Militant Agnostic

Although I have a whole lot of plans for this particular column, I find that starting it is the hardest part. Funny, huh?

So I figured I’d just start at the beginning. This is the beginning for me, how I came to be where I am. These are my two stories about this: the story of how I became an agnostic, and the story of how I became militant about it.

How I Became An Agnostic

I was raised in a somewhat mixed household. On the one hand, there was my mother’s Catholicism. On the other, my father’s silence.

When I was a kid, I went to a state school, but my mother saw to it that I and my brother went to church each Sunday, and attended Sunday School as well. I don’t recall feeling very strongly about it one way or the other. It was just another of the incomprehensible tasks adults were wont to set children.

When I started high school, I went to a Catholic high school run by the fine, upstanding men of the Christian Brothers (notably the fine, upstanding hypocrite who sexually molested one of my classmates – although in fairness, I only learned about this years later). Somewhere during my first year of high school, I became a practicing Catholic for a while. And faith had its rewards, most notably that I finally and for good conquered my fear of the dark (thanks largely to St Paul – Romans 8:31).

But somewhere along the line, my faith – never that strong – just withered away. I’d love to be able to say that it was the first time I heard XTC’s “Dear God” that broke my faith, but it simply wasn’t so. There was no great moment of shattering, just one day I realised it was gone. And that I didn’t miss it.

I began my second year of high school a confirmed atheist, but the Catholic Church had more to teach me yet.

Our religious studies class was taught by a doddering old brother who believed, among other things, that the religion of the Jews was called Jewism. But he was also the man who first told me of the existence of agnosticism, and I took to it like a baby taking its first breath.

Here was a solution to the problem of belief: I could simply rule the question unanswerable.

As the years went by, and I moved on from high school to university, that too proved unsatisfactory. It was a cop-out. Despite the frequent claims of the religious, it’s perfectly possible to have a moral and ethical code in the absence of faith. And the demands of my particular code included an aversion to all cop-outs. And so I began my quest to try to figure out what the hell I did believe.

That was half my lifetime ago, and I am still very little closer to answers than I was then.

On the other hand, I understand the questions a whole lot better now.

How I Became A Militant Agnostic:

I’m used to occupying a middle ground, mostly because in addition to being an agnostic, I’m also a card-carrying bisexual. And it was in being bi, and out, and (somewhat) activist about it, that I first learned just how daft the average extreme position is.

Because to be bisexual is, in many ways, to have the worst of both worlds. The heterosexuals lump you in with the rest of the queers to be discriminated against. And the homosexuals accuse you of being a traitor, and passing for straight – and then they discriminate against you too. (Yes, your experience may have been different. This was mine.)

Being an agnostic is very similar in that regard.

I’ve been used to being discriminated against by people of faith – the doddering old brother who first told me of agnosticism immediately followed it up with the party line that agnostics were just silly people who hadn’t made up their minds yet.

But it’s only been recently that I’ve started to hear that same self-serving narrow-minded mischaracterisation coming from the atheist camp as well.

(You get a similar thing about being bisexual from the two opposing camps at each end of the spectrum too.)

(See what I mean about the similarities?)

And I’ve had enough of it.

I’m here to state and defend my position.

I’m here to point out the logical flaws of both extremist camps, and to try to avoid engaging in the ad hominem attacks that both camps are so very fond of.

And today, for a start, I’m here to tell the religious and the atheist alike that they share a delusion.

The delusion is that I, and my fellow agnostics, are sitting on the fence.

There is no fence. None.

And the camps that envision themselves as being located on either side of the fence have a lot more in common with each other than either does with me.

See you next Wednesday.