Aaron Stanley - A combination of religious belief and avabilability are what led to my decision to purchase agnostic.net as my personal, vanity, domain. It was the summer of 1998 and the Internet revolution was in full swing. I had been online since the late 80s but had not yet joined the ranks of the domain name owners. I decided it was time to step into the fray and try to find myself an easy to remember and somewhat reflective domain name. After a week or so of trying cool sounding domains and realizing that almost everything good had been taken I finally found agnostic.net. It seems that agnostic.com and agnostic.org had already been registered, by the same person, but agnostic.net was open. I jumped at my chance to get a religiously and politically interesting name.
Aaron Stanley - As is apparent, agnostic.net was not my first choice domain. I really don’t remember what the first one I tried was, but I can’t say I’m unhappy with what I ended up with. I used to think I was an atheist. I was raised a reform Jew and at the order of my mother I attended Saturday Jewish Indocrination classes and eventually weekday Hebrew school when I was old enough. That sort of education really made its mark on me, a very bad mark. After I had been in the Jew Camp for 13 years I split. I had no intention of continuing religious studies after my Bar Mitzvah (which I performed because my family would have been quite ashamed had I not, and the money was really tempting too). Well before my departure from the Jewish faith I had renounced god and believed in pure atheism. The standard teenage rebellious depression common at the time set in and I really couldn’t force myself to beileve in anything.
Aaron Stanley - Then I found agnosticism. Freshman year in college I realized that it wasn’t particularly fruitful to believe in nothing at all. After seeing the the movie Contact and beginning a philosophy track at school I had begun to think about god in a very different way. I listened to the rhetoric about Occam’s Razor (that which is the simplest explanation, no matter how difficult to believe, is often the true explanation) and I learned about Pascal’s Wager (whether or not god exists it only makes sense to live a decent and good life). I studied Acquinas and Boethius, the Greeks, the Post-Modernists, everything I could get my hands on until I found something to believe in. The lack of faith at this point was killing me. I knew I couldn’t go on believing in god and yet I couldn’t reconcile atheism against an overwhelming dissatisfaction in scientific explanation.
Aaron Stanley - A little bit about agnosticism is in order here I think. It has been my finding that many people are confused about what it means to be an agnostic. When it was first proposed to me I was told that an agnostic was one who hadn’t made up his/her mind about what to believe. For me now, however, this description is unsatisfactory. Agnosticism holds religion in question, not because it hasn’t determined whether god exists, but rather because it realizes the impossibility of ever knowing the answer to that eternal question. In this respect, agnosticism is the one truly scientific religion.
Aaron Stanley - Given all of the evidence that exists on religious theory and scientific fact, one cannot make a determination on the existence of god. Science fails to explain much about the creation of the universe, the post-mortem functions of the body, and numerous other phenomena which religion so easily deals with. Relgion, on the other hand, makes its claims based on dreams, prophets, fictitous oral traditions, and misinterpreatitions of reality. In order to accept a religion one must take a "leap of faith" which is a dangerous proposition for those of us who want to understand what it is we believe. Ultimately, agnosticism is the only religion which can grant that understanding by neither accepting nor denying any tenents of any religion.
Aaron Stanley - Whether or not I believe in god is irrelevant. I believe in laws and I believe in morals but I consider these things to be very subjective in modern times. I will attempt to live within the generally accepted limits of society and hope that out of the finality of my life comes a greater understanding of what it was I lived for. I can never hope to understand this, however, until I experience it. It pays nothing to guess what god desires from people if indeed there is a heaven and it is a gated community because those guesses are simply stabs in the dark at the truth. Instead, if we proceed with our lives without concern for the hereafter because we realize that it is equally possible there is no such thing we may just find that life becomes much easier. "Guilt," says Al Pacino in The Devil’s Advocate "is like a bag of bricks. All you have to do is set it down." And life goes on.
31 October 2000