I lean theist. Not because I had some revelatory vision or because I’m scared of the void, but because when I stack the arguments—cosmological, moral, teleological—I find the case for some kind of divine intelligence more compelling than the case against. Not airtight, not infallible, just… weightier.

There’s also the social side: I genuinely think the modern world has gotten worse as religious belief has withered. Not just spiritually, but materially—less cohesion, less purpose, more nihilism, more people LARPing their way into meaning via consumption, dopamine, or tribal rage.

And honestly? Even if both outcomes were equally plausible, I’d still rather live in a world shaped by divine intent than one birthed from indifference. If that sounds like wishful thinking, fine. But you can desire something and believe it for reasons deeper than just comfort.

Yes, technically speaking, agnostics fall under the “atheist” umbrella since we don’t claim definitive belief in a creator. But that definition is sterile and unhelpful in practice.

Most self-described atheists aren’t agnostics. They’re confident there is no god- and often hostile toward the idea of one. That’s not me. I find the theist position more convincing, not less. And if I had to choose a world shaped by spiritual order vs one that wasn’t, I’d choose the former every time.

So no - I don’t call myself an atheist, even if I’d pass the semantic purity test. Language is about clarity, not academic checkboxes.

I’ve heard the criticism: “You’re just afraid to take a side.” That only makes sense if you think uncertainty is cowardice.

But in reality, declaring absolute certainty on something as massive as the existence of a creator feels more like vanity than bravery. I’m not sitting on the fence—I’m looking for the actual ground. If you don’t know something, pretending you do because everyone demands a binary answer isn’t clarity. It’s performance.

That’s the other pushback: If you’re skeptical about god, how do you trust anything?

Easy. I trust plenty of things—just not unconditionally. I don’t need metaphysical certainty to make a cup of tea, lock my door, or say “thank you.” But when it comes to the question of divine creation—the origin, purpose, and metaphysical structure of all existence—I think it deserves more scrutiny than what you’d give a train timetable.

If ever there was a topic worthy of slow, careful thinking, it’s this one.

If I’m not certain about the creator, I’m even less certain about the fine details—afterlives, pantheons, divine law, etc. I don’t think any religion has a complete monopoly on truth. But that doesn’t mean I treat them all as interchangeable fluff either.

More likely, in my view, is that something real—something sacred—has echoed throughout history, and different people across time interpreted and built traditions around it. Some got closer than others. Some warped it entirely. But that doesn’t mean the sacred wasn’t there to begin with.

Religions didn’t just appear out of boredom. They codified moral instincts, cosmological patterns, and lived experiences that stretched beyond what reason alone could solve.

I don’t blindly follow any religion, but I do pay close attention to what’s survived.

If a teaching has lasted centuries, across different cultures—especially isolated ones—it probably has some kind of underlying value. Not always literal truth, but something resonant enough to withstand time, decay, conquest, translation errors, and reformations. That’s not something to ignore.

Religious rituals, moral laws, festivals, even taboos—these aren’t just spiritual debris. They’re signals. Not all of them are correct, but they’re telling us something. And we’d be fools to discard them all just because they weren’t verified by peer review.

Even if you think the whole divine thing is fantasy, you should still study religion. Civilizations don’t revolve around fairy tales for nothing. Structures like marriage, dietary codes, rites of passage, sin, virtue—these shaped humanity, held communities together, and gave people a framework bigger than their own dopamine loops.

You don’t need to believe in heaven to see the value in a cathedral. You don’t need to fear hell to recognize that boundaries matter. You don’t need to be a theist to realize we’re floundering without something above us.

And maybe, just maybe, that “something” is still there—watching, waiting, whispering in the gaps.