The miracle

In Saturday's post, I joked that "the twain shall never meet" between theist Tom and atheist me, unless a miracle occurs and one of us persuades the other to turn. Romulus Crowe read it in the standard way and reported:

I wasn't going to comment but I laughed out loud at the line; surely if a "miracle" occurs, the only winner can be Tom? [first comment on the post]

That is, the joke is on me.

But there's also the modernist (or post-modernist—I can never keep the terms straight), ironic reading that Tom's god performs the more difficult miracle¹ of turning Tom to become an atheist. In that case, the joke is surely on both of us!
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1. I really do think that there's less of a possibility of Tom's becoming an atheist than of my again becoming a theist. He has his Jehovah's Witness support group, people he sees (I think he indicated) three days a week down at Kingdom Hall, whereas I can't be said to have such a support group—unless a few authors I read can be counted as such.

"Agnostic" = theistically neutral

The pleasure has passed that I felt on Thursday at discovering that Mr. Sheepandgoats and I are both agnostics. It isn't that I mind having this in common with Tom, it's just that I realized today that "everybody" is agnostic in the root meaning of that term, not knowing [whether or not god exists]—notwithstanding Carl Jung's statement that he knew. (So far as I know, he never said how he knew, and—again, so far as I know—no one ever even asked him to.)

No, it just isn't helpful or particularly enlightening to say that we're both (or all of us) agnostic in that way. The main thing, theistically speaking, about Tom and me is that I don't believe in god, and he does. In fact, even if I don't know that god doesn't exists, I believe (for reasons I will address, but not today) that it does not exist (and I employ "it" to get away from associations with the masculine deity of the Abramaic religions). And the same, mutatis mutandis, for Tom: he believes, for his reasons, that "God" (capitalized and masculine) does exist.

Another thing I realized today is that when Tom says (and he does say this on occasion), "Agnostics are a dime a dozen," he doesn't use the word in the root sense. If he used that [inflated] sense (where everyone except Carl Jung is an agnostic), he'd say they're a dime a hundred or a thousand!

I propose that, theistically speaking, agnostic be used to mean neutral. Acceptable synonyms might include "undecided," "undeclared," or "indifferent" (or still others). These particular alternatives seem inferior to "neutral," however.

"Undecided" implies that the agnostic can't have decided to be neutral, but he can. Or if he or she hasn't decided, that a decision has to be made at some point, and I don't think it does (although sometimes it is on the deathbed).

"Undeclared" overlooks the fact that theists and atheists may be undeclared too; they don't have to tell anyone their position (it can just be between themselves and their "God"...or their no-god).

I would like "indifferent" (and most agnostics may, in fact, be indifferent to whether someone else is an atheist or a theist) except that agnostics need not be indifferent—may, in fact, object to what theists get up to "in the name of God." They may also object to people like Christopher Hitchens or Richard Dawkins (or me) getting in people's faces with anti-religious books or blogs.

So, in the theistically neutral sense of agnostic that I recommend, I am atheist and Tom Sheepandgoats is theist, and never the twain shall meet (unless a miracle occurs and one of us persuades the other to turn). And agnostics are neither theist nor atheist, although they may or may not have decided to be, may or may not have declared it, and may or may not be indifferent to what anyone else is or does because of it.
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February 16. Note:I have written a sort of footnote to this, published as "Carl Jung wasn't the only one."