BackBe thankful if you are an agnostic
The best reason of all for agnosticism is the way it catalyses you to take responsibility for yourself
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In a class all Monday morning, I missed the news about the Sydney hostage crisis. Not a problem, though. I came home and fired up my email, only to find I had been flooded with messages from assorted yahoos, asking why I had not condemned the atrocity yet. Oh yes, they said, that’s because I must be “happy" about it, right?
This is how I learnt that this terrifying incident had happened (much the same with the Peshawar horror). And why in this way, why the email? Because it was a Muslim man who took those folks hostage in the Lindt café; because there are enough yahoos who begin frothing at the very mention of the word “Muslim"; and because they think anyone who isn’t as consumed by hatred as they are must necessarily love murder and terror and their practitioners, especially when they are Muslim.
One of those side effects of religion, of course. There is no religion I know of that doesn’t manage to lather some of its faithful into a constant sense of injustices suffered, a beleaguered victimhood. And that leads them to nurse a fevered hatred for other religions. And every time I run across one more of these I thank someone that I’m agnostic.
At a large conference I once attended to deliberate on religion, a fellow traveller on the agnosticism road took the microphone to wonder: There are people here to speak for nearly every religion. But who will speak for us agnostics?
Nobody paid any attention. Exactly as he might have guessed. But he knew and was glad for it: Agnostics speak for themselves. Always.
I’ve always liked this definition of an agnostic: “a person who holds that the ultimate cause (God) and the essential nature of things are unknown and unknowable." A person, as I see it, who doesn’t know whether God exists; but far more important, he doesn’t much care anyway.
Think a bit about that notion of not caring. Believing in God or not is one thing, but to not even care about it? Faced with a dilemma as profound as the existence of God, why is an agnostic content to sit idly on the fence?
Well, to start with, this agnostic doesn’t buy the profundity bit. But this agnostic also thinks that when you sit on the fence in such matters, you learn to take charge of how your life progresses. Not find others to blame, or others to hate. Being agnostic means you hear whispers in your ear, all the time, that you must and will assume responsibility for your life. This link to responsibility is, I believe, its greatest strength; it’s why agnosticism makes so much sense to me. This is, after all, how I want to live my life.
In my mind, I contrast this with a certain mindset religions encourage in too many of their faithful. I mean things said like, “It’s God’s will," and “Don’t you know? He works in inscrutable ways." After all, if an all-powerful God really planned for so many humans to live in poverty, well, we puny mortals can hardly fight that, can we? So we tell ourselves there will always be poor people—for God designed the world that way. Sure, let’s have schemes now and then to alleviate poverty. But we need be no more than half-hearted about them, because actually God doesn’t really want them to work.
All these are excuses and rationalizations, I believe, designed so we can close our eyes to our own indifference to others’ sufferings. In finding those excuses, we persuade ourselves that we cannot—maybe even should not—do much about things we actually can address.
Beyond indifference, there’s also moral superiority, narrow-minded bigotry, and overflowing hatred, those feelings that only seem to spread with every horrible crime or catastrophe. My experience with the email yahoos is a trivial example. The idea of setting out to convert people, whether because they must see the light or return home or something else, is another.
Every massacre in the name of religion is a far more serious example—from the Crusades to the Irish Troubles, to our many Indian moments of blood-soaked madness. What’s more, too many people believe that any given disaster is some kind of “payback" for something else. This is why one bigot said the 1999 Odisha cyclone and the 2001 Gujarat earthquake were “God’s punishment" to those states for “attacks on Christians". This is why another bigot asked if the 2004 tsunami was “a caveat from Up There about the atrocities being visited on the Kanchi Acharya [and] adharma gaining ground" (the irony is that the second bigot condemned the first).
Cue Russell again, with his mention of ethical values and twisted efforts to find excuses for misery.
Truly: If religion has wrought good, it has also both excused and generated vast cesspools of sheer human misery, throughout history. Who is responsible for this? The faithful will say, “Oh yes, it’s those other gods!" Or, “It’s those other people following those other gods!" But will you ever catch them saying, “It’s me and my outlook on life, even if only for being blind to the misery"? Not a chance.
I don’t want to suggest that every well-meaning follower of some faith thinks along these lines. Instead, this is about an overall attitude—an acceptance, maybe, where there should be outrage. Then again, outrage springs from personal involvement. Religion instead detaches, and offers a scapegoat. The only time we do feel outraged is when we are easily convinced into seeing other gods and their followers as the reasons for our problems. We lash out at them in some way and that makes us feel we’re off the hook.
So not only do we not need to feel outraged by some egregious happening, we don’t even need to feel any sense of responsibility. Things that happen, especially misfortune, are preordained and we have no control over them. God decides everything, so we need not.
For me, this enormous renunciation of responsibility explains much that is wrong around us. Our institutions crumble, criminals win elections, cities get more polluted, violence becomes routine, hate is acceptable.... In the face of all this, we feel helpless. But then again, maybe God has willed it all anyway.
All of which is why I like to think agnosticism addresses the helplessness in the most direct way. It tells you to leave God alone, to give up wasting time musing about his existence or otherwise. When you don’t care about that dilemma any more, you are left with no choice but to buckle down to your problems, and others that concern you, yourself. That turns out to be the only way they ever get solved.
To me, the best reason of all for agnosticism is the way it catalyses you to take responsibility for yourself.
That last, exactly what abusive email yahoos don’t do.
Once a computer scientist, Dilip D’Souza writes the column A Matter of Numbers for Mint.
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