In a comment on the Salty VIcar blog, "Erin" says:
I'm an ex-Catholic whose strong views on sexuality and its relationship to divinity eventually led me to apostasy. I'm happier there, but still very much interested in the debate. * * * I am an agnostic and a humanist, and while quite the moral absolutist by nature ... I'm more of a pragmatist by training.
That struck a chord with me; I posted the following in response to it (lightly edited here).
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Erin -- it sounds to me like you might not really be as much an agnostic as you think. It's possible you might simply not be sure what you can believe in, that's intellectually defensible. After all, there certainly are ample reasons to doubt what Christians are traditionally taught about their religion and about their Scriptures.
But maybe I'm just reading my own experience into your comment. As I explain more elsewhere, I fell away from the Catholic Church as a teen-ager. When I was growing up, I was taught a lot of dogma that I supposedly had to believe in order to be a Christian. I couldn't reconcile much of that dogma with my scientific (and later legal) training. As a result, I spent a long time thinking I was an agnostic.
But I still felt there likely was indeed Something out there. I wished I could know what it was. Eventually, and with a lot of help from others (notably my wife and my rector), I managed to figure out that there were indeed intellectually defensible reasons to believe:
- in a God who created everything;
- in a God who seems to have a plan in which we're privileged to participate;
- in a God who could legitimately be metaphorized, in human terms as a loving father.
I also concluded that, even if Jesus wasn't God incarnate, he could still fairly be called a son of God at least in roughly the same sense that James and John the sons of Zebedee were sons of thunder and Israelites were sons of Abraham.
And even though the Great Commandment and Summary of the Law were not original to Jesus, I found myself captivated by his emphasis of those principles -- which seem to me to touch on something as fundamental and important in the universe as gravity -- and by his trust in and loyalty to God, even unto death.
I don't claim to have all the answers or even the right answers. But the answers that I've worked my way around to, seem to fit the available evidence as near as I can tell.
As a result, I'm far more able now to put my trust in God than I ever was as a young man. Of course, some of that may be just the mellowing effects of maturity. In any case, I'm much the happier for it.
And I do claim that in trying to love God and our neighbor, it's important for us to keep asking questions, talking to one another, and remaining mindful that the other person just might have insights that we don't. If history proves anything, it's that (i) none of us knows everything, and (ii) in light of on-going discoveries -- or, if you will, on-going revelations -- anything we think we understand could later turn out to be wrong.
I've been very happy in the Episcopal Church, because by and large the mainstream of the church is quite accommodating of views like mine. I consider myself lucky to have married in. You ought to check it out.
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