Uncertainty

I have to admit, when this topic was suggested, I was really excited, but it seems very heavy for the first week. Before I get into it, I just want to say that even though some of what I'm about to say may come across as an attack on religion and/or atheism, it really is only intended as a reflection on my own experience in trying to figure out what exactly I believe. I have nothing but respect for the beliefs of the other people on this blog, and I'm generally pretty cool with belief systems that aren't centered around being a dick. Now that that disclaimer is out of the way, let's get into it.

In this post, I'm going to try to address two main things: how I came to find agnosticism to be an appealing option and why lack of a religion doesn't preclude having a strong sense of morality.

I think it's important to start out by saying that religion was never a huge part of the way I was raised. Yes, my family identified as ambiguously Christian, for the most part (my dad is a rather vocal atheist of the mindnumbingly ignorant variety), but we were never a very religious household. We never went to church at all until around the time I was in middle school, and even then it was infrequent and only ever involved my mother and sisters.

Interestingly, my older younger sister was a lot younger when this started, so she had more association with the church as a part of her childhood, which may be a factor in why she continues to identify as fairly religious.

Around this time is when everyone and their cousin at school started declaring, "RELIGION IS FOR SHEEP." This bothered me a lot at the time, and in a lot of ways, it really still does. These people made the same assumption that many religious folk adhere to: religion and reason/logicscience are mutually exclusive. I won't get into it too much, because we'll be discussing this more thoroughly in a future topic, but in short, I thought this was stupid and narrow-minded.

With middle school, something changed at church that I couldn't quite put my finger on. I felt out of place there, and eventually I stopped going to church with my family altogether. One afternoon I sat on my neighbor's driveway, and he asked, "Shouldn't you be at church with your mom and the girls?" My dad responded before I could with a simple, "Nah, he's an atheist now." This struck me as rather presumptuous (as my dad is wont to be). I still mostly believed in what I'd been taught; I just didn't go to church.

However, as I learned more about history and the way that different religions developed over time, I became skeptical toward the idea that any of the major options out there could really claim to have any certainty about the supernatural. For a while, I considered the idea of deism because it seemed consistent with what I was told that I was supposed to believe without contradicting common sense and logic and science.

But even that idea started to bother me. I just couldn't bring myself to definitively think either "I believe in some kind of religion" or "I don't believe in the supernatural". I didn't feel like I had the resources to really make an informed decision about what to believe because none of the available options really seemed like they had much concrete support for or against their truth.

And that brought me to agnosticism. I'm sure that if you didn't know what it was, you looked it up yesterday after Kathleen posted, but I'm going to provide a definition anyway. Old debate habits die hard.

ag·nos·tic   [ag-nos-tik]
noun
1. a person who holds that the existence of the ultimate cause, as God, and the essential nature of things are unknown and unknowable, or that human knowledge is limited to experience. (Dictionary.com)

Amusingly, dictionary.com also lists as synonyms for agnostic the following: disbeliever, nonbeliever, unbeliever; doubter, skeptic, secularist, empiricist; heathen, heretic, infidel, pagan.

Now, I think that something I should make clear is that this isn't entirely accurate as a representation of what I believe, but it's close enough. With enough advanced mathematics, I'm sure that there's some kind of calculable answer to the question of how the universe came to be, but we don't have that answer, and odds are good that we never will. If you think I'm kidding, you should go read up on chaos theory.

Not that there's anything wrong with having a strong belief in your preferred brand of religion or irreligion. There are plenty of possible explanations for the supernatural or other unknown aspects of the universe, like how it began or how it will end, but I don't feel like I could make a strong assertion of any particular belief in any of those things. There'd always be a level of uncertainty that I just couldn't shake.

Now that I've addressed that, the question of morality comes up. The biggest thing that bothers me that I hear as arguments against any kind of irreligion is that people without religion have no moral compass to guide them through life. To this, I ask, "Is your sense of right and wrong governed solely by your religious beliefs? If you thought that your god wouldn't punish you for being a dick to people, would you do it?" I think it's safe to assume that for most people, the answer would be no.

And that brings me to the (in my opinion, inappropriately named) Atheist's Wager:

Live a good life. If there are gods and they are just, then they will not care how devout you have been, but will welcome you based on the virtues you have lived by. If there are gods, but unjust, then you should not want to worship them. If there are no gods, then you will be gone, but will have lived a noble life that will live on in the memories of your loved ones. (Marcus Aurelius, allegedly)

A variation on the more commonly known Pascal's Wager, this idea is something that I strongly agree with. I make a concerted effort to do right by people. There are more than a few times that this effort has backfired on me rather spectacularly, but I still believe in trying to be a good person.

I'm not an ambitious person. I don't believe in stepping on everyone else to climb to the top. I don't think that financial well-being is as important a defining characteristic for success as being able to say that I've done my part to make the world a better place. My moral beliefs are simple, some might even say naive, but they're important to me. If there's a god that doesn't agree with those values, then that's not a god that I want anything to do with, and if there is, then I expect that I won't be turned away simply because I didn't want to make assumptions that I wasn't sure of.

Anyway, I hope that maybe you took something away from this, obviously not necessarily a change in your beliefs or lack thereof, but maybe a rethinking of your thoughts on the relationship between morality and religion. Tomorrow John will be posting, and I'm pretty excited to see what he has to say.