made-up terms

I have been reading a bit lately on the emergent church and some apologetics - both for and against Christianity. I had one of those moments forming a couple of terms in my mind that I thought were pretty cool and ones I had never heard before. I thought, gee, maybe no one has ever put these words together before ... I then I Googled them for fun ... and, of course I was wrong. It reminds me of the time in high school when for fun, I went through the exercise of deriving the formula for the volume of a generic pail (rather than look it up), or the time I thought I had found a method for trisecting and angle with only a compass and a straight-edge (no one has come up with one, as far as I know). It makes one wonder if anyone has truly had a unique idea. I know that many patents, perhaps most, tweak an existing idea. In other words, "progress" is often small and barely perceptible in reality - regardless of how it is presented in the media.

Anyway, as I was reading, two thoughts came to mind - that "not knowing" has been elevated in so many circles not just as a virtue, but as a requirement for sanity. In fact, one might say that the secret knowledge needed to be in the circle is that we doubt everything - or even that anything can be truly known. To this end, the idea of an "arrogant agnosticism" seemed to describe this sense from some that they had the "real" knowledge. From that, the term "gnostic agnosticism" also came to mind to describe the group of people who define belonging (or mattering) as being willing to say that one knows nothing for sure (or at least claims to not know answers to life's most important questions) ... I thought these words described quite well what I read about some post-modern people. There were only about 32 references on Google for the one, and 194 references for the other - so I guess I can be happy that there aren't many references to these ideas. Perhaps it wasn't something that I read somewhere a while back that was stored in the recesses of my brain - perhaps, but not likely.

So, while I like these two terms and will use them when appropriate, it goes to show that there is rarely anything totally new under the sun - even in the seemingly fluid world of language ...

But, it was a fun thought for a second ...