I have observed that the world has suffered far less from ignorance than from pretensions to knowledge.  It is not skeptics or explorers but fanatics and ideologues who menace decency and progress.  No agnostic has ever burned anyone at the stake or tortured a pagan, a heretic, or an unbeliever.
--Daniel J. Boorstin

One of the proofs of the immortality of the soul is that myriads have believed it.  The also believed the world was flat.
--Mark Twain

Faith means making a virtue out of not thinking.  It's nothing to brag about.  And those who preach faith and enable and elevate it are intellectual slave holders, keeping mankind in a bondage to fantasy and nonsesnse that has spawned and justified so much lunacy and destruction.
--Bill Maher

A casual stroll through the lunatic asylum shows that faith does not prove anything.
--Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

Say what you will about the sweet miracle of unquestioning faith, I consider a capacity for it terrifying and absolutely vile.
--Kurt Vonnegut

The most costly of all follies it to believe passionately in the palpably not true.
--H.L. Mencken

An agnostic is an atheist without the courage of his convictions.
--Studs Terkel

I was raised an atheist.  Every Sunday, we went nowhere.  We prayed for nothing.  And all our prayers were answered.
--Heidi Joyce

I am an agnotologist, no doubt.  That is to say, I am fascinated with all that we do not know, with the gray areas and uncertainties of life, death, and everything.  Agnostic = Doesn't Know.  Agnotology = Study of Ignorance.  Science depends on us being very clear about what we do not know yet, so that we can devise ways to try to find out.

( Great article here from the NY TimesCollapse )

"Isn't it sad to go to your grave without ever wondering why you
were born? Who, with such a thought, would not spring from bed,
eager to resume discovering the world and rejoicing to be part
of it?" ~Richard Dawkins

"A religion old or new, that stressed the magnificence of the universe
as revealed by modern science, might be able to draw forth reserves
of reverence and awe hardly tapped by the conventional faiths.
Sooner or later, such a religion will emerge."
~Carl Sagan

"Not only is the universe stranger than we imagine, it is stranger
than we can imagine."
~Sir Arthur Eddington (1882 - 1944)

"Not only are we in the universe, the universe is in us. I don't know of
any deeper spiritual feeling than what that brings upon me."
~Neil deGrasse Tyson
www.tinyurl.com/TysonSpirituality

“Spirituality is about being awake. It’s the attempt to transcend
the mundane, sleepwalking experience of life we all fall into, to
tap into the wonder of being a conscious and grateful thing in
the midst of an astonishing universe. It doesn’t require religion. ”
~Dale McGowan, author of "Atheism for Dummies"

An agnostic Buddhist eschews atheism as much as theism, and is as reluctant to regard the universe as devoid of meaning as endowed with meaning. For to deny either God or meaning is simply the antithesis of affirming them. Yet such an agnostic stance is not based on disinterest. It is founded on a passionate recognition that I do not know. It confronts the enormity of having been born instead of reaching for the consolation of a belief. It strips away, layer by layer, the views that conceal the mystery of being here--either by affirming it as something or denying it as nothing.
--Stephen Bachelor in Buddhism Without Beliefs page 19.

Everybody's wonderin' what and where they all came from
Everybody's worried 'bout where they're gonna go when the whole thing's done
Nobody knows for certain so it's all the same to me
I think I'll just let the mystery be
( an old traditionalCollapse )

The Vatican reports worldwide adherent percentages at:
19.2% Muslim
17.4% Catholic
33% all flavors of Christian

In the US we are supposedly 76.5% Christian.
( randomness about ismsCollapse )