I have admired some of my hosts posts about her struggles with faith, mine are ancient, and not resolved in ways that I think would aid her. I moved far away from church and organized religion in my mid teens, after being an obnoxious brat of a choir boy earlier. For a while I worshiped the notions and methods of science and the less sound pseudo fellow travelers of academic economics and psychology. But then and continuing now, I frequently ran into the moments of awe, that the universe is marvelous and yet sensible. Much later, I found for both science and religion, that a certain about of suspended decisions about belief worked for me, that I could avoid a lot of ambiguity by having a large mental bin stamped “I don’t know, and I don’t trust what others are saying they know” . So someplace, and it happened before I knew there was a long history for it, I became an agnostic deist, a believer in a god but one that I do not and can not know. Sometimes this still leads to odd places, because natural history and evoluton tends to contradict ideas of good and evil and support relative morality. This also tends to put me in an oppositional position to most fundamentalist approaches, I am not a follower of the “BOOK”, not acceptable as Christian, Muslim or Jew. I do not think it is intrinsic, but having the big box of “I do not know, agnostic” also seems to make me cynical.
By hear say, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_deists I do appear to be in good company however.
One aspect, which I have occasionally tried to explain with limited success is the scale of the universe in both the small and large is so far beyond our human mental capacity, that an all encompassing power, to create it is also far beyond our capacity. This can take one to a cold place, less comforting, not at all optimistic state of mind because the agnostic side say’s unknown and mostly unknowable.
excentricbahhumbug (guest)
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