If you haven’t done so yet, please read “An Agnostic Manifesto,” by Ron Rosenbaum over at Slate. It’s good.

Rosenbaum argues that the com­plex­i­ties of agnos­ti­cism shouldn’t dimin­ish its place in reli­gious debate, where “New Atheism” and reli­gious fun­da­men­tal­ism com­pete reg­u­larly to pro­duce the most bel­liger­ent quips and sound bites. Enough of that, says Rosenbaum. It’s time to put on our bak­ing gloves and pre­pare the Agnostic Loaf of Mystery.

He writes:

Agnosticism doesn’t fear uncer­tainty. It doesn’t cling like a child in the dark to the dog­mas of ortho­dox reli­gion or athe­ism. Agnosticism respects and cel­e­brates uncer­tainty and has been doing so since before quan­tum physics revealed the uncer­tainty that lies at the very ground­work of being.

That’s an elo­quent state­ment, whereas a lot of chat­ter in the athe­ist world is bratty and juve­nile. Atheist dis­course often reeks of fraternity/sorority shenani­gans; drink­ing games set against a back­drop of “sec­u­lar rebel­lion.” Worse, athe­ists tend to focus on Bible-bred insan­ity while avoid­ing the more prickly domain of Islam. Wimps.

The braver, more hon­est athe­ists fess up to this short­com­ing. Penn Jillette, for instance, recently went out of his way to praise Christians in a dis­cus­sion about his TV show Bullshit:

[we] have been bru­tal to Christians, and their response shows that they’re good fuck­ing Americans who believe in free­dom of speech. We attack them all the time, and we still get let­ters that say, “We appre­ci­ate your pas­sion. Sincerely yours, in Christ.”

Jillette explains that Bullshit avoids crit­i­cism of Islam for a sim­ple rea­son, one that offers a sad, illu­mi­nat­ing com­men­tary on the world: He (and part­ner Teller) don’t want to endan­ger their loved ones.

It’s awful that such a deter­rent exists in 2010, isn’t? Complete bat­shit insanity.

Still, con­trast Jillette’s approach with most athe­ist blog­gers, who chor­tle at Islamist sui­cide bombers and snake-handling Pentecostals from behind their Dawkins_IZ_Gawd (and, um,  Iced Borscht)  screen names. As a Catholic friend recently observed, it’s not exactly “bold” to par­tic­i­pate in “Everybody Draw Mohammed Day” from the com­fort of one’s Mid-Century mod­ern bach­e­lor pad. (The friend, a jour­nal­ist who has cov­ered var­i­ous reli­gious beats in New York State, was unim­pressed by my enthu­si­asm for Everybody Draw Mohammed Day, hence­forth known as EDMD.)

While he makes a good point, I dis­agree with the notion that EDMD was friv­o­lous and sopho­moric. Even some of its cow­ardly aspects con­tributed to an over­rid­ing pos­i­tive: the mit­i­ga­tion, on what­ever tiny level, of a despi­ca­ble form of intol­er­ance.  (Nick Gillespie makes my point more artic­u­lately here, and Paul Berman’s Flight of the Intellectuals pro­vides a bril­liant, if dispir­it­ing, analy­sis of how Western soci­ety — pow­ered by the engine of modern-day “jour­nal­ism” — glee­fully invites Islamism to cas­trate it).

I don’t mean to sug­gest that athe­ism should become a gloomy reser­voir for bland intro­spec­tion. It already has bland intro­spec­tion in spades; once you get past all the blas­phemy board games and kitschy crap, you’re left with an army of killjoys yam­mer­ing on about epis­te­mo­log­i­cal incongruence.

But the killjoys may be on to some­thing. For instance, when I “arrived” at athe­ism, it didn’t feel like some hedo­nis­tic eman­ci­pa­tion from God. Yes, I had finally found an “answer,” but the answer was anti-climactic and dull, as many “truths” are. Contrary to pop­u­lar belief, the road to athe­ism isn’t a hip grind­house flick — it’s not paved with priests’ skulls or set to the music of surf rock. Atheism is mun­dane, normal…unremarkable. But it has a cer­tain unde­ni­able power. Isaac Asimov once said:

I am an athe­ist, out and out. It took me a long time to say it. I’ve been an athe­ist for years and years, but some­how I felt it was intel­lec­tu­ally unre­spectable to say one was an athe­ist, because it assumed knowl­edge that one didn’t have. Somehow it was bet­ter to say one was a human­ist or an agnos­tic. I finally decided that I’m a crea­ture of emo­tion as well as of rea­son. Emotionally I am an athe­ist. I don’t have the evi­dence to prove that God doesn’t exist, but I so strongly sus­pect he doesn’t that I don’t want to waste my time.

Back to Rosenbaum, though. He writes:

I chal­lenge any athe­ist, New or old, to send me their answer to the ques­tion: “Why is there some­thing rather than noth­ing?” I can’t wait for the eva­sions to pour forth. Or even the evi­dence that this ques­tion ever could be answered by sci­ence and logic.

Stultifying. But if you peel back the fore­skin of this wrinkly cat­e­chism, you’ll always be in arm’s reach — and often at the busi­ness end — of a sen­tient cre­ator. Eventually you’ll be tempted by one of sev­eral “God-centric” posi­tions, and none of them will be more iron­clad than the “cer­tainty” of atheism.

One of my favorite arrows in the athe­ist quiver is the idea that our minds go straight to the the­ory of a sen­tient cre­ator with­out con­tem­plat­ing eso­teric con­cepts that might be more plau­si­ble. We’re stuck on “sen­tient cre­ator.” That’s the best we can do. Rosenbaum looks into this mat­ter by ref­er­enc­ing agnos­tic blog­ger John Wilkins:

…there are really two claims agnos­ti­cism is con­cerned with as impor­tant: Whether God exists or not is one. Whether we can know the answer is another. Agnosticism is not for the simple-minded and is not as con­ge­nial as athe­ism and the­ism are. The courage to admit we don’t know and may never know what we don’t know is more dif­fi­cult than say­ing, sure, we know.

I’ll put the brakes on here. While the con­straints of life and its short win­dow of oppor­tu­nity some­times depress me, it’s not an exis­ten­tial cri­sis. When my time comes to kiss the gal­lows, I under­stand that my cor­rupt­ible body will trans­form into a snack bar for maggots.

And I’m fine with that.

More analy­sis of Rosenbaum’s Agnostic Manifesto is avail­able here, cour­tesy of rock-solid peck­er­wood Jacob Grier.

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