I didn't start out agnostic. I grew up Roman Catholic and went through all the initial rites of passage of that particular religion: baptism, communion and confirmation. My mother, a single parent, was not exactly enthusiastic about religion despite (or maybe because of) having attended Catholic school as a child, but her best friend was a pious daily Mass enthusiast and priest groupie, so I guess she felt she had to keep up by making sure I became a certified Catholic.

Growing up, I did my best to feel some spiritual connection to the Almighty and even intensified my prayers to try to get the attention of God by scrunching my eyes shut and praying aloud with great fervor. But I never felt that God was present and listening to me. If anything, I felt silly. I still clung to a vestige of religion when I asked a Unitarian minister to officiate at my wedding. But gradually, over the years, my always shaky faith dissipated, and I found myself connecting strongly and naturally to agnosticism. One of the incidents that turned me off religion was when I asked a born-again Christian coworker if she believed that people who weren't Christians automatically went to Hell, and she replied yes. That seemed bigoted to me.

Why didn't I become an atheist? Maybe because of the failure of my Catholic training, which taught me to reject anything that smacks of blind belief and pie-in-the-sky gullibility. I've always felt that atheism is just another form of religion, the religion of no-God. Believing in the nonexistence of God is no more rational than believing in his existence, and just as faith-based.

I kind of admire the faith of the founding fathers of our country. Most of them were Deists, who are sort of half atheists. Deists believe that God created the world and then left the building. But I can't even go that far with the God thing. To me, the fanciful idea that humans are the Chosen Species of all the animal kingdom selected by God for his exclusive club is just too ridiculous to swallow.

And yet, as a rational being, I cannot entirely reject the notion of the existence of a Divine Being, just because it has never, and maybe never will be, proven or disproven. Agnostics leave the God door open. Some people accuse us of spiritual fence sitting. But we're more like the skeptics of Missouri; show us absolute proof and we'll believe.

I've always enjoyed learning about various religions, particularly eastern spiritual philosophies like Yoga, Buddhism and Taoism, and speculating about their precepts. I also like reading books and watching movies and TV shows that deal with the unexplained and the supernatural. But unlike billions of people worldwide who have absolute faith in their particular representation of God, I know that I will probably never know, and that's OK. Not knowing has made establishing my personal ethics and discovering the meaning of my life and my place in the world intriguing and challenging. Sometimes that's a blessing, and sometimes it's a curse. But being an open-minded agnostic is never boring and always hopeful. Embracing the closed mind of atheism would be too bleak for my taste.