An Agnostic's Manifesto [View All]

Pity the poor agnostic these days, caught in the middle of an ever-widening gap between an increasingly assertive religious fundamentalism on one side, and on the other a new brand of atheism whose dogmatic certitude and zealous proselytizing make it appear more fundamentalist by the day. Where in the conflict between these two competing claims of absolute certainty—religious and scientific—is there room for the person willing to throw his hands in the air and say simply, “I don’t know?”

Enter into this chasm the journalist and host of KQED public radio’s nationally syndicated talk show Forum, Michael Krasny. Krasny’s new book, Spiritual Envy, is essentially an agnostic manifesto: an eloquent and deeply personal journey to find some kind of spiritual center in what has become an increasingly polarized debate about the role and function of religion in America.

Krasny has long considered himself to be an agnostic, and while that term has taken on multiple shades of meaning since it was coined by Thomas Huxley in 1876—there are theist agnostics and atheistic agnostics and a whole lot in between, Krasny writes—at the core of agnosticism is the notion of being “without knowledge.” Yet, as Krasny notes, Huxley used the term himself not to indicate merely lack of knowledge, but rather to imply that, when it comes to matters of the divine, knowledge (at the least the scientific kind) is simply unattainable.

Finish this review at http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2010-11-04/michael-krasny-agnostic-manifesto/