My Religious Views

This has been an evening well spent, and , if there is one thing I like more than anything else, it is an evening well spent. After subjecting my weary self to the customary internet trawl, I have finally chrystalised my religious standpoint, and it thouroughly appeals to my highly developed sense of order and symmetry by being a statement which, at first appears to be an, "I'm sitting on the fence," type pronouncement, but actually turns out to be an expression of what is, for me, an undeniable truth. You see, I am an agnostic atheist. In other words, I do not believe in God, but - and here's the beauty of the thing - I don't KNOW that God does not exist. If it turned out that God does exist, then nobody would be more delighted than I; the prospect of the presence of a forgiving, all knowing, all seeing deity would offer us all some hope in, what is increasingly becoming, a world in which evil seems to be gaining the upper hand exponentially. However, the point is that the existance of God is truly unknowable because the empirical evidence will never substantiate the claim that God exists, so it would seem that WE are all that we have, and humanism is the way forward for me. But what kind of humanism? That is a consideration for a future item.

Agnostic atheism just gets better and better. Consider what is known The Agnostic Atheism Wager. It states

Whether or not you believe in God, you should live your life with love, kindness, compassion, mercy and tolerance while trying to make the world a better place. If there is no God, you have lost nothing and will have made a positive impact on those around you. If there is a benevolent God reviewing your life, you will be judged on your actions and not just on your ability to blindly believe, when there is a significant lack of evidence of any one god's existence.

I am grateful to Rationalwiki for this passage.

In other words, I will live my life in accordance with God's wishes, and, if, when I die, it turns out that there IS a God, he will welcome me in to heaven, and I will be happy. If he does not welcome me in to the Kingdom of Heaven because I refused to believe in him while I was alive, then he can hardly call himself a benevolent God, and a God that displays such a lack of benevolence is not worth worshipping. This, to me is a perfect argument for both atheism and living ones life in such a way that one spreads happiness. The atheism is easy; the spreading of happiness is the hard bit.