Faith
You know, we Agnostics get no respect. No respect, I tell ya.
We've been persecuted for millennia, but unlike most other religious groups, it's almost never been the "round 'em up and kill 'em all" kind of persecution. We're not even manipulated into living in little ghettos amongst our own kind, serving as a recognized underclass for the majority society. More typically, the more vocal among us have been individually shunned or tried for heresy, and the less vocal have just gone with the flow and pretended to believe in whatever they're supposed to. They get married in Churches to make the in-laws happy, tag along to the local religious festivities, and secretly wish they had a better reason to be there. If you're a Jew, all the enlightened Gentiles fret and remember to wish you a Happy Hanukkah! Agnostics get "Merry Christmas!" because, you know, they're really just like those Christians who only go to Church on Easter, only they don't go to Church on Easter.
Don't get me wrong. I like the presents. I like having big holidays with food. I just wish I wasn't lumped in with all the Jesus freaks by default. I have more important life agendas than starting a new holiday, and besides which, I wouldn't know what day to pick or what to call it. "Celebrate Divine Ambivalence day! Or don't! Whatever!" Everybody sing: Joy to the woooorld, for lack of any rationally compelling reason not to...
Part of the problem is the lack of any central authority. (Then again, this is one of the benefits as well. I can't imagine how horrid it must be, being an intelligent Christian and watching Jerry Fallwell speak on your behalf.) There's no Agnostic holy book, no Agnostic parables to tell the kids. There's only a fairly simple, somewhat non-committal doctrine that We Don't Know if God Exists. I suppose there's some wiggle room for fights between the "God probably doesn't exist but we're not sure" crowd and those Agnostics who think the "probably" caveat is an atheistic leap of faith. But when compared to the long tradition of animosity and disrespect between, say, Methodists and Episcopalians ("You Papist Fuckers still believe in transubstantiation!"), we don't spend a lot of time drumming up trouble.
We have our scientific heroes: Copernicus, Galileo, Darwin, and so on. Brave souls who took on the religious establishment in the pursuit of rational truth. But they never held up the banner of Agnosticism, and mostly weren't even Agnostics themselves. They questioned Church doctrine, which is a step in our direction, but they don't put strong human faces to a philosophy like a good, solid messenger from God. Moses parting the Red Sea, Jesus dying on the Cross -- these are MUCH more vivid, faith-inspiring images than Galileo double-checking his math.
And Agnosticism really is about faith. Faith is about what you fundamentally believe, whether or not it agrees with what you perceive about the world around you. If you're a Christian you believe that Jesus died for your sins, if you're a Muslim you believe there is but one God Allah and Mohammed is his prophet, and if you're an Agnostic you simply don't know whether or not God exists and don't think anyone CAN know. Not knowing is a more radical stance than you might think -- it goes against mankind's relentless search for ANSWERS. There's a basic presumption that it's better to guess and be wrong than to admit you don't really know. Watch a history documentary or take a science class, and when you get to the part where the world's foremost authorities are taking wild stabs in the dark the ratio of Wild Stabs to Admissions of Ignorance is typically about 30:1. "Given the scarcity of actual evidence," they'll start. "We don't really know, BUT..." And later there's a quiz to make sure everyone's memorized the correct series of mistaken suppositions and outright lies.
And like people of other faiths have to do, I see things that contradict Agnosticism all the time. The world is full of rationally inexplicable occurrences, coincidences that smack of divine justice, and even the odd bona-fide miracle. But my faith isn't shaken. I rationalize as best I can, and write the rest off to selective interpretation or biased reporting. I like to think that Creationists have a harder time cramming empirical observation of the world into their reality tunnel, but I freely admit it's the same process. It's faith. You hammer the square pegs into the round holes, and plug the gaps as best you can.
It's not a matter of personal choice at this stage, for me anyway. I might like believing in God. I'd certainly enjoy believing that by being a good person now, I'd have a reward coming to me in the afterlife. I'm completely enchanted with the ritual and sense of community associated with every religion from Catholicism to Paganism. Black robes and pointy symbols are cool! Ritual sex sounds great, and single sex cloisters of sworn celibates provide a high level of entertainment no matter what your religion. But I can't get over the very basic fact that I don't buy any of it. No matter how rich the tradition, or how complex the philosophy, it all sounds like a bunch of highly evolved fairy tales that started with some bullshit story some cave-dad fed his kid about where lightning comes from, and ended up with a lot of people killing each other in the Middle East.
Maybe it's the ambivalence of Agnosticism that keeps people from taking it seriously as a genuine religious faith. Atheists have at least committed to something. There's no God! Plain. Simple. Understandable. Agnostics want the best of both words, thus gaining the disapproval of people who think, with a little push, they could be persuaded one way or the other. Like bisexuals, only without the titillating photo spreads in Penthouse. (But with, fortunately, the fond memories of experimentation during college. This is the real gateway to general acceptance over time.)
Only Agnostics really *are* committed to something, which is that we have about as good a chance of knowing whether there's a "God" and what he "wants" as an amoebae has of spontaneously debugging Microsoft Windows. To quote a great, deceased poet, Space is Big. Really Big. And if you buy the premise that a single, intelligent entity set it all going, than all bets about the motivations of that entity are off. Not that it couldn't be true -- big universe, lot of possibilities -- but how would we know?
Really, let's stop flattering ourselves.