"Lately, I’ve been identifying as a Christian Agnostic. For many people, these two words seem to be a contradiction. But for me, the tension created between the two seems to perfectly summarize where I stand spiritually. For most of my life, I’ve identified as a passionate follower of Jesus. I’ve been so devoted to the Christian Faith that I’ve even become a pastor, teaching others about the good news of Jesus as my vocation. But the more I’ve grown, the more I’ve learned, and the more I’ve experience, the clearer it has become to me that the doctrines and dogmas that I’ve been trained to teach are either untrue or unknowable .

People look to religious leaders for answers about the big questions of life: Why are we here? Where are we going? Is there a God? Why is there suffering? Since the dawn of consciousness, shamans, gurus, and priests have emerged claiming to have superior insight into the answers to these questions and people have flocked to learn from them. I believe that most of these spiritual leaders were genuine in their belief that they had discovered the answers to these big questions. In fact, most of the founders of the great religions of the world offered their answers with humility, asking their disciples to do their own work to discover the truthfulness of their claims. It is only later on, when theologies were formed based on the teachings of the founders, that these humble perspectives were transformed into essential doctrine and dogma.

None the less, doctrine and dogma is what religion has become. At the highest levels, the worlds religions offer a systematized understanding of the world that we’re told we must believe wholeheartedly or else there will be some terrible consequence- usually some sort of eternal torment. Fear motivates many people to submit to these beliefs without much thought, and to internalize them as absolute truth.  The more they are repeated in religious settings, the deeper the belief becomes, until eventually a marginal believer becomes the most devout.

I saw this happening around me as a Christian and as a religious leader and I grew concerned. Certainty about the big questions is clearly impossible- we’re finite beings trying to comprehend the infinite. Yet I was preaching and teaching with certainty. Sometimes, people pushed back on me, pointing out that the claims of the Christian Faith that I was making were easily disprovable based on modern science, history, and logic."