Agnosticism & religiosity

A while back I decided to change my religious beliefs. This might sounds like something you have to fill in a form for, or at least notify your local governmental representative, but no - you can just go right ahead and change your mind.
I decided to change my beliefs from Atheist to Agnostic. Those among you that are believers of some kind may be thinking, "big deal", but I think it's an important distinction.
To give you some background, I decided at around age 12 that organised religion was not for me. Any believers among you looking for a scapegoat at this point would do well to talk to my R.E. teacher from that time, as it was my R.E. lessons that started my line of thinking. Being a noble sort however, I think I have to own up to making a conscious choice based on the information available, combined with my own reasoning and experience.
We were learning about different religions around the world - Buddhism, Hinduism, etc. and it occurred to me that most religions were practised by people according to two variables; geography and culture. If you look at a map of the world, there are areas of concentration of religion. The eastern areas like India, Japan etc are mostly Buddhist, the middle east, mostly Muslim, the west, mostly Judeo-Christian. I realise this is a gross over-simplification, but pick up any decent encyclopaedia and you should find exactly the kind of map I'm talking about.
So it occurred to me that I was the product of two parents, who happened to live in a certain country that was predominantly Christian. If I had been born to parents who lived a stones throw from Mecca, chances are I would have been raised as a Muslim, and so on. This to me seemed absurd, but this was not the only problem.
A second problem lay with prior religions of the world, which is to say the religious beliefs of the Egyptians, the ancient Greeks, The Romans, (although they stole most of theirs from the Greeks before converting to Christianity,) The Vikings, The Sumarians and so on. Because those societies are dead, we cannot talk to people who held those beliefs and try to understand them better. Who is to say that they were wrong? Why is it the Greek and Viking stories are now classed as 'myths'? (Read: pretty much fairytales so you don't have to give them any serious thought.)
Religion is generally told to have arisen from humankind's desire to explain the world around them. Lacking the capacity for reason and scientific method at the time, they created stories that explain how the world came to be and how we came to be on it. If you tell the creation myths of any tribal culture to say, a Christian or someone from one of the world's larger faiths, they will view it as a quaint story, but not something to give any real attention to. So why do they believe some omnipotent entity created the world in six days? Why do people no longer believe that the head of the gods was called Odin who had two Ravens, but some people still believed Jesus walked on water and performed numerous other miracles - or feats of supposedly genuine magic? To me, no one ideology seemed any more believable than another.
Another issue was that there was more than one religion at all. To my mind, most religions lay claim to be the true path to God, and all other religions are, in some way, wrong. Usually this seemed to be accompanied by some sort of caveat that inferred that if you were not a member of 'their' religion, you would suffer some sort of terrible fate once you passed on from this world. To put it simply, how was I at 12 years old, supposed to know which group were telling the truth? If the Muslims or Buddhists or Hindus were right, then I may well be going to some sort of Hell dimension after I died, (Never mind what would happen to me if the Catholics were right,) just because I happened to be born where I was. Talk about clerical error!
After a little thought I realised that all the claimants had certain similarities to their claims:

1. There is a God or Gods.
2. They created everything, including you, little man.
3. They are omnipotent.
4. They love you. (this one is a little iffy - some claim unconditionally, some claim God IS love... more later.)
5. If you don't believe in them you're in big trouble after you die. (Even if you believe someone else's version of them.)

It's the last one I had the most problem with, especially coming after number 4. Why would any all-loving God want to punish me due to mix up of geography and/or culture? If it, (I really don't like ascribing gender to a deity, but if I was pushed to at gunpoint on a monotheistic basis I'd say it had to be female. On any other basis I'd say genderless; both genders at the same time - being of dualistic nature; hermaphroditic, or polytheistic, depending on both my mood and also how much caffeine I'd ingested that day,) created us all and loves us all, it must understand the cultural and geographical issues and make allowances surely?
So, either God didn't love us all, (and I'm prepared to believe that an omnipotent entity would be very likely to be entirely indifferent to us,) or else the religious guys were wrong somewhere. If they were wrong about that, what else were they wrong about?
I started thinking about Hell. Hell is the place where wicked people go right? Now I realise morality is not an absolute, (I'm not getting into that here, that's for another post,) despite some religious guys claiming to have it literally written in stone, but for me any God presented with, for the sake of argument, an atheist who is generally a good person, a believer from another religion who is generally a good person and a baby eating, mass murdering rapist and says, "No entrance to Heaven for any of you guys, off to Hell!" is definitely one sandwich short of a picnic.
Also, in some religions, provided you repent your sins, you will get into Heaven. God forgives you right? So now we have the good atheist and the good believer from a different religion being cast down while the baby eating, mass murdering rapist waltzes in through the pearly gates because he started attending mass a couple of weeks before being sent to the electric chair, probably chanting "nyah nyah nyah" as he goes.
So I started thinking, if God forgives you, it's doubtful it does so because of which religion you belong to, having understood the geographical issues, (actually, in theory having created the geographical issues...) therefore no matter what you are, you get forgiven because God loves all of us right? The only thing that most of the religions were in agreement on was that if you were an atheist, you are definitely buggered when the rapture comes. However, what sort of God would grant it's 'greatest creation', free will & then judge them on their actions? "Hey I'm really proud of these human beings I created! What can I do to show them how much I love them? I know! I'll give them free will! There you go guys, you can do whatever... whatev... HEY! What the hell are you doing? I mean yeah, free will sure, but I didn't mean you could do THAT! Oh man I need to set some rules around here..." Just doesn't sound right does it? That being the case, even atheists must get 'forgiven', (I prefer to think of any God that grants us free will would simply accept us and our actions, rather than forgive us for them,) so what purpose does Hell serve?
I think it's all about control. Maybe religion has its place and maybe, just maybe there's some truth in there somewhere, but to me it just seems like a system of control put in place by some humans in order to get other humans to behave the way they want. Shamans used to be the the true power in a tribal society, because although the elder or leader made the decisions, it was the shaman they went to for council on how to make those decisions. So little has changed. As societies progressed, the priests took on a more powerful role and this can be seen in any number of societies until the separation of church and state. A society needs rules in order to operate effectively. (Point of interest, most people think a society without rules is anarchistic, but anarchy is actually self government by each individual, chaos is society without government.) Some of those rules are of a moralistic nature - the role of many, (I would say probably all,) religions in society is to provide a moral framework within which the society operates. Look at the ten commandments:

1. "I am the LORD your God who brought you out of the land of Egypt, from the house of slavery. You shall have no other gods before Me..."
2. "Do not make a sculpted image or any likeness of what is in the heavens above..."
3. "Do not swear falsely by the name of the LORD..."
4. "Remember the Sabbath day and keep it holy"
5. "Honor your father and your mother..."
6. "Do not kill"
7. "Do not commit adultery."
8. "Do not steal."
9. "Do not bear false witness against your neighbor"
10. "Do not covet your neighbor's house..."

Pretty moralistic right? Gives people a set of rules to live by. So what happens if people decide they don't like these rules? You need two things to make people adhere to your rules. Firstly, you need some kind of legal system - policing and subsequent punishment. Secondly, you need some kind of deterrent to make people not want to break the rules in the first place. What better deterrent than telling people they will be subjected to eternal torment when they die? Since no one knows what happens when humans die, you can make up any story and if enough people buy into it - you have a believable truth. As a sweetener, you say that if people do follow the rules, they will be taken to a perfect place after death, to enjoy eternal bliss instead.
What it all seemed to boil down to for me was that there were still many things about the universe that we couldn't explain and people, as a rule don't like being in a state of confusion. Confusion is used as a tool in warfare for that very reason. What people like is to be able to have an explanation for things, no matter how bizarre or unlikely, so that they can consider it done and tick it off their list of things to think about. "Well I don't understand how the universe could possibly come to be here, but I've been told that God created all in six days, so that's good enough for me. What's on T.V.?"
The moral framework removes confusion - questions like "Should I do this?" disappear. People know what is right and wrong because they have this framework as a point of reference. (It still doesn't stop people doing things they have been told is wrong, but they understand that it is wrong so they are more likely to accept punishment.)
This leads me on to why I changed from being Atheist to Agnostic, but first I'd like to reiterate that I'm not trying to offend Christians or Muslims, Hindu's or anyone else who has faith of any kind. I'm not saying you shouldn't have the beliefs you have, I'm merely explaining why I don't share that belief. You have the right to believe whatever you wish and I wish you well with it. To each their own.
So I had come to the conclusion that none of the world's religions were for me, which lead me to believe that I was an atheist. However, after some thought, I decided I wasn't an atheist, I was agnostic.
Let me clear up a misconception: Agnostic does not mean you don't care if there is a God or not. It may mean that for some people, but that's more apathy than Agnosticism. Not caring infers that you haven't given it much thought. I have given the subject a great deal of thought, as have most Agnostics. Agnosticism isn't fence sitting either. A lot of Theists and Atheists see Agnosticism as a cop out - a kind of "Oh, I don't know," answer, again inferring that not a lot of thought has been put into it.
Agnosticism is not knowing if a God exists or not and being OK with that. Weird huh? Agnosticism is about admitting there are limits to human knowledge and admitting being comfortable to admitting it. Personally I think that takes a lot of courage. When 99% of the planets population profess to either believing in some kind of deity or else believing that there is definitely no deity, then Agnostics walk the path less travelled and they do it because of an inherent function of the human mind - reason.
Here are the facts:

1. There are believers and non believers.
2. These people are diametrically opposed.
3. Belief is not knowledge. (Dictionary.com describes belief thus: confidence in the truth or existence of something not immediately susceptible to rigorous proof.)
4. Therefore belief is not subject to reason. (Dictionary.com defines reason as: 1. The mental powers concerned with forming conclusions, judgments, or inferences.
   2. Sound judgment; good sense.
   3. Normal or sound powers of mind; sanity.
   4. Logic. a premise of an argument.
   5. Philosophy.
   a. The faculty or power of acquiring intellectual knowledge, either by direct understanding of first principles or by argument.
   b. The power of intelligent and dispassionate thought, or of conduct influenced by such thought.
   6. To think or argue in a logical manner.
   7. To form conclusions, judgments, or inferences from facts or premises.
   8. To think through logically, as a problem (often fol. by out).
5. Reason derives from logic and therefore it is not logical to believe or disbelieve in a God or Gods as no proof of existence can be made either way.
6. Therefore it is impossible to know if there is a God or not, the only choices are:
• To believe that there is a God without proof.
• To believe there is no God without proof.
• To accept that since no proof can be given either way, there is no way to know if a God exists or not.

The Taoists of China believed that if there was a God, it was the universe itself, and because we were part of that universe, if we lived in harmony with it, instead of imposing our own agenda on the nature of things, we could lead happy lives. They also believed that there were limits to human knowledge and understanding and there were thing we simply could not understand and that trying to invent definitions was arrogant and against our own inner nature, which lead to conflict. That makes more sense to me than any religious doctrine and seems to be pretty true.
By my definition, everyone in the world is Agnostic, regardless of what they believe because they cannot KNOW if God exists or not, only believe. The only difference is that some of us accept that fact. Personally I think it takes the kind of arrogance that only humans exhibit to profess to 'knowing' that a God exists, or that a simple human being could possibly fathom the complexities of an omnipotent mind and speak on behalf of it.
But hey, I've just admitted that I don't know everything, so what do I know, right?