Agnostic Spoken Here

Agnostic is spoken here.

It is not the only language. I welcome differing points of view. But after something like a quarter century search for meaning and life and purpose of being, I have come to the conclusion that nobody really knows when it comes to the concept of “God” – who or what that three letter word really represents or means.

As you may have noticed I did a visual change on the blog cover overhead.

The dragon is not demonic, merely my Chinese Zodiac sign in green, a life color.  My image concession to the growing global culture of the human race.

I have also included a phrase I have used for many years.

“Just because man invented God does not mean that God does not exist.”

Hardly McShea’s Law or Logic formula on Agnosticism but a start.

I do not think that Agnosticism is half-assed Atheism because once an Atheist declares “there is not God”, he or she is not proclaiming it in a vacuum but in a functioning multi-dimensional world that needs some explaining sometime, somewhere from a scientific point of view at least.

And to explain God in terms of centuries old myth and superstitions is moot in the Twenty-first century of a common global era of the human race.

Also, I do not like a lot of the Atheists out there in the public square who seem so loud and vulgar in their defense of something that is both of a quasi-religious and secular nature.

Most Atheists I perceive to be first and foremost anti-religion perhaps due to bad past religious life experiences. The issue of God or Creator gets caught up many times entangled in that personal experience thing.

Atheism per se has gotten a bad rap through the centuries because it has always been a political term to quash any political dissent within the ruling theocracies which I think have been a majority throughout human history, both helping and hurting human history along the road to evolution of the species to bigger and better things.

That an extension of the tribe or clan has been the city state and the official party line, the official religion and or god has always been the local glue that holds the whole mess together at any given time locally along the human race timeline. 

That God for a lack of a better word is a metaphor, real at least to me, matching reality to a point and not unlike that of my childhood imaginary friend.

I think that when people say they believe in God, they are really saying that they conform to the local standards and enjoy the myth coming off of stained glass or the printed page and not necessarily in relation to total reality.

That looking at Dawkins Atheist Forum dissolve into chaos and dogmatic warfare says to me that Atheism is too on a certain level just another religion full of useless dogma.

As I have stated here on more than one occasion, I am Areligionist first, without religion and or dogma, before I am second Agnostic, with doubt about all popular religious cultural myths. I simply do not know.

That if anything, I am a closeted Quaker, not an official member of that party, but believe in the specialness of my own personal being and or personal God within aka the divine spark within.

Seeing the political scape descend into madness is seeing too much money and too much religion in politics these days.

That must change. Theologies do not work in the face of technology. Reality and myth conflict and reality is probable in most cases as opposed to any myth.

I remain a Cultural Christian because I believe in the basic teachings of Jesus. I do not however believe in his so-called divinity. 

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Counter Reformation Failed – Proof - Study - USCCB

Just as a twat like Stephen Hawking is battling Dawkins and Hitchens for legal regal  title to Atheist Pope over the new global Atheist religion, the dumb f**** over at comedy central (USCCB) come out with a  new report:

Study: Homosexuality, celibacy didn't cause abuse

WASHINGTON – Researchers commissioned by the nation's Roman Catholic bishops to analyze the pattern of clergy sex abuse have concluded that homosexuality, celibacy and an all-male priesthood did not cause the scandal.

The study by the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York instead said that the problem was largely the result of poor seminary training and insufficient emotional support for men ordained in the 1940s and 1950s, who were not able to withstand the social upheaval they confronted as pastors in the 1960s. Crime and other deviant behavior increased overall in the United States during this period, when the rate of abuse by priests was climbing.

"The rise in abuse cases in the 1960s and 1970s was influenced by social factors in society generally," the report's authors said. "Factors that were invariant during the time period addressed, such as celibacy, were not responsible for the increase or decline in abuse cases over this time."

Victims' groups dismissed the report as an attempt to focus blame for the scandal on priests, instead of on bishops who allowed offenders to stay in ministry without warning parents or police. "They want us to fixate on abusive priests, not callous bishops," the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests said in a statement.

In other words, the Council of Trent, the Counter Reformation, and the 613 odd pages of the Tridentine Catechism, the training manual for all RC priests, fell apart and proved a failure in the face of “Modernity”, an instrument of democracy, humanism and of course Satan.

The Devil and or Modernity made them do it – the sexual abuse thing.

If the modern world continues, the Vatican hierarchy, the spiritual sons of Borgia, cannot save us all from Hell.

Or the Bullshit of the Council of Trent just ran out of official steam in the mission statement of whatever it is these days - real estate, banking money laundering, anti-human sexuality (birth control), anti-heterosexuality (as in the case of Father Cutie), anti-homosexuality that the RC church thingy has in reality become today.

What the hell ever happened to Jesus? 

Jesus H Christ! ( damn these a-holes make me angry in the name of ... )

Whatever.

Of course this BS study is all backtracking. Trying recently to blame the gays in the priesthood for the failure in the seventeenth century mission statement does have a potential backlash. If ninety percent of your males only clergy walk, the corporation is a shell and technically out of business. (Amen) (Hallelujah)

(Can’t let that happen yet - not until the last parish property in North America has been sold, assets desposited offshore and hopefully forgotten and not prosecuted - cross your fingers.)

Have a nice day.


What is a Devout Skeptic vs. Cultural Christian ?

I ran in to a comment via e-mail that mentioned something in terms of not being PC for a Cultural Christian or a Devout Sceptic.

Devout Skeptic? What’s that?


Never heard that one before. And believe it or not, Wikipedia does not have a small article of explanation for the phrase. Rather odd.


Needed to do some Internet research.


I did run into the British spelling of skeptic as sceptic.


Apparently there was a Brit radio show for many years by that name which is a possible answer to the question of what is a devout skeptic?


Bel Mooney

She was a regular presenter on BBC Radio 4 from 1982 until 2008, notably as presenter of Devout Sceptics, a programme devoted to public figures' private beliefs, not necessarily agnostic or atheistic, as the name might suggest.

A quote from Theo Hobson, a British “post-Anglican” theologian:

Confessing Evangelical

…this: a certain dishonesty and laziness of mind, and a certain pretentiousness. The Devout Sceptic wants to lay claim to the glamorous depths of religious tradition, without the embarrassment of actually identifying with it. Do not confuse me with a common atheist (he says), like that brash chap Dawkins, who is blatantly ignorant of the controlling passion of Western culture. Consider me to have the integrity and depth of a believer, yet also the searching mind and defiant heart of a Romantic.

And going back to Mel Mooney:

Devout Sceptics

… Ever since, at the age of sixteen, I rejected the idea of God - believing that no God of Love could preside over a world so apparently lacking in that commodity - the longing for him/her/it has been like a guilty secret inside me, with no curtained confessional in which to whisper. When a bereavement left me bleak and bitter, I skulked around lighting candles for comfort yet hurling insults at a God I steadfastly denied….

Devout Sceptics are seekers who won’t trust the maps they have been given, but know there is a destination towards which to stumble. Even if it proves to be the place they began at, and (to invoke T.S. Eliot) they know it for the first time.

It is not atheism, not quite agnostic and a phrase that I think in some ways has an affinity with the term cultural Christianity.

So in conclusion, a Devout Sceptic is, in my opinion, is one in a personal comfort and at a certain distance amid the sea of many religious beliefs and practices.

tolerance as a reason in this and every season

People and individuals keep on searching for meaning to life and circumstance in this cold, materialistic, godless, secular global culture.

Some people are writing columns to say that the movie Avatar is a vehicle to sell nature and pantheism. Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar and not a penis. Sometimes a computer enhanced cartoon or Hollywood fantasy is just a computer enhanced cartoon or just a Hollywood fantasy.

This 24/7/365 knit picking over everything that does not conform to the traditional exceptional American concept of God is not a call to arms to preserve the traditional religionist culture. It is more a shouting in a warehouse, taking inventory, of obsolete aspects of the old Christian belief system before they are carted off onto the trash heap of history.

In my own personal search for a new meaning of the concept of God, I end this year listening to some Christmas Carols like the Brit atheist dilettante Richard Dawkins.

I am more convinced than ever that the current phase of belief in non-belief is wall paper glue filling in the voids of a yet to be printed or determined pastel belief pattern on that wallpaper that will be the norm for decades or centuries to come. Old paper comes down. New paper goes up. The practical and the mundane non-belief is a stop gap glue of many for the moment.

Many years ago as a native tourist investigating every nook and cranny of Independence National Historical Park, I came upon a gem of a colonial building. Back then the only entrance way was down an alley way and into a courtyard. The courtyard with gray paving stones and surrounding brick buildings and simple paned glass windows reminded me of something very plain but European. The RC church of St. Joseph’s was behind a very plain entrance way. Thus I found out that in History, this very pagan Jesuit church was allowed in Quaker Tolerant Pennsylvania in colonial times and still stands in present day downtown Philadelphia. Back then it was probably the only RC church for a hundred miles. It is also a gem inside architecturally in a very subtle kind of Baroque mixed with colonial style interior design.

This story leads me to the Quakers or Society of Friends, or I should say leads me back to Quakers because no matter what your beliefs or ethnic origins, if you grow up in Philly the subtle imprint of a Quaker sub-cultural essence lives on to this day.

This is not an endorsement of the Friends but in reading again in full detail their habits and beliefs I seem to be drawn back to the concept of simplistic beliefs in my personal search for God.

Indeed, the persistent agitator of George Fox against the established COE types is what no doubt got Charles II to settle his debts to the Quaker William Penn’s father’s estate with a land grant to his son a whole ocean away. Best to ship the pesky little religious varmints off to the New World than build more prisons. The Brits had yet to find and settle Australia.

One has to wonder in the recognizable shape of the Quakers that evolved in England, that someone like George Fox was not unaware of the various simplistic aspects of Islam. Perhaps there was a hidden mosque down some London alleyway in days of yore for a native tourist to discover and wonder at. Many books back then about Islam and the Gnostic thing but no hard manuscript evidence, only rumors, on the latter at that time.

I perceive some possible similarities between the two belief systems.

Quakers - the Religious Society of Friends

Among key Quaker beliefs are:

• God is love

• the light of God is in every single person

• a person who lets their life be guided by that light will achieve a full relationship with God

• everyone can have a direct, personal relationship with God without involving a priest or minister

• redemption and the Kingdom of Heaven are to be experienced now, in this world

It is in the inner light thing, this almost Gnostic thing that is a hallmark of Quaker belief.

The Quakers are also not very evangelical, preaching and recruiting to their belief system like some screaming Christian Constantine army press-gang thing.

The inner light of the creative force within endures. You must come to it. It does not necessarily come to you. Indeed, many people raised as a Quaker are not shining examples of this belief system like Richard Nixon as one example. But who is to judge really?

Putting beliefs aside I have to say that for a quiet bunch of unnoticed people in the woodwork so to speak they have founded and maintain many schools, universities – as well as maintain the ground work for doing what some would label as Christian but they themselves do not cling to any faith describing labels or agenda.

The most powerful thing I saw in my youth was a single force, behind the scenes in the widespread opposition to the Vietnam War, in the American Service Friends Committee and its lobbying efforts. At the height of the anger and discord in America around 1972, I remember how the city wanted to widen the road in front of a bunch of nineteenth century brick buildings. The buildings had to come down to make way for the widened street. One of the buildings I believe housed the local AFSC. When vacated I remember a home made sign of about a foot square made of shirt box cardboard and embellished with three simple words in laundry marker or dark crayon – it was tacked over the door of one of these abandoned buildings.

Those words were “Rendered unto Caesar”. Powerful words to make a statement about the then current injustice and unfairness of it all. Those words have lasted in my memory to this day and remind me of the power of simple actions to move governments from the wrong column of history and in to the correct wave energy of human history.

Enough of Philly tales. As this year ends I have two religious belief systems in mind that the world of Christianity, perhaps a dying and or going through a dramatic metamorphosis belief system, might consider in the future shaping of anything to be labelled Christian or Christ-like.

I am mindful of the Quakers and their beliefs and also of the dissident St. Mary’s in Exile Congregation in Brisbane Australia – two places I think I could visit in a service or meeting and where my eccentric at present and eclectic agnostic search for a new meaning or definition of God would be tolerated.

Have a happy and safe new year.