Episode 78: Agnosticism

So thank you for everyone who has joined to talk through some ideas.

So I would like to be able to mostly leave time to engage in questions and conversation as a group activity working towards some kind of clarity or purpose of meeting.

A couple of things I should say.

Clearly, I am a Westerner, so when I talk about Christianity, I come at it from a Western perspective, but Christianity in and of itself is not a Western religion, and we have to remember that Christ, for example, was a Middle Eastern Jew, which is a fact lost on most Christians, I would say, especially in the evangelical tradition, which is where my roots are laid, although that's not where I live now.

And then also I tend to parse apart something, you know, philosophically, I'm agnostic.

In practice, I'm a Christian.

I'm a very devout Christian, I would say, in my practice, and in particular in the Franciscan school of thought.

And that's a weird juxtaposition.

I have a lot of views and the reason that I'm still not yet really on camera with people is I talk about a lot of things that are disconcerting or challenging to quote the institution.

So for example, I'm what's known in philosophy as a hard incompatibilist, meaning I reject the notion of free will.

I don't believe in free will.

That is a very problematic position for Christianity and themes of salvation and Christ's death and those sorts of things traditionally.

So all of that is to say I'm an outlier in many ways.

But it is through finding that strange space that I was able to reach a purposeful relationship to God or with God, because the standard structures didn't work for me.

And And Josh said, we were talking kind of before this, and we've talked in the past about how many people, and me being in chaplaincy especially, I deal with a lot of people who have religious trauma, specifically from the Christian church.

And if we are raised in a Christian household, let's say, or any kind of religious household, and we tend to go through a crisis of identity in our early 20s, which just lines up with our biological and psychological development as well.

We kind of wander around for a while and for a while we're lost.

We try out different things to see what works.

And many people spend their life being a seeker, which I think is a good thing.

I do believe, without kind of qualification, I don't have data to show you on this, but I, in my belief, I don't think you can completely disavow yourself of whatever roots were laid down earlier in your life.

And the key to me is finding a way to heal from that trauma, redefine what was taught, and accept it, live back into a new, newly formed version of what was laid down.

Because for whatever reason, perhaps psychological, perhaps because it's true, I don't know.

But for whatever reason, I think it's kind of like being raised Catholic.

There's some kind of kernel that sticks in you that you just can't get rid of for whatever reason.

And I've seen