TheChez.net

by ssjrem

I’m planning a big blog about my history with regard to religion, Christianity, disbelief, and all that other good stuff. I’m going to try to make that blog a reasonable length, but it’s going end up being too long for its own good no matter how hard I try because I just always end up making things too long anyway. So, yeah, I’m going to talk about an interesting subject here. At least, I think it’s interesting, as it’s something I’ve researched and thought about a whole lot over the past seven or eight years.

When I was a teenager and I started down the road leading away from religion, I didn’t really know what to call myself. Was I atheist? Was I just doubting things? Did I still call myself a Christian? There are plenty of people out there in the world that call themselves Christians, yet I actually know far more about their religion than they do. And the amount of research I poured into all this is one of the main reasons I left Christianity in the first place.

Anyway, I didn’t quite know what to call myself. In all my anger and depression of my first half of high school, I directed a lot of this toward god and Christianity. I began cursing and defaming god in all my thoughts and words. However, in order to do something like, I still had to believe in him. I certainly wasn’t an atheist. I was still a Christian in a sense, but I just hated the main figure behind the whole religion.

The further I delved into the whole thing, the more I realized that Christianity and even the very existence of god made utterly no sense to me. Sometime during my sophomore year, I was prepared to call myself an athiest. I denied the very existence of god. I was very angry and wanted to all out purge religion from the world, “enlighten” all the believers, so to speak. But I realized I had no right to do things like that. It was a rather audacious thought.

By junior year, in my travels through the internet, I had come across a term with which I hadn’t previously been aware: Agnosticism. This resonated with me even more deeply than atheism. It just made so much more sense than anything before. Breaking the word down, -gnostic means knowledge. The prefix “a” means “without.” In essence, the word means “without knowledge.” Most frequently, the word is tied to matters of the metaphysical, questions of the cosmos and God and such things.

Many seem to treat agnosticism as if it’s a religion. When signing up for any sort of social networking thing online (Facebook, Myspace, OK Cupid) agnosticism will always be a choice for religion, even though it’s not. If anything, it’s actually a philosophical stance. It doesn’t really tell you anything about what the person believes. Therein lies a problem when it’s treated like a religion or some kind of declaration of belief. An agnostic could theoretically believe or not believe in god.

Atheism is a much stronger word. I suppose you could define in it one of two ways and there’s an important distinction. On one hand, you could define it as the denial of the existence of a god. On the other, you could say that it’s the lack of belief in a god. If you go by the first definition, then I am not atheist. If you go by the second, then, yes, I am in fact an atheist and so are many people who claim to be agnostics. Personally, I do like to use the second definition for the word. So, yes, I am an atheist.

But I’m still going to call myself an agnostic. If I wanted to be really nitpicky, my actual stance is agnostic atheism. I lack belief in a god or supreme being and I’m also unsure of whether such a being exists. I don’t outright deny the existence of such a thing. I rather strongly think that there isn’t a god, but I can’t rule it out. It can’t be proven one way or the other. At least, that’s how I feel about the issue.

So why still call myself an agnostic? Well, people are prejudiced and ignorant. Atheists are vilified like you would not believe. They are actually the most hated and least trusted minority in the United States. Yeah. I can’t believe it. There’s the ridiculous stigma attached to atheism that seems damn near impossible to shake. You say you’re an atheist and suddenly you’re looked down upon. Say you’re agnostic and the response is anywhere near as negative. It’s stupid. But so are humans much of the time.

Colloquially, the word agnosticism has evolved to fit a certain definition. It means uncertainty about the existence of god to most people. And I’m fine with that. I wish atheism didn’t carry with it this awful stigma and I could just say that I’m an atheist. But the stigma exists and most people don’t even understand atheism or agnosticism properly. Another thing, it pisses me off when people call agnostics cowards who just take the middle ground. If Christianity or any other religion is in fact true, then agnostics still are gambling with their very souls. Even though I don’t call myself an atheist, I still don’t believe in god, which means that I will go to hell if such a place actually does exist. Can’t really call me a coward if I’m still leaving my soul (if it exists, that is) hanging in the balance.

In conclusion, I had some time to kill and didn’t feel like doing any work or finishing any of the dozen or so blog drafts I have in the works, so I just decided to do this because for some reason it’s been on my mind lately. I’ve always thought of myself as a very poor debater and I really don’t think I argue well. Admittedly, I guess I wasn’t really arguing anything here. Whatever. I haven’t done a blog not related to movies or Dragonball Z since my Paramore review, which was nearly two months ago. I am working on that big religion blog and I have a lot of things in the works. It’s just a matter of not so much finding the time, but the will to do those. So, yeah, I guess that’s it. Until we meet again.