with it, I hold as intellectual equals and thoughtful fellow humans.
There you have it, folks. These are my honest, thoughtful opinions and ideas as an agnostic. People of all faiths have a tendency to forget that believers of other creeds and non-believers alike believe that they are right just as much as you do. Just because your religion is in the majority in a particular city or nation doesn’t mean you get to condescendingly tolerate other faiths, non-believers and homosexuals as misguided and lost souls who have yet to find salvation. Some people don’t want to be “tolerated” or “saved” but accepted as equals who hold a different perspective on life that does in infringe upon your rights. Regardless of what you believe, no religious group is in charge or gets to dictate policy to the rest of the United States. The United States is not a Christian nation, though the majority of its citizens are. We are all equal human beings under the laws bequeathed to us by a group of Christians and Deists who saw fit to check religion at the door as they molded the public sphere of American society.
I mean to hurt no one and my opinion has no binding authority so please consider that as you make your comments. I am always open to intelligent debate in which people exchange and debate one another’s ideas without insult or character assassination. If you are willing to be civil, so am I. Let’s agree to disagree. If you wanted to understand how an agnostic sees the world, well the above is the world view of an intellectual agnostic.
Reference:
- www.associatedcontent.com/article/295828/thank_god_for_a_bold_rodeo_cowboy_and.html This article inspired my own.
