Belief or Knowledge?

It’s Sunday morning, and I’m not going to church. I haven’t been a regular attendee of any religious meet-up for over three years. Although, I wasn’t very regular when I did go. It’s not that I don’t think about going. I still do periodically. It’s also not that I don’t want to go. Well, I wouldn’t say that I have a particular desire to go either.

The deconstruction of my faith began with a seed of doubt planted in college by a fellow person of faith. They have no clue what they started, and they never will because it doesn’t matter, the soil was fertile, to use a biblical parlance. That was over ten years ago, and I’m still in the process of figuring out who, or what exactly, I believe in. It’s a difficult way to be. Not comfortable, not fun. There are mountains of questions with seemingly little to no answers. I’ve had to snuggle up to this feeling of doubt and uncertainty, and it’s slowly transforming into wonder and excitement.

So I don’t find myself as a person of faith. That prevents me from adopting a firm stance in either the theist nor atheist camp. I just can’t do it. I don’t have the certainty to decide that there is or isn’t some sentient force controlling, creating, modifying, or altering life and existence. I do however remain hopeful that clarity will come to myself, and preferably to everyone else as well. For a while now this has left me identifying as an agnostic. Specifically a weak agnostic (and that has nothing to do with my physical fitness, but neither would it be a faulty descriptor). What I didn’t realize is that I haven’t been properly “identifying” myself. So once again, I find that I am wrong about something that I had become pretty sure about.

What I’ve recently discovered about identity is this, and it seems to come down to etymology and parsing of terms: Agnosticism has nothing to do with belief. It is strictly used to describe the state of knowledge, or rather the lack thereof. Theism and atheism are the two primary terms directly related to the idea of belief. This goes back to the original Greek, term usage, yada yada yada.

So apparently I can’t be just an agnostic since that term says nothing about my belief. I’m left with what I’m told, by an atheist no less, is a binary choice. I either believe a god or gods exist, or I don’t! That’s it. A two-point spectrum. No middle ground. There is no term for the person who neither believes nor doesn’t.

So I could be an agnostic-atheist, or even an agnostic-theist. The term “apatheist” doesn’t work because I do care about whether a god exists or not. It is an important issue for me. “Non-theist” implies atheism, which I am not an atheist. “Ambivalence” is more of an attitude, the adjective rather than the noun. “Irreligious” seems too broad of a term for me. “Skeptic” also isn’t specific enough.

So what do I call myself? Does it matter? What do we do with these individuals who “just don’t know”?

Well, I’ll probably just continue calling myself agnostic as related to belief, unless I’m in the company of those who like to dissect words. That is until I discover, or maybe just invent, the term that adequately describes my state of belief.

So yeah, probably won’t be going to church next week either.