Letters to the Editor
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The attraction of agnosticism is fence-walking. In the middle of the rail is no time to pick a side, it’s a time to feel the reality of gravity and balance, to sway and be amazed at the miraculous ability of lifted arms to prevent your fall.
beautiful L,; thank you!
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Eat Some Comfort Food
Dear Shaky,
Sounds like you want someone to revitalize your passion for life. Someone to bring comfortable and relieve stress and anxiety. To admit this says you an honest persone to yourself.
There is a god inside you that is able to bring these things for you. You can do it. I urge you to examine the source of your longings and find something you can build on to that is real and move forward.
The fact is that agnostics are the only people that can defend their position that there is not enough evidence to prove there is a personal god who cares about mankind. It takes some sort of leap of faith to believe there is no god or there is a god. And guess what? Its up to you.
I loved the ending of the Sopranos. Tony was enjoying life surrounded by his loved ones knowing that he must always be watchful of the threat of being whacked. No guarantees of safe passage. The same as it always has been for him because of the way he has chosen to live. We really don't know what happens to him in the future.
But, a lot of people were not comfortable with not knowing. They wanted to be comforted by knowing what happened. The trick my friend is being comfortable with no knowing and realize this is what life is.
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Believing On Your Own Terms A Good Plan, At Least For Starters
I was raised an evangelical, charismatic fundamentalist in the midwest and had personal conflicts with such a proscribed doctrine that I couldn't really address until I was first at college. Although these people told me that there were two positions to hold on this issue, that of being a "true believer" born again in christ or that of being damned by god, some still small voice in my soul said "no, I don't think so."
I read the work of William S. Burroughs and decided that I didn't think being gay was a case for damnation at all, nor did I think it was a choice. I became a feminist, battling my own programming from childhood. I decided I didn't believe in marriage except as a legally binding contract conferring inheritance and custody benefits. And I began to attempt to reconcile the growing feeling I had that no one is "damned" due to religious beliefs, and that in fact, "God is God," or "God is Gods" or however we want to put it. After a fifteen year rejection of any form of religious belief system or personal spirituality, I began challenging these old fundamentalist notions of what god is, studying not only how the christian bible has been edited and misquoted to prop up the religious right (see Elaine Pagels, Randall Balmer's Thy Kingdom Come, Bart Ehrmann's Misquoting Jesus, Karen Armstrong's work), but also how world religions believed, how they defined the idea of god, thinking about how I personally might begin to define the idea of god for myself.
Don't let organized religion taint your conceptions of what it means to believe in a god. It is a very worthy thing to seek out your own definition of god: is god a unified spirit, or an energy, a force, nature itself? Both? Is god an idea humans have created and given force to, that we need to believe in, like mom and dad? Do you want to be a part of some human system of acknowledging and dealing with our mortality together, which can be one of the functions of participating in religion or seeking a belief system that's right for you?
I currently am trying out a Universalist Unitarian Church, a gathering of people who believe many different things, among them atheists, and have been extremely pleased to participate in such a thoughtful and diverse conversation on the issues. As for me, I will never subscribe to any single organized religion again, and have realized that searching for my personal position on god and life and death and the problem of human suffering is a worthy pursuit, and that it makes me feel closer to whatever god is, not farther away as the fundamentalists argue. Your new journey seeking your new beliefs is a great opportunity, and I applaud your having the courage to take it.
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atheism dead?
Great response!
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You're not alone, LW
I understand your concerns -- I'd still like to believe in Something More, especially if it means my beloved wife & I could be together always to the end of time. I know that's a leftover from naive childhood belief -- in many ways, I'm still a cultural Catholic, if no longer a believing one, and I still appreciate a lot of religion for its aesthetic qualities. And I can certainly see using it as a useful inner framework or guiding metaphor -- but I don't confuse that with any external reality. I don't think there is any greater purpose or meaning, other than the ones we create for ourselves -- birds make nests, humans make cultures, as they say.
You're hitting midlife, LW. That's when these questions really come into focus: What's it all about? Have I wasted my life? Is there anything more? And so on. That's all to the good! As previous posters have already suggested (thanks, neonnoodle), immerse yourself in art & literature. Take time not just to think, but to mull, to contemplate, to slow down & start figuring out what it all means TO YOU. That's what you're really looking for, I think.
You may never arrive at a final answer, either. I'll be 54 in a few months, and I'm still wrestling with those questions. But maybe it's the journey that matters in the end, not the goal. Perhaps the meaning is in the seeking, not in the finding. For me, much of it is love, art, beauty, the unfathomable wonder of the Universe -- that's my meaning. And my purpose is to add just a little bit more of all that to the world. There are worse things to do with a life, after all.
Good luck to you in your search, LW!