On Liberty

Open Agnosticism - J.S.Mill and the 19th Century - Rebel X - Overture - Rushdie & Bulgakov

🍏

Open Agnosticism

Reflective people understand that we can be fooled, and that we can fool ourselves. All around us in 2025 we see people believing things that just aren't true. Russians are the victims of NATO. Ukraine started the war. Vaccines are the real threat. Global warming’s a hoax. The Democrats stole the election in 2019. Sellers, not buyers, pay tariffs. Etc. And on the global stage we see religious groups continue to slander and hate each other, even though they all insist they’re acting in the name of God. A televangelist milks another congregant, a Russian priest blesses another bomb, a jihadi slaughters dancers in a desert, a group of brahmins attacks a village of Untouchables, a Jewish settler takes another plot of land. In such a world, it’s natural to keep an open mind, to doubt openly, and to be skeptical about religious conviction.

Although it may surprise a truthful doubter to find belief, and although it may disconcert a truthful believer to find doubt, the adjective here (truthful) is capable of overpowering both nouns (doubter and believer). Who will blame seekers for pledging allegiance to truth, no matter what they find? For such people, the notion of a double refuge may be helpful, since it explores how they can allow themselves to find a Greater Spiritual Meaning, and also how they can thrive even when they don’t.

I should note that hard agnosticism is less helpful here than open agnosticism. Hard agnostics insist that we can never know whether or not spiritual Truth exists, whereas open agnostics doubt the eternal nature of doubt. Open agnostics think, Who knows? Some day we may know. (I define and compare open and hard agnosticism more fully in A Middle Position, Rivers of Change, Huxley’s Definition, and The Unconvinced.)

It’s important to remember that open agnostics don’t aim to stop theists from believing. Quite the opposite. Who doesn’t want to find a complete and total Meaning? Who doesn’t want to believe that the universe is controlled by benevolence, and that we have an eternal soul? Agnostics just haven't come to this conclusion. Perhaps they will some day, or perhaps they never will.

My point is that it doesn't matter. God is patient. There’s always time in a spiritual (or essentialist) universe to find a Greater Truth. There’s all the time in the world, and beyond. If there is in fact a spiritual world and an afterlife, and if God is in fact a benevolent Guardian of the universe, then there will be time to embrace a solid, unchangeable belief. From the third century of Origen to the present day of Father Richard Rohr, theologians of Grace have argued that God simply isn’t in the business of damnation — let alone eternal damnation.

Origen of Alexandria (c. 185 – 253 AD)

In the struggle toward love and truth, no one needs to be left behind. In the meantime, the doubter who leans towards belief, and the believer who entertains doubt, can find a resting place in the double refuge.

🍏

J.S. Mill and the 19th Century

While much of what I write about in The Double Refuge is on the philosophical and poetic side, I also emphasize the role of politics. In particular, I argue that the freedom to follow any path — whether it’s that of belief, doubt, or disbelief — is most easily exercised in liberal environments. While versions of agnosticism can be found from the Mesopotamians to the Persians, Greeks, and Romantics, agnosticism gets its name from Thomas Huxley, who lived in mid-19th century England. Huxley defines agnosticism in the 1860s, amid the fusion of scientific disciplines in the middle of the 19th century. This was also a time of great political change, with various reform laws moving England slowly toward a functioning democracy. Huxley’s version of agnosticism runs parallel to the type of open, critical-minded society envisioned by John Stuart Mill, whose On Liberty was published in 1859, the same year as Darwin’s On the Origin of Species. The evolution of science, and the science of evolution, evolved in step with liberal democracy. 

(I go into these 19th century currents of thought in 🦖 At the Wild & Fog. In this chapter, I use Dickens’ novel Bleak House to chart the interactions between belief, doubt, science, and the survival of Christian ideals. See A Misty Maze, But Not Without a Plan - Pope: A Mighty Maze - What the Dickens - Love Amid the Fog - God Among the Scientists - Hutton’s Hammer - Jardine’s Monkeys - Darwin’s God.)

Agnosticism arises in a liberal context, and a liberal context continues to be extremely beneficial to the free operation of thought and belief. We aren’t free to think and explore the variety of thoughts that characterize agnosticism if we’re censored from reading and writing, or if we’re forbidden to express ourselves, assemble freely, or decide our communal future. Likewise, open explorations of theism and atheism require free and tolerant environments, as well as the political will to maintain those environments.

🍏

Rebel X

As regards Christianity, we often see its mystical infrastructure and its doctrinal superstructure, but we sometimes overlook the political structure which allows a church to exist in this batter’d caravanserai, this stark world of division and violence. While we gild the altars and polish the gargoyles, we hear the sound of tanks rumbling down the street. F.R. Scott gets at this danger in his poem “Overture,” written in 1945:

We can understand the historical novelty, and the deep human need, for Forgiveness and Grace. We welcome these with an open heart. We can also understand the need for confession (the recognition that we aren’t perfect) as well as the need for service to others (to have a social conscience). But we tend to overlook, or downplay, the political context. We construct convenient hierarchies, institutionalized churches, and conservative doctrines, but we often overlook that Jesus challenged spiritual hierarchy, institutionalized religion, and conservative doctrine. One might even say that Jesus was a nonviolent revolutionary. Rebel X. Certainly he stood up to the Jewish and Roman elite, and certainly he refused to kowtow or equivocate. If the emperor had no clothes, he’d shout out loudly in the crowd, even while the guards, on the nod from the moneyed elite, moved in to drag him away.

The systems we set up tend to repeat themselves. As hard as we struggle toward liberty, equality, and fraternity, the old influences of power, money, and exclusivity rise up from the deep to nip at our heels. So we end up with political and economic systems that favour the wealthy, and religious systems that favour doctrine and compliance. These systems tend to ignore those on the periphery, in their shanty towns of random poles and tarps, or lost in the crowd. If Jesus were around, and he saw the gilded offices, the crowded food banks, and the modern day emperors with their imaginary perfections of dress and design, he’d shout at the top of his lungs.

The spirit of helping others, of getting outside our own frame of mind so that we can hear and see what lies beyond us, is a universal human ability. It’s what drives us to connect with the world around us in a positive way, using compassion and critical thinking together so that we can feel and understand what others feel. Shakespeare says this eloquently in King Lear: banished from wealth and privilege, and alone on a storm-beaten heath, Lear finally empathizes with the plight of the poor citizens he had ignored all of his life:

Poor naked wretches, wheresoe’er you are,
That bide the pelting of this pitiless storm,
How shall your houseless heads and unfed sides,
Your looped and windowed raggedness defend you
From seasons such as these? O, I have ta’en
Too little care of this. Take physic, pomp.
Expose thyself to feel what wretches feel,
That thou may’st shake the superflux to them
And show the heavens more just.

What Lear says of the heavens, I would say of atheism, doubt, and belief: none of them can be divorced from politics, economics, and basic human decency; all of them show themselves more just, more worth respecting when they go beyond self-interest. When they are open, liberal, charitable, and loving.

By political I don’t just mean universal suffrage and rights, which are of course crucial. I also mean the recognition of others, the understanding of things that we find strange or uncomfortable, and the willingness to share with strangers not only power and wealth, but also the pursuit of meaning and truth.

🍏

Rushdie & Bulgakov

Two examples of the relation between politics, agnosticism, theism, and mysticism can be found in the novels of Salman Rushdie and Mikhail Bulgakov. In 🇮🇳 The Fiction of Doubt (starting with 🇮🇳 The Rise of the Simurg), I explore how Rushdie works iconoclasm in many ways, often tearing into the heart of belief to see if he can turn religious hatred and violence into tolerance and community. Unfortunately, history is what it is, and Rushdie often finds that the world just rips that loving heart to shreds, and all that’s left is the ideal of unity.

This ideal comes up again and again in Rushdie’s fiction in the mythical figure of the Simurg. In Sufi poetry (especially Attar’s Conference of the Birds), this King of Birds is symbolic of the God that lies within us. The word Simurg comes from the Persian si murg or thirty birds, who in Attar’s poem are 30 truth-seekers who fly to the top of Mount of Qaf. There they find that their unified spirits, once they have annihilated the selfish self which keeps them apart, are the closest they can come to God. The Simurg thus symbolizes unified belief, the open spiritual connection between disparate people.

The Simurg finds its most powerful symbolism in the annihilation of the self — especially the annihilation of the prejudices that lead to hatred between Hindus and Muslims. In Rushdie this mystical annihilation is both political or social, in the sense that it proceeds from a unity of diversity. It’s also mystical in that it’s magical. To use the literary jargon of the day, it’s the idealism found within Rushdie’s magical realism. This term will be helpful in understanding the link between matter and spirit that I suggest in the notion of the double refuge.

Rushdie’s iconoclastic way of writing about God and religion unfotunately led to a Persian death sentence that kept him under the protection of Scotland Yard for a decade. The threat finally morphed into the demonic form of a violent man with a knife that stabbed him 15 times, and almost to death. Rushdie doesn’t even want to know what that man believes, because what he believes led him to do what he did.

My second example of the combination of politics and mysticism occurs in my exploration of the Ukraine war in Crisis 22 (this exploration is not part of The Double Refuge). Within the chapter, Metaphors, you’ll find 🚥 Symbolic Landscape, 🌊 Russian Horses, 🐎 Magic Black Horses, and 🍷 Nightingales. These pages analyze how Mikhail Bulgakov uses religion in a visionary way to imagine the totalitarianism of the Soviet state, as well as to suggest the reconstruction, or resurrection, of spiritual life within a greater cosmic context. One of the most powerful images he uses is that of a Night Flight of horses, led by Satan, yet a Satan that clearly works for the Man Upstairs. The Flight goes through the mists of evil, repressive politics, militant atheism, etc. to arrive at a vision of Christian peace, forgiveness, and tranquility.

The crazy violent flight of the troika in Gogol’s novel Dead Souls becomes in Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita a flight of redemptive horses, flying over the dark night of Moscow and Russia. Their flight toward dawn is the end of the violence of Pilate and the Roman Empire. It’s also the end of the Soviet system of repression that kept millions terrified, and kept Bulgakov’s novel hidden all his life. The Master and Margarita helps us to imagine the possibility of a new dawn of peace — something we need in these days of bombs dropping on apartments and children’s hospitals.

🍏

Next: 🍏 Refuge and Absinthe

Back to Top

Contents - Detailed Contents - Core Beliefs - Overview