this post was submitted on 23 Mar 2026
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Why agnostic? Like... If there's no proof, why believe in the existence of a deity at all?
Eh, I think there's a decent semantic dispute for it. It's of course dependent on your definition of deity and is mostly an exercise of pedantry. However, with the size of the universe I think there's a pretty decent chance that there exists an intellectual being that could be interpreted as being god-like to the human perspective.
Now I'm not making claims that this proposed being has ever had anything to do with humans, nor are they responsible for any universal creation. Just that the universe is big enough for the existence of something significantly more advanced than humans. That being said, the size of the universe that allows for the possibility of this proposal also makes it possible existence mostly pedantic.
But agnostics don't believe in the existence of a deity. Are you maybe confusing it with deism?
You can be an agnostic deist. Agnostic just means you have no firm belief. Most people who identify as "nones" in polls are technically agnostic, even if they personally believe in a higher power. Its a lack of certainty.
Most atheists are also technically agnostic atheists. A gnostic athiest would be someone who holds the absence of any higher being or spirituality as an almost axiomatic belief. Though they merely can be so certain that the small chance they're wrong seems irrelevant to them.
For simplicity, I've always explained agnosticism as the belief that "I don't know and neither do you".
I was an agnostic for a very long time.
My main view of things - I couldn't know if there was a god or if there wasn't. But all that ultimate judgement shit never made any sense for me. If you're just behaving decently because of fear of ultimate judgment, then you're not a decent person. Ok if god would want me not to be an asshole, I'd need to be that out of my free will. And if a god demanded adherence to some random rules out of the blue - that god wouldn't have a moral compass and I wouldn't want to have to do anything with them in my life, being smitten down at the end would have been a consequence for me anyways.
I just want to be no asshole. So the question of there's a god or not. I don't care. God is irrelevant.
Thus: agnostic
I started staying I'm an atheist somw time ago, as that's just quicker and I can go by without explaining.
Still - if there's a god around, which is possible but improbable - I'm making sure I make fucking good use of the free will they gave me.
I've always considered agnostics to be atheists who just don't wanna debate. At least that's why I used to call myself an agnostic when I was younger.
I used to say agnostic because at that point all the atheist discussion I saw in public was aggressively anti-theistic, and I found it equally stupid to very strongly believe in either direction about things there's simply no way to know. Now I just say atheist because it doesn't mean only "I hate religion with passion" anymore
i call myself a devout agnostic. the justaposition of those words is inherently absurd since part of agnosticism and identifying as such is believing there is value to studying theology even if you yourself don't believe the theologies you're studying because ultimately prior to colonization, religion was how groups of people encoded and passed along their wisdom. however saying "devout agnostic" throws people enough off balance enough to introduce them to these concepts since so many say with their whole chest that they're something when traditionally these terms have meant something else to the people who use them.
for example, an astounding (at least to me) number of people say quakers and unitarians aren't christians. when you dig down on this you often find that this position is rooted in a believe (both positive and negative) that the fundamental mechanism and experience of christianity is trauma. however, when you look at the broader world of religion, you find that that's mostly only Christian denominations rooted in the theologies of the roman empire such as roman catholicism and the various european orthodoxies like Greek and russian. however, the oldest denomination, Ethiopian Orthodox, would i think to the people who say quakers and unitarians aren't christians, seem very unchistian. for that matter, i think so would Native America Christianity, Oriental Orthodox, and Armenianism. (fun fact, the Unitarian church is rooted in Oriental Orthodox, which is either the second or third oldest christian denomination)