Agnostic Quotes

“So when dogmatic atheists assume that science has all the answers, or imagine that it soon will, they are no more immune than the most literal religious fundamentalist to the deceptive enchantment of certainty.”
― Lesley Hazleton, Agnostic: A Spirited Manifesto

“Spiritual but not religious” is an expression of a very human yearning for an opening of mind and heart—a sense of soul and spirit that enhances day-to-day experience instead of tamping it down and channeling it into the narrow confines of stick-and-carrot orthodoxy. It’s a rejection of traditional tenets and pieties, of doctrine and dogma and judgment. It resists the usual attempts to pigeonhole, saying, “Spare me your labels.” It is, at heart, agnostic. —”
― Lesley Hazleton, Agnostic: A Spirited Manifesto

“humans are pattern-seeking creatures. That is, we seek out narrative. Or rather, we impose it.”
― Lesley Hazleton, Agnostic: A Spirited Manifesto

“find more honest ways—both intellectually and emotionally—to talk about such magnificent intangibles as God, infinity, and consciousness.”
― Lesley Hazleton, Agnostic: A Spirited Manifesto

“Moral compasses” are often invoked, as though religion always points north. It doesn’t seem to have occurred to the graybeards that religion and morality are not synonymous”
― Lesley Hazleton, Agnostic: A Spirited Manifesto

“There is nothing restful about real faith. Where belief is the easy way out, a comfortable position for pious couch potatoes, faith demands an active engagement with uncertainty. “Doubt,” wrote playwright John Patrick Shanley in the introduction to his drama of that name, “requires more courage than conviction does, and more energy; because conviction is a resting place and doubt is infinite—it is a passionate exercise.” An exercise of the heart, that is, as much as of the mind—not of one against the other, but of the two interwoven, each constantly challenging and thus enriching the other.”
― Lesley Hazleton, Agnostic: A Spirited Manifesto

“Where belief tries to expel doubt, faith walks with it, offering no easy answers. Belief insists, while faith hopes and trusts. The one is demanded, the other freely given, and this freedom means that real faith is both difficult and stubborn. It involves an ongoing struggle, a continual questioning of what we think we know, a wrestling with issues and ideas. It goes hand-in-hand with doubt, in a never-ending conversation with it. And sometimes even in conscious defiance of it.”
― Lesley Hazleton, Agnostic: A Spirited Manifesto