my inactive sister who is very much a jw at heart recently discovered (i told her) that i was a budding agnostic. she was quite intrigued and wondered why. here's what i said...
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Coming to an agnostic viewpoint has been a long journey. It started with my questioning the JW religion. An outgrowth of that was to view with outright suspicion things in the bible that have always troubled me. I stopped just accepting (having faith?) that everything was the way it was actually presented or the way I learned it. I became an independent thinker, I guess you could say.
There was no pivotal moment when I came to adopt my current view... more a dawning realization. Understand, I have yet to see or read or hear it exactly expressed what label most accurately defines what I am. I wouldn't say that I'm a "hard-core" agnostic, where my view could be said to be indelibly fixed. It's just that I have begun to lean on what I am able to observe, whether by reading and study, watching certain documentaries, a variety of things.
For example, did I write you about the day I made my pilgrimage to the Murrah Building (the bldg. that was blown up in OKC)?
In history class in our textbook there was a sidebar that told the true life experience of a slave (Olaudah Equiano) that threw himself off the slave ship, preferring to drown rather than be separated from his family and home.
I was in a book store and came across this paperback, "A Boy Called It", and sat there and read a good part of it, a true story of a boy horribly abused for years by his mother, made to do all sorts of ugly things.
I could go into long detail on each of these occurrences, but suffice it to say that these prompted periods of deep reflection as they touched on still other events, whether my own or those I read about or knew about.
In the past, these and many other things I could mention prompted me to say what others STILL say in explanation: "We don't know what god has in mind" or "god will make it right" or something equally exculpatory. Instead of approaching the tragedies (floods, earthquakes, those of human invention) from the standpoint that there IS a god, making it a foregone conclusion, I began to go with the assumption that there wasn't one.
Wouldn't THAT explain "god's" silence in all of this human suffering, especially in light of the fact that god is supposedly so loving and so concerned for humans? Why such a lengthy record of inattention and seeming indifference? There being no god seemed to satisfy the conundrum. Around the xmas holiday last year, I exchanged some of these ideas with someone who said that, "perhaps god is dead." Even though I'd heard the phrase many times, in that particular setting it hit me with an odd force. It struck me as quite plausible in light of my growing religious identity, more than just a quip from the hippy era.
I remember the final scene from "The Bodyguard." There's a benediction at the beginning of a conference, a prayer for god's direction and protection. The bodyguard is standing just out of sight, alert, head up and eyes open, scanning the crowd--ready to move in an instant if any foolishness breaks out. If something does go down, left to god, you'd be reading about the calamity in tomorrow's newspaper like we always do. Left to the bodyguard, you wouldn't be hearing about it at all because he was there to squelch the nonsense, whatever it might be. The bodyguard was on the job. Where was god?
That scene, played out in about ten seconds or less, was a major pillar leading to my current philosophy--that of giving much more weight and consideration to the human equation when considering both the good and the bad that humanity has accomplished.
When the bomb went off, killing even little babies;
when Olaudah Equiano whose miserable existence as a slave, forever separated by an ocean from his family, represents the miserable existence of millions of lives of all ethnicities, races and cultures throughout history;
when the boy called "It" repeatedly cried to heaven for help from god;
while humans are working so hard in areas of science, medicine, government, all of the humanities,
how could it be that he so aware, so loving and concerned about human affairs and yet so silent and seemingly oblivious to all that human suffering and equally uninvolved in human achievement?
If I have to base my belief in god on something other than faith (I must) but look instead at the historical record along with current events, the tangible record does not speak very forcefully for a living, loving, omnipotent being. imo.