Radical Uncertainty, Family Tables, and the Quiet Honesty of not Pretending

Mar 23

I don’t have a clean label for what I believe.

If someone forced me to pick from the usual shelf—atheist, agnostic, spiritual-but-not-religious—I’d probably land closest to atheist, at least in the plain sense that I do not subscribe to the metaphysical architectures offered by most monotheistic and polytheistic religions. No single creator orchestrating events. No pantheon of divine personalities trading favors. No invisible scoreboard turning human life into a test with rubrics, punishments, and secret rewards. And, yes, I know agnostic might be the technically cleaner label in the narrowest sense, since it literally points to a lack of knowledge. But in practice, that word muddies the water fast. It can make it sound like I’m quietly leaving room for divine metaphysics I do not actually believe are at work. I’m more confident than that. So, atheist feels closer, even if it is not perfectly exact.

But I’ve never felt like the label was the point. My view of things does not arrive with a banner. It arrives as a question that refuses to stay solved.

The best phrase I’ve found for that posture is radical uncertainty. I did not invent the term. I’m borrowing it in the way it tends to appear in philosophy and skeptical traditions, as a form of intellectual humility about ultimate claims. Not “nothing is true.” Not “all ideas are equal.” Not a shrug dressed up as wisdom. More like this: we can know quite a lot about the world, but when it comes to the largest metaphysical declarations—God, gods, cosmic purpose, what happens after death—certainty is cheap and justification is hard. Radical uncertainty means I try to keep my grip loose where the evidence is thin, and I try not to confuse conviction with proof.

This matters to me in part because family is where beliefs stop being abstract. My in-laws are deeply Catholic. Their faith is not a hobby. It is more like a grammar. It shapes their calendar, their conscience, their understanding of what life means and where it goes. I respect that sincerity even when I do not share its conclusions. And I also know that in families like this, certain differences can become quietly loud over time.

One of those differences is simple enough to fit in a sentence: our kids were not baptized.

The Baptism Question, and a Small Family Difference

Our kids were not baptized, and it was not because I was trying to make a statement. It was not a protest. It was not a performance. It was something closer to indifference paired with a kind of ethical reluctance to pretend.

I do not believe baptism changes anything about a child’s essence or destiny. I do not think water and words do metaphysical work. I can understand why believers see the ritual as beautiful, protective, binding, even urgent. But from my vantage point, it is symbolic—meaningful if you already accept the framework, inert if you do not.

I’ve had this conversation a few times in my own family too—not with my in-laws, but with my dad, my actual blood father. It is not a major disagreement. It belongs to the category of small, familiar differences that do not have to become friction.

His view is basically that baptizing them is what creates the option later. You do it early, and then when they are older, they can decide whether to lean into it or drift away. In his mind, baptism is not a trap. It is a door. It is giving them the choice.

I see almost the opposite. I think baptizing a child often makes the later “choice” less like a choice and more like gravity. It becomes a story placed on them before they can even form a question. Later, the child is not choosing freely so much as deciding whether they are willing to step out of something that already has momentum, history, and expectation behind it.

So, to me, not baptizing them is what keeps the door wider open.

And, again, this is not some dramatic rift. It is in the same category as our long-running disagreement about that one song. I say it is the itsy bitsy spider. He insists it is the teensy weensy spider. I have never heard it that way in my life, and he is equally baffled that I have not. That is the vibe. We disagree, we laugh, we keep going.

If the kids grow up and feel drawn to Catholicism—or to any other religion—they can choose it when the yes can actually mean something. And if they choose nothing, that is fine too. I am not trying to deprive them of anything. I am trying to leave them room.

Two Early Tells

If I’m honest, none of this began as a polished adult position. It began as a feeling, the kind you have before you have the vocabulary to defend it.

One memory is sitting in pews as a kid, listening to the rhythms of church, and thinking, almost guiltily, I’m too old for this. Not that it was evil. Not that the people around me were foolish. Just a bodily sense that the whole performance was aimed at someone younger than whoever I had already become. Like I had aged out of a script.

Another memory comes from PSR—sixth grade or somewhere around there—when someone asked that classic question: could God create a rock so heavy He could not lift it?

Even then, the question struck me as incoherent, like a word game pretending to be a profound test. It felt rigged. It was either designed to herd you toward “God can do anything,” or to train you to treat contradiction as depth. But, I could not sign on the dotted line. I remember thinking, in my own half-formed way, that if a concept requires you to call nonsense meaningful, the concept may not be doing the work you think it is doing.

Those moments did not prove anything. They did not solve God. But, they planted a seed. They left me with the feeling that religion was asking for a kind of assent I was not built to give.

Heaven, a Four-Year-Old, and the Moment the Question Became Real

I did not expect to have a serious theological conversation with my daughter when she was four. I assumed I had a few more years before I would need to find language for something as heavy as eternity.

But, one night, I put Charlotte to bed like normal. Fifteen minutes later she started calling out for me to come back in. She was fine, just unsettled, the way kids sometimes are when the lights go off and their minds decide not to.

Then she said, very clearly, “I don’t want to go to heaven.”

She said it again, like she needed to hear the sentence outside herself. “Do I have to go to heaven?”

It is hard to describe what happens in you as a parent when your kid asks something like that. Part of me wanted to comfort her the way you comfort any fear—soft voice, simple reassurance, make it smaller. Another part of me felt the weight of the moment. This is what it means to raise a person. Eventually they run into the big questions. Not because you sat them down for a lecture, but because the world leaks into them. A story gets told at school, or by a friend, or in a book. A concept sticks. A fear forms around it.

I started with diplomacy. I told her that is how the story goes for good people, and that heaven is supposed to be a good place. Thankfully death never came up. I did not want to open that door in a bedtime conversation where she was already scared.

Then I said something else, gently, and it felt like the most honest pivot I could manage: not everyone believes that story is true.

But, I could feel myself getting pulled toward one of two bad options—a dissertation or a dodge. Neither seemed right for a four-year-old.

So, I did what I suspect parenting often is: I tried to thread the needle.

I switched to language she could actually hold, and I said, “You don’t have to go to heaven if you don’t want to.”

Was it perfectly precise? No. Was it still honest in the way that mattered at bedtime? I think so. I was not telling her heaven is definitely real or definitely fake. I was not demanding she accept or reject anything. I was trying to give her a sense of agency inside a story that can feel coercive even to adults, let alone a child who has just realized people talk about forever as if it were a place with rules.

And then, because children are children and not philosophers with notebooks, the fear seems to have passed, at least for now. Lately she has been “packing for heaven,” putting toys and books and other treasures into boxes and announcing that “we all need to take two,” which is funny for several reasons, including the fact that there are more of us than that. I am not grading a four-year-old’s math, obviously. I’m just struck by how quickly dread can turn into play once a kid gets a little room around the idea.

So now, when she starts packing for heaven, I mostly just meet her there. “Sure.” Real enthusiastic. No sermon. No correction. No sudden lecture on mortality. Around the house we all keep saying some version of, “It’s going to be a while before you need to think about that.” And, thankfully, death itself still has not really become the subject.

Maybe that is part of the real job here—not to solve the question too early, and not to load it with more fear than it already carries. Just to help her live near it without getting trapped by it.

Because that moment still feels big to me. It turned this whole essay from an abstract explanation—my beliefs, my in-laws, my choices—into something more immediate. This is not just about whether I accept a set of metaphysical claims. It is about what I hand my kids when they are afraid. It is about how I teach them to live with questions without giving them nightmares.

And, in a strange way, it is also about what I will not do. I will not use certainty as a sedative if it is not true for me. I also will not dump adult existential dread into a child’s lap just because I value honesty. The job is to be both honest and kind, and sometimes that means choosing the truest sentence a child can actually digest.

Grace at the Table, and the Slow Drift Toward not Faking It

If baptism is the headline version of the tension, grace before meals is the everyday version—the kind of thing that happens a thousand times and leaves little residues.

I used to say grace. I bowed my head and spoke the words. It felt like courtesy, like fitting into the moment. It also, if I’m being honest, felt like avoiding friction. It is easy to play along when you do not want the evening to tip into debate.

Then I shifted. For a long stretch, I would clasp my hands, bow my head, and stay silent. That seemed like a workable middle—participating in the shape of the ritual without saying things I did not actually mean.

These days, I am more likely to just sit quietly. Still present. Still respectful. Just not performing the gestures anymore.

That shift is not meant as disrespect. It is the opposite. It is a small commitment to honesty. I am not here to mock anyone. I am here because I love these people. But, I also cannot keep playacting belief forever without it hardening into something else—resentment, maybe, or some private sense of fraudulence.

Silence feels cleaner.

And, it is strange, because despite the way this difference hovers at the edges of gatherings, no one has ever directly asked me, “So what do you believe?”

I have rehearsed answers in my head anyway—long answers, careful answers, answers with footnotes and caveats. But, I think if someone ever did ask me plainly, my reply would be plain too:

“I don’t really know. I’m just not willing to subscribe to any religion or metaphysical system.”

That is it. No speech. No takedown. No counter-sermon. Just an honest admission that I do not see what other people seem to see, and I am not willing to pretend that I do.

This Isn’t a Vibe: it Comes From Reading, not Ignorance

One thing I want to make clear—mostly to myself, but also to anyone tempted to assume disbelief is just shallow contrarianism—is that this does not come from an uninformed place.

I have read theology. I have read arguments meant to be taken seriously, not just simplified slogans. I have spent time with Saint Thomas Aquinas—and, yes, I am using the Saint on purpose. Part of that is respect for the tradition even as I disagree with its claims. Part of it is simpler than that: it is a legitimate title in the context of Catholic history, in the same way “Doctor of the Church” or “Pope” or “Father” are real titles within that world. I am not invoking mystical reverence. I am acknowledging the category the man actually occupies for the people I’m writing about, and for the history he helped shape.

And, Aquinas is formidable. He does not wave his hands around vague spiritual feeling. He builds an edifice, and he builds much of it through the Summa Theologica—carefully, systematically, article by article, objection by objection, reply by reply. There is a seriousness to that architecture that I respect even where I reject the structure itself. Reading him does not make me believe. But, it does keep me honest. It reminds me that if I am going to disagree, I should at least disagree with the strongest version of the argument, not a cartoon.

I have also read biblical scholarship—Bart Ehrman, for example—work that does not treat the Bible as a single clean object dropped from the sky, but as a complicated library of texts written, edited, copied, argued over, canonized, and translated across time by human beings in specific historical contexts.

What Ehrman gave me, more than anything, was a way to separate the Jesus of faith from the Jesus of history without pretending the historical question is meaningless. He helped convince me that the historical Jesus was a real person—an actual first-century Jewish preacher with real followers, shaped by the politics and expectations of his time. Not a miracle machine. Not a magician violating physics on command. But, a charismatic leader whose impact was later amplified, interpreted, and mythologized by communities trying to understand what they thought they had encountered.

He has made that point directly in more than one place. In Did Jesus Exist? he pushes back hard against the idea that Jesus was a complete fabrication. In Jesus: Apocalyptic Prophet of the New Millennium he situates Jesus inside a specific first-century Jewish worldview, one shaped by apocalyptic expectation and charismatic preaching. That does not make me believe in miracles. It does not make me accept divinity. But, it does make the historical core feel more plausible to me. It lets me take the man seriously without being forced into the metaphysics.

So, when I say I am unconvinced, I do not mean I never looked. I mean I looked, and I stayed unconvinced about the metaphysical claims. If anything, reading widely has made me more respectful of believers who actually know what they believe, and more wary of easy certainty that treats doubt as sin and complexity as threat.

What Radical Uncertainty Looks Like in Practice

Radical uncertainty, for me, is a refusal to outsource my mind.

I cannot prove there is no god. I also cannot prove there are no gods. But, when I look at the claims religions make—across continents, centuries, and competing traditions—I notice how wildly incompatible they are while each insists it possesses the final word.

And, when I examine the gods themselves—whether the single omnipotent lawgiver or a whole pantheon of divine personalities—I keep noticing how human they are. They have preferences. They have rules. They care about ritual precision. They issue commands that look suspiciously like cultural norms frozen into sacred language. They often seem deeply concerned with obedience, boundary lines, and group identity.

That resemblance makes me skeptical. It feels less like revelation and more like projection.

The bigger issue, though, is not mystery. I am fine with mystery. I am drawn to it. What I resist is dogma—the insistence that uncertainty is a moral failure, that doubt is disobedience, that a mind doing what minds do is a problem to be corrected.

Dogma tells people not to follow the question all the way to its edge. Do not tug on that thread. Do not ask what happens if the story is not true. Someone already decided the answer. Your job is to submit.

I do not know how to live like that. It feels like turning down the volume on the most human part of being human.

Priests, Respect, and not Turning Disagreement Into Contempt

One reason I try to be careful with how I talk about religion is that I have actually had good experiences with priests.

Not in the “they converted me” sense. In the “they are serious people” sense.

The priests I have interacted with have been educated, thoughtful, and generally respectable. Many are good listeners. Many take their roles as counselors and community anchors very seriously. They are not caricatures. They are not naive. They are often wrestling with the same raw material everyone wrestles with—death, guilt, love, suffering—only with a different metaphysical vocabulary.

That matters, because it keeps my skepticism from turning into contempt. It reminds me that belief is not always about being less rational. People are moved by tradition, by community, by beauty, by grief, by love, by fear, by awe. Sometimes religion helps them become kinder. Sometimes it does not.

My criticism is not aimed at people as people. It is aimed at a particular kind of certainty, and at institutions when they weaponize that certainty.

And, I should say this plainly, because the baptism question is easy to misread as a protest, or as me mocking a ritual I know matters to other people: that is not what this is. I am not flinching at the water. I am not trying to make a point. If anything, it is almost the opposite. I respect the faith enough—and I respect priests enough—that I will not fake it in the one moment where faking it would be easiest.

Because in Catholic baptism, the parents are not just there to watch a nice tradition. They are asked to affirm things. To make promises. To say, in one form or another, “I will” and “I do.” And, plenty of people do say those words while quietly treating them as ceremonial background noise, a kind of social lubricant. Just say the line. Do not overthink it. Everyone will be happy. The pictures will look nice.

I cannot do that. I cannot look a priest in the eye—someone I generally respect as educated and serious—and pledge myself to principles I do not actually hold. That feels like disrespect wearing the mask of courtesy.

And, yes, I know there are technicalities. I know that in some cases only one parent has to fully affirm and the other can simply consent. I know there are ways to make the moving parts line up on paper. But, adding more paperwork and more choreography does not change the core problem for me, which is honesty. If I am not going to mean the words, I am not going to say them.

That is a boundary I am not interested in ceding for the sake of smoothness.

Disability, and the Temptation to Assume a Story

It is also worth stating plainly—because people love a neat narrative—my disability is not the reason I do not believe.

I did not arrive at non-belief as a reaction to suffering. I did not reason backward from my body into a verdict on God. My lack of religious belief is older and simpler than that. It is rooted in rational reflection and a lifelong discomfort with metaphysical certainty.

Disability has sharpened certain questions—about luck, fragility, fairness, time—but it did not manufacture my worldview.

Useful Traditions, Unclaimed Metaphysics

One thing I have learned is that skepticism does not only apply to the faith I grew up around. It does not just point at Catholicism and stop.

I meditate a lot. I reference Buddhism often. I have borrowed language and practices from it because, frankly, a lot of it works. A lot of it feels true in the practical sense—true as a description of the mind, true as a way of relating to suffering, true as a training in attention and compassion. Some Eastern traditions have been better at naming certain inner mechanics than the West ever was.

But, that does not mean I sign the whole metaphysical package.

It is not like I believe in rebirth. I am not secretly swapping one cosmology for another. I can take what is useful, and even what feels deeply accurate about human experience, without turning it into a set of supernatural claims. If anything, Buddhism has helped me get more comfortable with not knowing—more comfortable living with unanswered questions without rushing to fill them with certainty.

I am happy to learn from a tradition without pretending I believe everything it says about the structure of the universe. That is the line. That has always been the line.

What I Do Believe, Even Without a Metaphysical Map

So, if I do not accept religious metaphysics, what is left?

A lot.

I believe this life matters because it is the one we are sure we get. That does not make it bleak. It makes it sharp. It makes the ordinary precious in the only way I know how to mean that word—irreplaceable.

I believe in attention. In the way a child’s face changes when they realize you are really listening. In the way a moment can become luminous without any divine endorsement. Religion does not own wonder. It does not own gratitude. It does not own reverence. Those are human capacities, available to anyone who stays awake.

I believe in ethics without heaven and hell. I do not need cosmic scorekeeping to care about harm. Consequences are already here—in trust, in fear, in what our homes feel like, in the kind of world our kids inherit.

And, I believe in letting my kids have their own honest encounter with the question. If one of them chooses a religion someday, I want it to be a real yes, not a yes-by-default. If they choose nothing, that is fine too. I want them to know that “nothing” can still be full of meaning, kindness, and awe.

Living With the Gap

So, this is where I land: a secular parent at religious family tables, trying to live the disagreement without turning it into a war.

I will not baptize my kids just to soothe someone else’s anxiety. I also will not mock the people I love for believing what I do not.

If anyone ever asks me directly, I will try to answer without defensiveness or theater.