I'm a radical agnostic, so what's that?

So an agnostic is someone who is open to the possibility of Goddess/God with out imposing their beliefs - as theist or an atheist. Gnostics seek the experience/knowledge (the Greek word for it is "gnosis") of God/Goddess. Agnostics are without knowledge either way. Most people use it as a way of copping out on making a decision, on committing. Like gays used to say about bisexuals, they are just chicken about committing to being gay or lesbian. But like bisexuals agnostic is probably the natural state of most people. They don't let the presence or absence of God/Goddess, or the other big serious questions of life to interfere with their living.

A radical in politics, religion and philosophy can be said to be someone who puts their life on the line for their beliefs or said differently devotes their life to them - goes to the extreme to do so. A radical is a maths term for being out of the main flow of results, the mainstream, a spin out. It is a sudden turn. They just go too far, are too different. So radical agnostic could be said to be someone who devotes their life to ignorance, and could be said they put their lives on the line for the openness for knowing and does both at once. This is my interpretation. I first heard the term from Stephen Bachelor who wrote a book call "Buddhism without beliefs". I have no idea if my definition fits his I just like the ideas it threw in my way.

Atheists are often as close-minded as theists when it comes to questions of Goddess/God as Richard Dawkins demonstrates. When they are so ardent about the dangers of religion and its practices and beliefs they forget what atheist secular scientific following politics has done to the world in the two hundred odd years it has been predominant as an organising principle for politics and knowledge. They happily lump in the good and bad of religion, its idealizations, its thoughtfulness and creativity and positive results with its evil, its politics and its just plain sadness whilst not doing the same with the secular atheism and its sects - like the wars, massacres, environmental vandalism etc of capitalism, communism, fascism, and other political misuses of humanist, secular and scientific idealism and philosophy.

As a wise man once said to me "If there is evil it is certainty of knowing."

Doubt is my faith as the poem below puts forward. So it is that I devote myself to it. Unprovable truths are not worth my energy, but poetry, and a poetic life is. Whether there is a Goddess/God is less important to me than understanding how and why humans do evil. Dawkins is strange, as the arch-evolutionist, why doesn't he focus on the function religious certainty has in our humanity because the evidence is that it is an important part of human life since it appears everywhere humans are. Atheists are as condescending and exclusive-ist as any religious group in believing that believers in God/Goddess are delusional and dangerous. Applying the warrior paradigm is the issue not the ideas. My feeling it that it ain't the ideas you hold that the issue it is how hold them, what function the have in your mind, emotions and culture.

As a radical agnostic, I don't know. I don't want anyone else to take up this choice because it is hard and uncomfortable to say you don't know. To be open to learning, to openly be insecure and uncertainty to have no basis for argument, or at least to know that nothing you say is finally true, and that you are too small to know if it is. It is hard to argue when you can see the other persons point of view and its validity. Although I must say that you learn quickly and can if you refine yourself and your thinking you can also get into other people's heads and have real conversations sharing on the personal level more deeply and clearly. You must always acknowledge that your ideas and thoughts and feelings are subjective, personal opinion. This is where passion can still live. It also means not attacking the person but rather addressing the idea, the feeling, the action. You are continually awed by the beauty of the world in its complexity. I seek to understand what can understand about why people do it.