AGNOSTIC: NOT A DIRTY WORD
Robert Meyers

I can still hear it from those years of hard, varnished pews and Will Slater songbooks: “Make no uncertain sound!” the preacher would thunder. “People who say ‘maybe’ and ‘perhaps’ are people who have never learned the Truth!”

It was the liquor of absolute certainty, and I got gloriously drunk on it. I was the kind of child who wanted to know more than anyone else, anyway, and to prove it as often and noisily as I could. No one could have appealed to me more than those visiting Church of Christ evangelists who spoke with iron-jawed assurance on every religious topic from Aaron to Zipporah.

It took many years for me to get over the conviction that uncertainty is always a weakness, The past fuses and separates like kaleidoscope, but sometimes I think I may have reached 40 before I managed to say “I don’t know” without feeling 1 had just betrayed my Church and the Almighty—in that order.

Humility was a word to use, even to preach about, but in the garden my religious experience bequeathed to me there was scant soil for it to grow. I remember with shuddering regret my unprovoked assaults on the faith of those whose opinions differed from mine, but whose characters often surpassed my own as the sun’s light does a candle. I thought it was an inevitable adjunct of faith that I should be as dogmatic as a certain woman who once rebuked Queen Victoria.

The famous 19th century monarch, soon after she bought Balmoral Castle on Scotland’s River Dee, spent one Sunday afternoon being rowed on the river. A woman saw it who believed in the strict observance of what she called the Sabbath. She said to her minister, “Isn’t it dreadful?”

“What’s dreadful?” he asked.

“The Queen’s rowing on the river on the Sabbath,” said the irate woman.

The minister reminded her that Jesus was on the Sea of Galilee on that very day.

“It doesn’t matter,” the woman snapped, “Two wrongs don’t make a right!”

She would have been beautifully at home where I spent my childhood, certain memories of which revived recently while 1 was reading a book about the Koran. It was, the author said, believed by Mohammedans to contain all the knowledge and all the literature necessary for men. He illustrated their point of view by the decision of a certain Caliph.

It seems that the learned men of Alexandria asked the Caliph Omar to give them the vast library of that city. “If those books,” he replied, “contain anything which is contrary to the Koran, they deserve to be destroyed. If they contain what is written in the Koran, they are unnecessary,” So he ordered the books to be distributed among the baths of the city, to serve as fuel for their furnaces.

The language is startlingly like that I heard in my childhood church. It assumes an infallible understanding of everything which is written in a book, and then denies value to everything lying outside the boundaries of that understanding.

There was, of course, a little difficulty with this point of view since the Gospel Advocate and the Firm Foundation were peddling commentaries and other Biblical helps, but it was explained that this apparent breach of logic was excusable on grounds that nothing in these books would contradict what the Bible taught and would serve only to enhance it. Which, being interpreted, meant: nothing in those books would contradict what we said the Bible taught.

These memories lead me to a question which has perplexed me much in adult years. Why is it that so many of us cannot live with uncertainty? Why must we seek comfort forever through those who assure us over and over that we are right, that we know all that is worth knowing, and that anything less than total sureness is akin to wicked doubt?

Is it not possible to live happily with the recognition that one can never know very much for sure” That there is such a thing as humble, but hopeful, uncertainty? Eric Hoffer’s “true believers” will undoubtedly be with us forever, but must there be so many of them?

There are, I suppose, people who are born with perfect taste, who never worshiped an idol with feet of clay, or held to a wrong opinion, but they are rare and we should not be too quick to enroll ourselves in that class.

Robert Lynd, once literary editor of the London Daily News. put it this way: ‘The ideal world would be a world in which everybody was capable of conversion, and in which at the same time the converts would admit the possibility that they might be mistaken.”

“I myself sometimes wish,” he goes on, “that the people who are not sure that they are right would form a league to control the people who know that they are right, and turn this splendid knowledge to the world’s advantage.

“But then,” he adds, lampooning himself deliciously, “I have reached a point at which I am not sure that my latest opinion is right. I do not even feel sure that my opinion that my latest opinion may not be right is right.”

And while I once would have scoffed at such dubiety, I am now more and more inclined to pay careful attention to such self-deprecating people. Having won through to the wisdom of uncertainty, they make their occasional positive statements tenfold more persuasive.

I have followed with interest the career of the great London preacher, Leslie Weatherhead, ever since a book of his, bought in a Welsh bookstore in 1943, turned my religious life around. One of his latest books describes him as a “Christian agnostic,” a phrase which will seem stupidly paradoxical to some.

It is obvious that he believes strongly in a great many things. But he has also come to a place where he can be happy and unafraid to admit that there is a world of things about which he must say, “I don’t know.”

It’s a relaxed house to live in.