From time to time I run across people in the rooms and elsewhere who ask about my religious beliefs. When I tell them that I am agnostic, the responses vary from “Oh” to “I’ll pray for you.” (Not too many of those, thank goodness.) Occasionally someone will ask how it’s possible for me not to believe in a God, since I profess to have turned my will and my life over to a Higher Power. If they seem sincerely interested, I may try to explain.

To me, whether there is or is not a God (theism or atheism) is irrelevant to my program. I’m quite willing to admit that I couldn’t, the other folks in the rooms could, and I needed to learn from them and do what they did in order to survive my addiction(s). That, to me, exhibits all the humility and acceptance of my own non-God-ness needed to progress in my recovery.

Contrary to popular belief agnostics do not believe that there is no God, but rather that whether there is a God is ultimately unknowable. That is either a tenable position or not, depending on one’s feelings about an afterlife or lack thereof, but it’s really pretty balanced when you think about it. Not knowing is a pretty good mental state to maintain if we can, because that’s when we’re open to learning and experiencing new things. “Beginner’s mind,” as the Buddhists say, or as another of my favorites goes, “You can’t teach a man what he thinks he already knows.”

Most of us are more interested in what we already know, or think we know, than in learning something new. If I believe there is a God, and in reality there isn’t, no matter how obvious that is I’ll never see it because I am blinded by my belief that there is. Likewise, if I believe that God doesn’t exist, God could be right in front of me and I wouldn’t be able to see that because of my belief that there isn’t a God.

While it’s pretty scary to think that the safety net one has depended on to catch them at the next stage of existence might not be there, to me it’s even scarier to remember the way theistic beliefs blinded me to myriad wonderful things about the world and the universe that were contradictory to them. That’s especially true when I’ve yet to encounter proof one way or the other about the existence of a deity or deities. Should credible information come to my attention I might be swayed one way or the other, but it wouldn’t change one iota of how I live my life. I do my best and if a theoretical God asks for more than that I’m sunk anyway.

In either case our beliefs–whatever they may be–can blind us from seeing reality. To that extent an open mind, coming from either direction, is a desirable thing to have.