Confrontation, not Consolation

"An agnostic Buddhist would not regard the dharma as a source of 'answers' to questions of where we came from, where we are going, what happens after death. He would seek such knowledge in the appropriate domains: astrophysics, evolutionary biology, neuroscience, etc. An agnostic Buddhist is not a 'believer' with claims to revealed information about supernatural or paranormal phenomena, and in this sense is not 'religious.'

"An agnostic Buddhist looks to the dharma for metaphors of existential confrontation rather than metaphors of existential consolation. . .It confronts the enormity of having been born instead of reaching for the consolation of a belief. It strips away, layer by layer, the views that conceal the mystery of being here -- either by affirming it as something or denying it as nothing."

Stephen Batchelor, Buddhism Without Beliefs, pp. 18-19.