Can Someone be Simply "An Agnostic?"

[Rampant.A.I.]

atheism to refer to those who reject the existence of God/gods, and agnosticism to mean those individuals who abstain from assigning a truth value to the question of the divine, usually because they view it as unanswerable.

It's unanswerable by nature of the question.

If you claim the literally interpreted God of the bible exists as defined in the bible and by theologians, you contradict yourself.

But it is still possible such a god exists, either internal or external to the human psyche.

In fact, if you look closely at the best definitions of the supernatural, there is no functional distinction from things that are wholly imaginary, and yet it is claimed they still effect the material world.

Insofar as people act in accordance with supernatural beliefs: they do.

In our view, Jeremy Walker has an imaginary friend, who loves him and talks to him, and improves his life. To us, that belief is mistaken. He has trained himself the same way some revival sects to do cordon off areas of his mind, and listen for thoughts to "pop into his mind" and interpret which of those thoughts are God communicating.

To him, he has good reason to believe it is God. He uses a mythological framework to interpret and explain the experience, but no matter how mistaken his interpretation may be, he's still experiencing it.

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There's no delicate way of saying this, but if you have any experience dealing with the mentally ill, their experiences are real, to them.

Reality is little more than an interpretive shared consensus of observable information and internal experiences.

Have an imaginary friend and you're an eccentric; have a group of 100,000 people experiencing the same imaginary friend and you have a religion. They're experiencing the same brain states, the same chemical releases, and the same centers light up in their brain when they experience the divine.

If it is all in their heads, there is no contradiction between that type of shared delusion and a shared experience of the supernatural, and more importantly: there's no way to test it.

And shared delusions are incredibly powerful. They have a life of their own. The Huichol people of Mexico believe reality is a dream, and dreams are the true reality, and they take peyote to experience reality and wake themselves up from the dream world.

They have very coherent beliefs about the nature of reality passed down by shaman.

Are they deluded at some level? Sure. Are they experiencing something shared? I think so.

We are, however small, integral parts of the universe itself, forged in stars, and though our bodies die, those particles will go on to be reconstituted, sometimes into other life, like sparks of the Brahman.

We are the universe examining itself, and there has been so much time and thought and blood and so many tears spilt in our short existence, that even the superstitions of our early years are inescapable.

There is nothing particularly special or exemplary about any of us that will matter in 100 years, and yet our internal narrative tells us otherwise. History tells us otherwise.

If there is no supernatural realm save for that we have generated, and tell back to ourselves through story and metaphor and archetype, it is indistinguishable from a supernatural realm. The empirically accessible nature of it is null on both accounts.

You can either edify and costume it, give it names and faces, and parade it through town, or you can argue what that realm fundamentally is is ill defined, because we lack the vocabulary and theory to explain what is actually going on, and are too busy infighting over whose costumed anthropomorphic characterization is the best.

And up until very recently, the only vocabulary we has to describe attempts to framework these shared frameworks were called Gods. And then God. And now, Us.

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Religious people worship a great and powerful sky human. Humanists "worship" the sum of human experience since the first hominid picked up a heavy club, and made it clear to a lion he ought to fuck off. Atheists throw the whole thing in a bin for careful, planned dissection at a later date, because it has blinded so many people, and dismantle their particular brand of blinders from an outside perspective.

Agnostics sit in the bin, knowing for fuck-all there's some sort of greater meaning in there, but they lack the tools to dissect and reassemble a coherent truth from it, and the toolkit probably won't exist in their lifetime.

I don't know. I have no way to know, what my actual beliefs are about religion. I don't have the words to describe the concepts that seem to contradict each other, and don't, simultaneously.

I have been, and felt, as far back as I can remember, like an alien archeologist, trying to piece together some semblance of belief shared by the native culture coherent enough, or at least fake well enough to what those around me regarded as common sense that made any real sense when examined.

Anyway. You said your post ran long?