It took a while after I parted ways with organized religion in general, and Christianity specifically, but I'm now very comfortable, if the subject comes up in conversation, saying I'm agnostic.
The reason a lot of people react with silence is that they aren't really sure what an agnostic is. Everyone knows what an atheist is. But the primary reason you get the cold shoulder is that being up front about your lack of belief in the god they believe in threatens them. Kind of the same way they'd feel threatened if you announced openly that you're gay.
I'm convinced that any thinking person questions their beliefs from time to time, or at least comes to the brink of doing so. But I also remember, when I was a Christian, being very cognizant of the biblical adminitions against questioning my beliefs and losing faith.
Faith is a very interesting dynamic. Because there are no empirical proofs of the existence of god or of the efficacy of the bible (insert kuran, talmud, etc.), embracing a religious belief by definition requires a suspension of logic and reason. How else could a person internalize a fairy tale to the extent that they act as if it were absolute truth. That's why faith is referred to as a "leap".
I don't know about other people, but despite my 40+ years as a member in good standing of the essentially fundamentalist church of christ, I had never truly made that leap. It wasn't for lack of trying. I simply never once felt the presence of anyone or anything on the other end of my prayers. I never once felt that I was being guided through life by god or jesus.
After being exposed via a 13-week PBS series by Bill Moyers in 1986 to Joseph Campbell's "The Power of Myth", I finally had a framework for looking at my beliefs in a critical fashion. Over the next few months, while reading more of Campbell's writings, my sense of cognitive dissonance between what I publicly purported to believe and what I was actually coming to believe increase to the point that my stomach would physically tie itself in knots every time I went to church. Still, I hung in there for the next year or so, driven primarily by the need to fit in with my Christian family and friends, as well as the fact that I had yet to identify an alternative set of beliefs to replace the christianity I'd been raised in.
After a quick study of the other major world religions, I came to the realization that all of them required that same leap of faith, and I knew that eventually I'd reach the same point of cognitive dissonance that I had with Christianity were I to accept any of them.
My inner tension finally reached the point where I had to do something, even if it seemed radical and left me out on a limb with nothing to fall back on, or I was clearly going to go nuts. So I simply stopped going to church. My wife and children were, of course, appalled. But it was interesting that not one of my fellow church members, who claimed to love me so much, ever called or came by in an effort to bring me back into the fold.
The foregoing is a somewhat more circuitous route than I'd intended to follow to make my point, but I believe the reason even those stauch Christians didn't confront me was that they were threatened by me. Instead of providing the mutual reinforcement for keeping the faith that I'd played along with before, I now represented someone who had operated on the same basis they had, but who had "fallen from grace". And they really didn't want to hear my reasons because doing so would have brought into the light of day some very scary, read heretical, thoughts they'd grappled with in the dark of night in their beds.
Most of my family have kept their faith, as well as most of my christian friends, some of whom I still maintain contact with. But I make no secret of the agnosticism that I grew into over the years since I left religion behind. I'll gladly discuss my journey openly with them, but I won't bring the subject up out of simple courtesy and my interest in keeping peace with those I love. Based on my own experiences, I consider their beliefs among a lower order of available myths, but I won't try to dissuade them as long as they're happy with them.
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"I am an agnostic; I do not pretend to know what many ignorant men are sure of."
Clarence Darrow |