S. T. Joshi

You might say I was a passive atheist through my teenage years.

You go back to T. H. Huxley, who coined the term, what he said - and I came to believe he is right - is that agnosticism asserts not only that he himself didn't know if there was a God or not, but that nobody could know.

I may have had a prejudice against agnosticism as a body of thought: sort of a fence-sitting theory, where you can't make up your mind one way or another.

My father insisted that I and my sisters not be indoctrinated into any religion at any age.