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01/27/2002 Archived Entry: "Agnostic"

Picture the scene: It's about midnight, and we've been playing poker for about three hours. Someone walks into the room containing myself and four other hardened players, and mentions that he's going to be watching Rush Hour 2 on his computer. We nod, and have a discussion about university bandwidth charges and the fact that my college is in its rightful place of number one among bandwidth users.

Five minutes of subjective time passes, and the same person returns, having finished watching the movie. All the players fall into a stunned silence. Is it really 2am? It is. Perhaps that explains the reason why we can't keep track of who's dealing from one hand to another, let alone within a single hand...

New invented adjective: declenched, as in 'when I heard what she said, I felt a bit declenched inside.'

Reading Sophie's World, I finally found out (or at least, was reminded of) the proper definition of an agnostic, i.e., 'one who holds that the existence of anything beyond and behind material phenomena is unknown and (so far as can be judged) unknowable, and especially that a First Cause and an unseen world are subjects of which we know nothing,' (definition from Oxford English Dictionary). In terms of God, where it is usually referred to, it does not mean, 'Well, I'm not sure whether there's a God or not,' or some such wishy-washy nonsense, it actually means, 'You can't prove or disprove the existence of God.' So I think I'm an agnostic, not an athest.