Why Can't Agnostics Get Any Respect?

Most people lump atheists and agnostics together, which is just plain dumb, as simple-minded as lumping together Christians and Muslims, because they both believe in one God.

Knowing there is no God and not knowing if there is a God are two completely different beliefs.

Why is that so difficult for so many people to comprehend?

At least we have Matt Taibbi to speak up for agnosticism.

Via Andrew Sullivan:

I’m always on the lookout for religion’s latest counter-arguments, the new rhetorical approaches that God People are constantly fine-tuning for use in pimping the righteousness of faith (and for demonstrating the moral dissoluteness of agnostics like myself). There isn’t an inherently irresolvable metaphysical challenge that comes close to wasting as much of the world’s time and energy as this particular one. It’s the intellectual equivalent of the eternal R&D quest for a baldness cure: you just never stop being surprised at how many different ways men can find to fail at growing hair...

As for the actual argument, it’s the same old stuff religious apologists have been croaking out since the days of Bertrand Russell — namely that because science is inadequate to explain the mysteries of existence, faith must be necessary. Life would be meaningless without religion, therefore we must have religion.

But this sort of thinking is exactly what most agnostics find ridiculous about religion and religious people, who seem incapable of looking at the world unless it’s through the prism of some kind of belief system. They seem to think that if one doesn’t believe in God, one must believe in something else, because to live without answers would be intolerable. And maybe that’s true of the humorless Richard Dawkins, who does seem actually to have tried to turn atheism into a kind of religion unto itself. But there are plenty of other people who are simply comfortable not knowing the answers. It always seemed weird to me that this quality of not needing an explanation and just being cool with what few answers we have  inspires such verbose indignation in people like Eagleton and Fish. They seem determined to prove that the quality of not believing in heaven and hell and burning bushes and saints is a rigid dogma all unto itself, as though it required a concerted intellectual effort to disbelieve in a God who thinks gays (Leviticus 20:13) or people who work on Sunday (Exodus 35:2) should be put to death. They’ll tie themselves into knots arguing this, and they’ll probably never stop. It’s really strange.

But no less than Graham Greene failed to see the distinction, even as he admired the effort (from The Lawless Roads):

For one can respect an atheist as one cannot respect a deist: once accept a God and reason should carry you further, but to accept nothing at all -- that requires some stubbornness, some courage.

Seems to me that by that standard, agnosticism requires considerably more guts than atheism. 

John Lennon probably put it best (in one of his disbelieving moods)

Above us, only sky...

Sky Blue, by question of lust.