My Beliefs
Very Outdated and Needing an Update.
~S 7/20/05

I grew up as a Reform Jew but never really took that belief system very seriously. It is really a smorgasbord of religious belief as one is free to pick and choose what laws to follow and which stories to believe. The impression that I got from Reform Judaism can best be summed up by the following anecdote:

Confused about his beliefs, little Johnny went to his Rabbi for some wisdom.
"Rabbi," Johnny asked "what am I supposed to believe about Moses and the Ten Commandments? Did God really appear to Moses in the form of a burning bush? Did he really carve the tablets himself and give them to Moses to bring to the Jews?"
"Ah, my little Johnny," the Rabbi replied. "If believing that these things really happened makes you feel better as a Jew, believe them. If they cause you any discomfort, however, they are not required. Just be good."
And with that the conversation was over.

While definitely a caricature of a conversation that never happened, it sums up my interpretation of Reform Jewish beliefs.

I never really made a conscious effort to move away from Judaism, it just sort of happened. For the longest time, I did not think about god. I was too wrapped up in the things of life to worry about anything larger than my immediate surroundings and the people and things that affected me. I drank and used drugs and did everything that I could to make me feel good. I was a mess.

One night I was sitting in my living room drinking my second beer of the evening and watching TV when I was almost knocked to the floor by a piece of knowledge that came to my mind. I can not say what it was that put that knowledge there, but one second it wasn't and the next second it was. It was, for lack of better words, a revelation.

What was this knowledge? Quite simply - "I had been living wrong. Alcohol and drugs would lead me nowhere. There was something more that is out there that I could not explain." That night was the last night that I drank alcohol or used drugs. That was three and a half years ago.

Since that night I have quested for Truth. My first stop was the Bible. I wasn't sure what I would find, but I read and read and read. I prayed for guidance every night. I prayed in thanks. I prayed for further revelation. Nothing ever came. I tried for months thinking that it was a matter of persistence. Nothing ever came. I even kept a journal for an entire year to track my progress in spirituality. Eventually I started to feel silly and I stopped praying.

When I looked closer at the Bible, I realized that it was wanting in many areas. I found things that I knew were simply not true. I found others that did not make sense when viewed against the world around me. I found others still that did not make sense when viewed against other parts of the Bible. This website is the result of that search.

So what was it? What was "out there that I could not explain"? My first level of satisfaction was that it was not "out there" at all but resided in every human and thing equally - Pantheism. I went from not seeing deity anywhere to seeing it everywhere. This was how I explained the connection that certain people have all of the time. For example, we have all experienced something along the lines of thinking about someone and them calling you moments later. What are normally called coincidences, I explained through the divinity reaching out to other parts of itself that it was familiar with. As comforting as this was, it did not last.

Someone suggested to me that I would find plenty of ammo against the Bible in a book by Thomas Paine known as The Age of Reason. I did get a lot of good ammo from that book, but I got something else that was more important. I got a fresh insight on god. Thomas Paine taught me about the natural religion of Deism. From this book and reflection on it, I came to the realization that there was indeed an entity known as God and that this entity was responsible for what we call first cause - the creation of the universe. The rest was acceptable if nothing more as it said that after creation, this entity withdrew to observe and did not interfere with the creation ever after. This was all very good for me as I could see God's withdrawing not away but into everything that was created. It meshed well with my view of Pantheism, though there were some quick modifications that had to be made. I was now a Deist.

This was all good for a while. I could maintain a positive belief in a god (comfort) without having to have any proof other than the fact that we are all here. I could explain first cause and still accept the scientific theories that are at the cutting edge of the respective fields from which they stem. Would that work forever? Apparently not. Around the beginning of last year, however, I started to have doubts.

I put Christianity to the ultimate test. I demand absolute verifiable proof for me to accept it. Since it is not possible to get from Christianity, Christianity is rejected. Why should my belief in Deism/Pantheism be any different? Recently I visited another forum and came to a breakthrough into Agnosticism. I wrote:

Let's face it - admitting that we do not know something is not easy. Admitting that we do not know something like this can send many people over the edge. They may have a hard time dealing with this newfound lack of knowledge, but they will finally be reaching a point of honesty that those who claim to know the truth can not know.

I am an Agnostic. For those who do not know what an Agnostic is, here is a definition:

Agnosticism \Ag*nos"ti*cism\, n. That doctrine which, professing ignorance, neither asserts nor denies. Specifically: (Theol.) The doctrine that the existence of a personal Deity, an unseen world, etc., can be neither proved nor disproved, because of the necessary limits of the human mind (as sometimes charged upon Hamilton and Mansel), or because of the insufficiency of the evidence furnished by physical and physical data, to warrant a positive conclusion (as taught by the school of Herbert Spencer); -- opposed alike dogmatic skepticism and to dogmatic theism.

It is not that I believe or disbelieve. It is simply that the jury is still out and might remain out until death.

Cygnus - 4.29.99

UPDATED 2.22.00

It is nearly a year since I wrote this piece and many of it holds true to this day. I do still classify myself as an Agnostic but I also classify myself as an Atheist, too. While this might not make sense at first, let me explain:

Of all of the gods that I have read about and encountered its followers, there is not one that I believe exists. I believe that they are all contradictory to nature, science and logic on some level. Some gods, the Christian one, for example, are more contradictory than others. As this is my belief and because I do not have a system of theism, I consider myself an Atheist.

I maintain my label of Agnostic as I have not been everywhere and do not know all that there is to know. While I believe that the possibility of a creator-god is highly unlikely, I do not have all of the answers and recognize that the possibility exists - however slim - that there is one.

For further study:

Robert Ingersoll's Why I am an Agnostic

Some Thomas Huxley on Agnosticism