The Softer Path: Just Say You Don’t Know

I lived much of my life embracing a mixture of atheism and agnosticism.  I allowed myself brief intervals of vague faith in a non-specific something, but I was not willing to approach or draw near to the God of my childhood.  The God of my childhood scared me to death!

Though I tried for many years, I found it very difficult to convince myself that I was an atheist.  Personally, I discovered atheism to be the most difficult theological position to sustain, or defend.  If I wanted to say I was an atheist, I also had to claim I believed human beings were nothing more than highly developed animals.  I already believed the only significant fact of life for animals was survival, and my life experience had always been full of issues and feelings that went far beyond mere survival.  The need to have rights and certain individual freedoms is characteristic of human beings alone.  If this were not so, the whales would have staged their own campaign to “save the whales.”  Because of these obvious contradictions, I found athiesm to be intellectually dishonest.  This simple bit of logic convinced me the term “agnostic” was better suited to describe my attitude about God.  It was always easier to just say: “I don’t know.”

The problem with “not knowing” is that it leaves you in limbo-land with nothing to hang on  but yourself.  You wind up having to make up your own rules about life and the world as you stumble through it.  You start developing eternal opinions based solely on your own personal experience and preference – which always leads to catastrophic error without corrective  revelation.

The track record of humanity is to create a God that will match human desires and specifications – rather than discover who God really is.