where have all the agnostics gone?

Come on. Sing along. (to the tune of "Where have all the flowers gone?")

Where have all the agnostics gone, long time passing,
Where have all the agnostics gone, they were here 40 years ago
Where have all the agnostics gone, become spiritual deists every one
When will they ever see, it's all about personal Deity.

Once more.

No. No. No.

We talked about God a lot when I was a teenager. I had two close friends I normally hung out with, and none of us every darkened a church door, except on Friday nights, when local churches had dances to give their teens controlled recreation. Those dances were jammed with church kids looking to experiment with anything and everything, and I often performed sexual experiments in the back seat of my car. Casual intercourse was out in 1966; everything else was in play.

I don't think Chris, Walt and I felt guilty about our lifestyle. I know I felt no guilt about Friday nights. Our ongoing discussions about the existence of God weren't fearful conversations about His ability to destroy us because of our sin, but a debate about whether God was really out there and, if He was, the extent God controlled the Universe. The God we visualized was spirit. There was no sense of personality or any possibility of a direct relationship with the God we imagined. He was more pantheistic than anything. We mocked organized religion for how it duped people, and we especially mocked the Christian faith for its fantastic claims about floods and the Red Sea, about miracles and the Virgin birth. We especially mocked the Resurrection.

We had these ideas within the shadow of our doubt. We fluctuated in our views. The days we didn't talk were days when our interest in these things was low. Our agnosticism rose out of our developing realization that we could never figure out God, if He was there at all. Our agnosticism was a surrender to our inability to prove anything about God empirically. We hoped there was a God, but were uncertain of His existence.

No one is uncertain about God today. He is chi and spirit; lightness and goodness; the prime mover and universe binder. There are fewer atheists in the United States today than in 1960. Spiritual people have a positive relationship with God, and Hallelujah, they have it on their own terms. The uncertainty we grappled with 40 years ago is much more certain now. If it's not traditional, it's metaphysical: Shamans and the Mayan gods; Atlantis and aboriginal dream time; points of convergence and the apocalyptic 2012; karma and reincarnation. Some grokked through psychedelics, other in eastern discipline, more people have experienced God than during my youth, and encounters with God are indelible and not open to evaluation by non-believers.

There is less doubt and more passion today. There is much more certainty, about all forms of spiritual activity. There's even more involvement in religion.

But I miss those days with Walt and Chris, when we talked late at night about eternity and philosophy and about whether God existed. I miss wondering and considering in every fiber of my being. It was wonderful when peoples' hearts and minds were open, and we hadn't gotten so sure about everything.

Long time ago.