The Agnostic

I have noticed over the years that people with a Master's Degree or PHD or doctors or Lawyers tend to be agnostic. Oh, they might profess a belief in a higher power to make everyone feel comfortable around them but if you talk to them privately as close friends it is another matter. There are those of you who might be horrified by this and think that our educational system is driving "God" out of people. However, I think this is the wrong way to think about it. Societies need people who are rational and can do "Critical thinking" in regular times as well as emergencies. So, people who can be pragmatic enough to tell you privately, "I don't believe in any fairy tales anymore really. I sometimes enjoy them but at core I'm an agnostic which means I'm just not sure what there is after death, maybe nothing."

There is a thought that all religions really are is a way to keep one's kids (especially teenagers) from just jumping off a cliff en masse and ending their lives. I can remember being suicidal many times between the ages of 13 and 24, so this makes a lot of sense to me. After all, there are just so very many unrealistic expectations that one as a teenager feels, and that they will die if things don't happen in a specific way which they never ever do. So, many die, withdraw or like most people they have to cope with whatever life brings them. I finally had to realize that I couldn't kill myself because that wouldn't be fair to my parents. So, I stayed alive got married and had a child by 26 and moved on with my life. By 32 I was really happy I had stayed alive. However, my 20s were the agony and the ecstasy and one cannot survive those extremes very long.

The reason I'm writing on this subject is that I was up skiing on Mt. Shasta with an old friend, yesterday and as we skied from Bunny Flats to Lower Sand Flat Road on Mountaineering Cross country skis with metal edges I asked him once again, "Do you believe in God or a higher power." Once again he said to me about 40 years after I first asked him this question. "No, I"m an agnostic, Fred".

And that answer led me to writing this.

I find that Atheists were either damaged by the religion they were raised in or a father, mother, Grandfather or grandmother was damaged by religion being forced upon them. People don't usually become anti-religion unless they have had a really bad experience with religion. So, most people who are highly educated tend to tend towards being agnostic, even though they might tell you otherwise just to be polite and well bred and educated.

My present point of view that I have had since about 18 or 20 is that whether God exists or not it is basically irrelevant  on one level because most people need God to be real to even choose to stay alive at all. This is something that is just a part of the human condition. So, whether God exists or not people would have to invent one. Accepting this one fact allows us to be human.

So, even though my own concept of what God is more perfectly aligns with Star Wars and "The Force" as in  "May the Force Be With YOU" I still recognize that most people need to Believe in a Higher power to stay alive.  Personally, I think this is directly tied in with having parents when one is a baby. IF one has parents or a parent or even someone to care for them at all, they live. Otherwise, they die and sometimes in quite miserable ways. So, I think the need for God is directly tied into that stage from conception until being about 12 to 14 years old where theoretically in ancient times one might survive on their own into adulthood. (Many survive on their own worldwide from age 4 to 6) but usually have pretty severe psychological problems throughout life from this.

So, God then tends to be 'The Father of the Human Race", "The Mother of the Human Race" or the Father and Mother of the Human Race" depending upon your root belief system that you were indoctrinated into while growing up.

So, my point of view is sort of like, "Did your Belief system and your parent or parents (real or adopted or caretaker) allow you to grow up and give you what you needed to survive?"

If the answer is "Yes." Then likely you will survive well.
But if the answer it "NO" you will either have to find someone to train you to survive like a priest, minister, psychologist or mentor or you will have to reach out and find a way to be your own parent and to study what a good parent does and parent yourself so you can survive whatever comes in your life.


So, this is still not the end of the story at least for me. So, what I haven't told you is that my friend got interested in Tibetan Buddhism in college at UCLA in the late 60s and early 70s. His favorite dream was to go to Mustang in Nepal where an untouched or relatively untouched Tibetan Buddhist area at that time. 

So, slowly he sort of drew me also into becoming interested in Buddhism. He eventually got a Master's degree in History specializing in Comparative Religion, Buddhism and Sanskrit. So, he also became a Sanskrit Scholar and whenever we climbed or hiked the Mt. Shasta area or rock climbed in  the Yosemite area we usually went by Berkeley so He could buy more Sanskrit Reference Books at the Shamballa Book store there then in the early 1970s.

So, since he was studying all this sort of stuff I learned a whole lot about comparative religion from him. So, since we both were very into philosphic inquiry on all sorts of subjects, we used philosophic inquiry in relation to all the religions he was studying. We both agreed that if it came to just logic and no other factor, Buddhism made the most sense of any religion. It was sort of like Buddha, Socrates, Aristotle, Lao Tzu, Confucius and many others as well as even Jesus in many ways all thought incredibly logically about all aspects of life. So, for college students Buddhism allowed the most logic and the least "Fairy Tales" that one couldn't prove that we both were aware of.

It is not that the 'Fairy Tale' aspect to all religions is wrong, it is just that 'fairy tales' cannot be proven and so is sort of like saying, "This is the way it is and you just have to accept this because I said it." However, to a college student, this would be like someone saying, "The moon is made of green cheese and you just have to accept it because I said it." It just isn't going to fly.

So, the next interesting thing for me is that even though he is much more intellectual than I and has been in order to get both a bachelor's degree and a Master's Degree much more disciplined than I during that time of his life, I often respect how he has the discipline to study something whether it is religion, building, Music, Music business, building computers, learning computer languages, and writing and often creating his own software or apps for his music business. So, I respect the self discipline necessary to pursue goals and to become successful in life doing this.

However, the other side of this is that my friend is an agnostic and I believe in God. I could say I believe in God because I need to believe in God like most people on earth. I think the statistic is about 85 to 90% of all people either believe in God or need to believe in God. This percentage is genetically predisposed to need to believe in God. The other 10% to 15% aren't. And this is straight genetics by the way. They call this the "God" gene.

So, what is interesting to me is that my friend is also very intuitive like me in many ways. Another similarity is that even though neither of us is dyslexic, my mother and grandmother, and his older brother and mother are both dyslexic. So, of necessity my friend and I growing up had to learn to think dyslexic and regular. Since both our brains were wired regular it meant that we had much more diverse ways of perceiving reality than the average person. Remember, Einstein was dyslexic. And what I find about most dyslexic people is that most of them are very very "Spiritual" by nature if they are given enough good breaks to survive and do well in their lives. So, both my friend and I benefited from both these two very different views of everyday life.

So, for example, if I want to get into my car now I just visualize forward into time and if I see an accident  or near accident I just wait for about 5 or 10 minutes so I'm not involved in the accident. Often I will see the cars or trucks that would have been dangerous to my life along my way. Sometimes, they have crashed other times they are okay.

My friend, who is a professional musician and writer of music often gets his music sung to him while he is near an alpine lake when he takes a nap. The local nature spirits will sing the song for him. So all he has to do is to remember what he heard and it often becomes very well received by his fans. So, for me, I use my gifts to protect myself and others and he uses his gifts to listen to songs being played for him by nature spirits which people love to hear. He has been successful about 30 to 40 years so far because of his talents of translating this music into reality for people to hear. And he has performed all over the world.

Another thing we share is that often when we travel around the world we each remember our past lives where we go. For me, the last place like this was when I was in Versailles, France near Paris. I remember being very wealthy a few centuries back before the French revolution but I didn't feel free. So, I had wealth and education but not the kind of freedom that I have now.

My friend, like me, remembers people that he meets from previous embodiments as he meets them again in this life. I, also am like this as well. It is said by many teachers that one can't get along with anyone unless this was learned in previous lifetimes through a lot of experience.

So, how does one reconcile that we both have this experience while I believe in God and my friend is an agnostic? I don't know. But this is our life experience. Maybe it can be explained through some kind of Buddhist cosmology. So, what I'm trying to get at is many people have experiences that they just have to accept because these experiences keep them alive and make sense of their lives. I suppose on one level it doesn't really matter if anyone else understands. The point is can you live with yourself? And is what you believe helping you to a life you can actually stand to live? If not, then it might be time to change your belief system to something that works for you. Otherwise you either will be miserable or dead soon. So, why not be happy? So, if you can learn to be kind to yourself and all beings around you, I find this often is the beginning to happiness long term in any person's life.

One cannot be unkind to other beings without first being unkind to oneself. This is just a logical fact of life. So, in starting with kindness towards yourself and all others you will change your world and the worlds of all others. Maybe if enough of us can do this we all eventually will create a heaven on earth for all the beings that live here.