Simone Weil, a philosopher and activist exiled from Vichy France due to her Jewish origins, converted from Judaism to Christianity yet refused baptism — condemning the practice as an idolatrous remnant of Judaism. Gillian Rose, a Jewish-born thinker of the late twentieth century, was baptized on her deathbed, declaring she did so to "gain my Judaism more deeply." Despite their opposing religious gestures, both thinkers advanced forms of nonreligion throughout their lives. These paradoxical positions are illuminated by Weil's concept of atheism, which Rose develops into her own concept of agnosticism. For Weil, idolatry consists in mistaking a worldly institution for God, risking totalitarianism and religious conflict. Since God does not "exist" in the ordinary material sense but only as a Platonic idea withdrawn from the physical world, "atheism is a purification": denying that God is a thing among things opens a gateway to genuine faith, which requires acknowledging that institutions merely mediate toward the divine rather than embody it. Rose glosses this: "Weil says […] Agnosticism is the only true religion because to have faith is not to give up knowledge, but to know where the limit of knowledge is." She concurs that faith means identifying the boundary between knowledge and its limits, but substitutes "agnosticism" for "atheism," arguing that declaring God unknowable risks dissolving the concept's ethical and socio-political weight. For Rose, "God" mediates something undefinable yet real — analogous to "freedom" or "ethics" — each generating institutions that strive toward the absolute while perpetually falling short. These conceptions cut through contemporary religious-secular divides and inter-religious conflicts by paradoxically situating nonreligion at the center of theology. Politically, they demonstrate that secularism can unwittingly become theocratic, while genuine faith requires atheism or agnosticism to avoid idolatry.