Religion and beliefs

[Ryllharu]

Edit: Hah, there's a quote from the Denys Turner interview which makes the same point Ryllharu was trying to get across:
"I find the likes of a card-carrying Atheist like Richard Dawkins to be really just an inverted image of a certain kind of rather narrowed-down theism. There's a fundamentalism about Dawkins' atheism which matches, as in the reversing of a mirror image, that which he's rejected." - Turner

Someone forwarded me this message sometime in 2005 (I kept good notes, so I know the years at least), which was after I had slowly switched to agnoticism. It is much along the same point that you quoted.

"The opposite of the religous fanatic is not the fanatical atheist but the gentle cynic who cares not whether there is a god or not."
-Eric Hoffer (1902-1983)

This is not true for many atheists, hence Hoffer's use of "fanatical," but I have found a large number of self-proclaimed atheists to be just as fervently insistent that there isn't a God as much as certain sects of Christianity are that there is one. Just like the Turner quote, a mirror image of each other, each desperately attempting to convert the other and those who lie in the middle.

My version of Agnosticism is the kind that finds it inherently impossible to prove or disprove which deities there are. There may be one, there may be thousands. It isn't that I don't want to choose one or the other, I just don't bother because there's no way I can prove it.

Wikipedia informs me that I am a follower of Agnostic Theism or Spiritual Agnosticism. Didn't know there was a name for it...

It really isn't that much different from one of the core beliefs of Catholicism in that God Himself is unknowable, and if we were to be able to directly communicate with him, our minds would never be able to comprehend it (and possibly die). Thus, Saints and Angels exist to act as go-betweens for God and humanity. I am aware that I am either exaggerating or playing the concept up (due to ignorance rather than intention), but the concept is at least similar.