The people I’ve encountered who say they’re agnostic have told me that they’ve grown up going to church because their parents made them, hated it and ended up not going as soon as they were old enough for their parents not to force them to go anymore. So my first thought is that this agnostic view must be some belief that God isn’t real. I then heard another person who claimed they were agnostic say they couldn’t disprove that God isn’t real.So then I thought, “Ah, ok….maybe they acknowledge that God exists, but choose to reject Him for whatever reason.” You know, that old dilemma…”If God exists, why does He allow so much suffering?” But then I heard that same agnostic later say, “There’s no proof that God does exist.”
Tired of trying to figure out what exactly agnostic means, I decided to finally look it up on the internet and here’s what I came up with:
An agnostic thinks it impossible to know the truth in matters such as God and the future life with which Christianity and other religions are concerned… An agnostic doesn’t believe in God but is not considered to be an atheist… Agnostics base their beliefs on evidence.
Is this correct? Would an agnostic please let me know? So basically agnostics figure that they’ll never know for sure, so they can’t take a stand on whether God exists or not. My question is, “What if God does really exist? If God does exist, what will happen to you for not accepting Him?”I mean, to a true agnostic, that’s not a dumb question…because they don’t reject God’s existence because then they would be atheist.I bet an agnostic would probably answer like this to my question:-”What if God doesn’t exist? Then I’ve wasted my life believing in Him”-”If God exists, He wouldn’t send me to hell.”- “I didn’t reject God and I was a morally good person, so He shouldn’t send me to hell.”To me it kinda seems that they want the best of both worlds…to live a life without the responsibility of serving God and the benefit of having a secure spot in heaven just in case God does exist.I don’t get it…I just don’t see the reasoning behind this.
At least an atheist truly ( or at least I think so) doesn’t believe that God is real… To me it’s like a smoker saying, “smoking might give me cancer or lung disease” but just in case it doesn’t, I’m going to smoke anyway…In my mind agnostics are atheists but don’t want to admit that…So someone tell me…why be agnostic? Are they afraid of being atheists? Do they believe in God, but just don’t want to follow Him?
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1 comments:
Well you’re definitely on to something with your descriptions of what agnosticism is. "Agnostic" is a very broad-ranging philosophical term and can refer to many different beliefs. Some believe that it is impossible to know whether there is a God by reason of our natural inability to verify any experience with anything but another subjective experience; others believe in the existence of God but do not know if any existence on a personal level; some share beliefs with atheists but can't rule out the possibility of God existing absolutely... and there are more! You would have to pry the individual to learn what form or level of agnosticism they have. For instance, I consider myself agnostic. I believe that it is possible that one or more Gods exist, but the "truth" as to whether or not a particluar God is the true God is unknown.
As far as your argument along the lines of "what if you're wrong?" I'll offer you this view. Over the span of the entire existence of humans on earth, there have been millions of Gods and millions of religions. Some have come and gone, and some have emerged and flourished. Some have been wiped out by others. What if any one of these millions of Gods is THE true God and all the others are false? Take for instance, the case of an average Christian (this might even be you!). Think about all of the Gods (out of the millions of possible Gods) that you believe do NOT exist. You then know what it’s like not to believe in a particular faith because you’re not a muslim, you’re not a hindu, you’re not a sikh. Why aren’t you a hindu? Because you were brought up in a place where Christian values were held. If you were brought up in India, you might be hindu. If you were brought up in Denmark in the time of the Vikings you’d believe in Thor. If you were brought up in ancient Egypt you’d believe in Horus. So if you were to ask me, “what if you’re wrong and the Christian God is really the true God?” To that I would answer, “what if you’re wrong? What if you’re wrong about Thor? What if you’re wrong about Horus? What if you’re wrong about Allah?” You believe that all of those other Gods do not exist and that your particular God does. To me, it seems as though you believe that just as many religions are false as the average atheist would, minus one. In this sense, I would think that you have more in common with an average atheist than with an average agnostic who believes it is possible for any God to exist.
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