Open Letter to Maliha on Agnosticism

Dear Maliha, thank you for coming to my blog and providing a Muslim perspective on religion. But thank you even more for your provocative questions, which I am trying to use to better travel my "journey of self-discovery through self-exploration." At about 8:40 this morning you commented, for example:

I don't understand agnosticism, because it seems so uncommitted to anything.

And then how would you derive meaning to our existence? What's the point? Is there a point? Are we just a comical abberation of a universe gone wild?

I am really interested in the thought process, because as I have struggled in determining whether Islam is "the" path (and now I am settling for its [being] "a" path), I never questioned the existence of God...it just seems like everything would be too mundane for such a beautiful world.

I must have read that not long after you submitted it, for at 10:01 I commented back to you:

I'[ll think] on these things...But know that I can't tell you when my muse is likely to strike with something like insight. She comes in her own time, but always faithfully responsive to my sincere desire for answers.

Well, within about one hour my muse was already starting to whisper to me, urgently, while I was driving home after doing an errand. Already, while driving out of my yard to go do the errand, I had been thinking that if an agnostic is not committed to anything, then the term hardly seems to apply to me. I feel committed. I am passionate about responding impeccably to life, to "the human condition." I have never been a couch potato, a spectator, a blindly following dogmatist. I have tried to engage life, to have passed this way not in vain.

In other words, your comments were affecting me powerfully and I'm sure they strengthened my desire to hear from my muse. And this, in turn, prompted her to aid me as quickly as possible.

At any rate, because I was driving when she started to whisper to me, I pulled off the road and took notes:

Free thinkers, free from received opinions about faith and science, pre-fabricated thought structures, and, perhaps most of all, other people's revelations, unless they accord with my own experience and the light of my own reason. Descartes tried to practice methodical doubt. In my own way, I have lately been trying to practice constructive skepticism.

Maybe I'm not agnostic as to whether God is or is not, but rather as to what God is (beyond the I AM THAT I AM). For I do believe in...Something. Maybe it's just that I'm unwilling to say I know what it is (because I don't think I do).

[Added on Monday: More whisperings followed, with some guidance on what God is.]