Sunday, November 16, 2008

the "agnostic" household

On the Web, I've read the phrase "raised in an agnostic household". Some time later, I started pondering what it could possibly mean.
  • The less-likely option is that it refers to a household in which the authority figures actively taught agnosticism. Instead of nightly prayers, there were recitations of standards of proof. The question "Why are we here?" was answered with "Nobody knows, since nobody can prove anything sufficiently conclusive". And the Christmastime inquiry, as to how and why the songs describe an infant as a King, elicited the reply "the infant may or may not have been a king, and in any case we can never know for certain". Perhaps some households do this, but I'm skeptical. To put it mildly, the young have a tendency to want their answers to be unequivocal.
  • The more-likely option is that the authority figures of an "agnostic" household weren't so much agnostic as they were religiously apathetic. They didn't discuss religion. If anything, they were careful to ensure no ideas were "enforced" on impressionable minds. They were neither for nor against any ideas about God. Rather, they kept their Sundays busy by worshiping different gods altogether, like leisure and entertainment.
I implore everyone: call households atheistic or apathetic when those terms fit. Don't try to claim that a household was "agnostic" if it truly wasn't. Agnostics, have the decency to represent your upbringing accurately.

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