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I don't know that I can add anything to pigglet's articlulate comments, Martian, but his last point hits home for me. I once considered myself agnostic, and I still believe that the only thing we can know for certain is that we can't absolutely be sure of anything. In that sense, I share your expressed view that you "simply profess a lack of knowledge". Nontheless, there is a jumping off point where we each assume something to be true. In your case, you accept, on faith and not proven fact, that you "exist" (whatever that means) and that it's preferable to take action to perpetuate that existence rather than to simply do nothing and waste away. I'm on this page with you too. For many, the justification for that choice is a component of the evolution of faith in a higher power or some form of spirituality. It doesn't have to turn out that way, though, and for you it hasn't.
pigglet's point of first finding a lens appropriate to one's world view before going on to ascribe to a spiritual view consistent with it is logical, and surely some people out there take that approach. In my experience, however, there also are lots of people who start with religious beliefs they've grown up with and then cling to them throughout their lives...for them, reality is viewed through the prism of their unchanging religion.
To elaborate on my initial response, I started out as a Christian (American Baptist) because that's how my parents raised me. I accepted as true and without question what was taught to me. From where I sit now, those beliefs didn't qualify as "faith". Currently, and with the study of philsophy, mythology, and oriental religions under my belt, as well as lots of life experience, I have come to faith, and it has evolved into a sort of personal mythology, a description of which would be lengthy and tough to describe. My mythology gets tweaked occasionally, with further knowledge and experience, but whatever its form, the result is that I am able to be at peace with and accept that I'm a part of the unknowable human and cosmic mystery. I "have" to have faith in my personal mythology, knowing that it may well be just a bunch of nonsense, or it doesn't work. The "having to believe" part of it leads me to conclude that in my case, at least, faith comes first.
Like the commercial says, "individual results may vary".
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