Manifesto: Agnostics are the best

I try occasionally to be spiritual, but it never stays for more than a few seconds. I look up at the stars and the black between them a lot. This is because I’m feeling a baseline serenity now, and because I am approaching seventy. Looking at the stupefying nonsense, the desire to feel magical is sweet. But as said, it quickly fades. What of the mystery? What could this all be? But for me it stops at a question mark. How spiritual and glorious is that?

It is actually worse. I try to imagine a creator and I have to picture him as the son of something prior. Additionally, there can’t be a first particle or a first cause that knows. The first is the most ignorant. It’s the last and oldest that knows most.

I wrote in a NYT reply to a comment that agnosticism is assuredly the most courageous position to have. A believer wants to have magic. Atheists often relish a superior certainty in the universe’s emptiness. The agnostic doesn’t know, and doesn’t believe. If he’s a more rigorous thinker, he’ll see that knowledge is a conceit, atoms bouncing off atoms. It’s not that he is ready to believe in the unnatural if something happens to change his mind. He just can’t endorse any knowledge at all. That is the absence of all dessert and pretty much of all ego. It is the most courageous.

What does the brutal agnostic, yours truly, think about the human psyche? Meaning is feeling and nothing more, but feeling evaporates when we picture a universe without a creator. So let us pull the circle in closer and feel about real things, small precious things: the pieces of nature. That’s what healthy children do. And they have no mean bones in them.