This is the latest installment in the Sacrilegious Humor series. This is a series that I would like readers to help me with. If you know of a comedy bit that is irreverent towards religion, makes fun of religion, pokes fun at sincerely held religious beliefs, or challenges the firmly held religious beliefs of others, please email me the name of the bit or a link to it.
Today’s video is Coming Out As Agnostic by Emily Catalano.
Bruce Gerencser, 67, lives in rural Northwest Ohio with his wife of 46 years. He and his wife have six grown children and sixteen grandchildren. Bruce pastored Evangelical churches for twenty-five years in Ohio, Texas, and Michigan. Bruce left the ministry in 2005, and in 2008 he left Christianity. Bruce is now a humanist and an atheist.
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OMG that was hilarious!
You know, my 20-something age kids still don’t quite understand what a big deal it is when you “come out” as non-religious to your religious relatives. My daughter is living in the Bible Belt now so she’s seeing how overwhelmingly Christian everything can be. For example,she recently got a job at a different law firm, a larger firm specializing in corporate law. They had a nice Christmas party, and at the party the head partner led them all in a prayer thanking God for the year they had, for their success, because God made it all possible. I asked my daughter if she was ok with that, and how isn’t that an HR issue, and she just brushed it off as “their culture”. Meanwhile, I would have been pissed AF. A law firm of all places should know better. But she just flies under the radar about religion.
I know that neither this series nor individual clip is intended as deep philosophical territory but….well. I dislike the term agnostic and this comedy routine sums up why, for me anyhow. She can’t tell her parents she’s an atheist but agnostic, hey that’s okay. The reality is that I cannot offer up a consistent definition of agnosticism. We can talk round it, we can say things like knowledge versus belief, but it all ends up with me scratching my head. In fact, I think the very word agnostic was invented simply for the purposes here, to be a sort of sop to religious believers. Anyone on the fence could avoid having to declare their position and just say they were ‘agnostic’. If we stop using the word then we have to think our position in terms of atheism, being honest with ourselves as to belief. A believer is a theist (negative atheist) whilst someone who doesn’t believe is at the atheist end. People who hover in between adopt different levels of atheism/theism (however they want), but don’t get to cop out via ‘I’m agnostic’.
I know this is one of the few issues you and I have a disagreement.😂❤️ I call myself an agnostic atheist. When I first deconverted, I used the agnostic label, but I found myself explaining what I meant all the time, so I started calling myself an atheist. I am an agnostic in the sense that I do not know if there is some sort of deity. While I’m confident that the extent deities are no gods at all, it is possible that there is a God of some sort that has not yet made itself known to us.
I am also an atheist. I am certain, for example, that the Christian God is a myth. I can say the same thing about the other Abrahamic gods. Thus, I am an atheist concerning these deities.
For me, the issue is all about probabilities. It is unlikely that any God exists, so I am an atheist. I live my day-to-day life, as if there is no God, even though probabilistically there could be a deity that is, at this present moment, unknown to me.
However, it is simpler and less confusing for me to say I am an atheist.
I do agree with you that some people who use the agnostic label do so to avoid the stigma that comes from calling oneself an atheist. It’s not a big deal to me, knowing how hard it can be in some corners of the world to say you are an atheist.
Bruce I can’t disagree with you, until I start getting philosophical! Indeed, until recently I identified as agnostic atheist, and frequently still do because the word agnostic is so embedded in our psyche. It’s part of the internal arguments I have with myself.
I have no problem with the word agnostic, having been agnostic before I knew what it meant. As I started became a skeptic of religion, I started saying the only thing I know about religion is I don’t know about it. For me it amounts to saying “I don’t know what can’t be known”. In common use it’s understood as simply one who is not religious, and lands less crashingly than the word atheist.