Rep. Mike Johnson, the newly elected Republican House speaker, used to conduct a seminar in churches premised on the idea that the United States is a “Christian nation.” This ministry, as he has referred to it, is yet more evidence that Johnson is committed to a hardcore Christian fundamentalism that shapes his views of politics and government.
The seminar, titled “Answers for Our Times: Government, Culture, and Christianity,” was organized by Onward Christian Education Services, Inc., a company owned by his wife, Kelly Johnson, a Christian counselor and anti-abortion activist who calls herself a “leader in the pro-family movement.” The website for her counseling service—which was taken down shortly after Johnson became speaker—described the seminar, which featured both her and Johnson, as exploring several questions, such as, “What is happening in America and how do we fix it?” The list includes this query: “Can our heritage as a Christian nation be preserved?” There were different versions of the seminar running from two-hour-long lectures to retreats lasting two days.
I wouldn’t class agnosticism as cowardly atheism, it’s very much its own class.
Atheism is the disbelief of gods or enlightened creation.
Agnosticism is just a “we don’t know” catch-all. There might be an Abrahamic god, with a heaven or hell that follows. There might be connected life and consciousness in the form of pantheism, where our consciousness dissipates and gets absorbed into the rest of existence. We might be living in a simulation, and wake up to a world with an entirely different set of rules and beliefs. Or maybe traditional atheism is right, this is our only existence, and we return to nothingness after death.
On a tangent, I’m weirded out by staunch atheists in the same way I’m weirded out by organized religion. We’re living subjective experiences of reality fed to us by electrified sacs of meat in our head, and even that could just be the truth on paper given to us by a simulation. We don’t know what we don’t know. We don’t remember what it was like before birth, but a nasty blow to the head could make it so we don’t remember what it was like yesterday. Observable and measurable fact is all we have, and anyone who claims to know what’s behind it or between the lines, or for that matter what isn’t there, is just elaborating on their own worldview, not empirical evidence.
I mean, technically there is no such thing as empirical evidence since we only know about it through our senses.
That being said, I personally find it far more interesting and amazing to assume that the universe is as we observe it. The idea that all the complexity we see results only from interactions between a small handful of different types of tiny wave-particle things is oddly inspiring to me.