Reply #83: other...

[tjfreeman]

There is no adequate category for my preference.

I wouldn't say "atheism" for that says too much--though I like Stendahl's joke that Nietzsche loved so much:
"God's only excuse is that he does not exist."

I wouldn't say "agnosticism" for that says too little--its not, for me, a matter of not "knowing," though I, too, would claim not to know whether God exists or not.

For me the question of the existence or non-existence of God has got to be the most overrated and irrelevant question ever posed in human history.

It's not what one believes that counts but rather the consequences of what one believes.

The same belief can have many different consequences.

Thus, if there were a truly loving God I can't imagine why it would matter what anyone believed.

I like the line in Woody Allen's Crimes and Misdemeanors by the old Jewish philosoper who says something like: "we are still trying to understand the concept of a truly loving god"

Or Zarathustra's sharp riposte to Christianity: "Whoever praises him as a god of love does not have a high enough opinion of love itself" (Thus Spoke Zarathustra)

Perhaps I'm closest to Buddhism (you could have at least spelled it right!) where the question of God's existence or non-existence is irrelevant. But Buddhism also means so many things that it says too little to label myself "Buddhist."

I guess I like best that Zarathustra who tells his followers: "Now I bid you lose me and find yourselves; and only when you have all denied me will I return to you."