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Please note that the text below was written by the feeling-being ‘Peter’ while ‘he’ lived in a
pragmatic (methodological), still-in-control/same-way-of-being Virtual Freedom before becoming actually free.
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Agnosticism
Agnosticism – the doctrine or tenets of agnostics, an agnostic attitude;
Agnostic – A person
who holds the view that nothing can be known of the existence of God or of anything beyond material phenomena. Also, a person who
is uncertain or non-committal about a particular thing. Oxford Dictionary
Agnosticism – That
doctrine which, professing ignorance, neither asserts nor denies. Specifically: The doctrine that the existence of a personal
Deity, an unseen world, etc., can be neither proved nor disproved, because of the necessary limits of the human mind, or because
of the insufficiency of the evidence furnished by physical and physical data, to warrant a positive conclusion.’ Webster’s Dictionary
Peter: The philosophy of agnosticism, ‘the
doctrine which, professing ignorance, neither asserts nor denies’ is not only rooted in theism, its continued existence as a
philosophy sustains theistic belief, and its current popularity in some circles is, bizarrely enough, sustained by Eastern
spiritual belief.
From my brief reading on the subject, the term
agnostic was publicly coined by T.H Huxley, a biologist, philosopher and champion of Darwin’s evolutionary theories, at a
meeting of the Metaphysical Society in London in 1869.
‘It came into my head as
suggestively antithetical to the ‘Gnostic’ of Church history who professed to know so much about the very things of which I
was ignorant.’ T.H.Huxley
Hence agnosticism, as a philosophy of
professing ignorance, was rooted in opposition to those who claimed they had a special knowledge of spiritual mysteries, hence
what some refer to as secular agnosticism owes its existence to theism – or to put it plainly, if you hold no theistic beliefs
whatsoever there is no need to be agnostic to those beliefs. The reason I say that the philosophy of agnosticism sustains theistic
belief can be summarized by the following quote –
‘The
Atheist asserts that there is no God, whereas the Agnostic maintains only that he does not know.’ Encyclopaedia Britannica
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In other words, by
maintaining he or she ‘does not know’ an agnostic leaves the door open to theistic belief.
Of course an actualist, whilst being
an atheist, is not constrained to asserting that there is no God, he or she has, by the experiential evidence of a PCE, the direct
knowledge that there is no God, by whatever name or gender – that any and all religious and spiritual belief is but impassioned
fantasy.
That the current philosophy of
agnosticism is sustained by Eastern spiritual belief can be seen from the following reference –
‘It is also
possible to speak of a religious agnosticism. But if this expression is not to be contradictory, it has to be taken to refer to an
acceptance of the agnostic principle, combined either with a conviction that at least some minimum of affirmative doctrine can be
established on adequate grounds, or else with the sort of religion or religiousness that makes no very substantial or disputatious
doctrinal demands. ...
The second possibility, that of an
agnosticism that is religious as opposed to secular, was realized perhaps most strikingly in the Buddha (Gautama). Typically and
traditionally, the ecclesiastical Christian has insisted that absolute certainty about some minimum approved list of propositions
concerning God and the general divine scheme of things was wholly necessary to salvation. Equally typically, according to the
tradition, the Buddha sidestepped all such speculative questions. At best they could only distract attention from the urgent
business of salvation – salvation, of course, in his own very different interpretation.’ Nature
and Kinds of Agnosticism. Encyclopaedia Britannica
If one believes the hand-me-down
legends, Mr. Buddha remained agnostic about many issues that were of vital interest to his followers and this legend has served to
imbed the principle of agnosticism within Buddhist philosophy – and therefore within much of Western philosophy of the last few
centuries. In Buddhism agnosticism is exalted as a sign of great wisdom so much so that whenever a Buddhist professes ‘ignorance’
he or she is actually maintaining their feeling of superiority over others.
Anyone who holds to the doctrine of
agnosticism has to, as a matter of principle, remain open to ‘an unseen world’ … because
its existence cannot be disproved. Agnosticism is directly contrary to actualism – actualism is firmly rooted in the actual
world, it has nothing whatsoever to do with any ‘unseen world’.
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Freedom from the Human Condition – Happy and Harmless
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