Look up Jonathan Pageau. Also checkout Tom Holland's "Dominion".
A "Christian Atheist" is a modern phenomenon, and our materialist culture is the heart of that perspective and one that's deeply misunderstood and flawed.
I'd argue St. Paul and other biblical era scholars would find a western atheist not only very Christian, but also having a very childish and ignorant understanding of reality.
When everything is a thing, we have no room to see the fractal nature of happenings through time and synchronicity up and down layers of abstraction. Reality is just as much an interactive story between narrative and conscious threads as it is space/time, matter/energy. We've lost the first personal perspective of that with our modern "atheism".
I just want to say this is a great summary of the predicament of modern atheism. (I watch Pageau’s videos regularly and am halfway through the book Dominion.)
Not sure if this the same experience as the person you asked the question of, but I went to Catholic school growing up, altar boy, youth group, the whole works. And I'd consider myself atheist, or agnostic maybe is better. But I call myself "culturally Catholic" because so much of how I grew up is still a part of me: a focus on finding universality in experience ("catholic" christian historically grew out of an attempt to find universality in the christian belief, and I think today amid globalization it still does that remarkably well); an impulse toward social justice; a tolerance of hypocrisy and inconsistency.
And like the prior poster said, many/most Catholics disagree with the Pope--I think something like 85% of American Catholics disagree with the official views on birth control and abortion and homosexuality--but that doesn't stop us from calling ourselves Catholic.
Yeah, most of my mom’s family is like this. They don’t believe in most on the heaven and hell stuff literally but see Catholicism as part of their cultural identity as Irish-Americans
Not at all unusual - though I think of it as more common in Judaism, where the cultural heritage is much more important than the religion for many people.
It took me a long time to reconcile how people can claim they belong to a religion, yet proclaim their assumptions are contrary to said religion as well as exhibit inconsistent behavior.
I was probably almost mid 20s before I realized people simply need an excuse to form and maintain tribal bonds, similar to how a birthday, anniversary, house warming, or other ritual provides an excuse to get together. I wish someone had explained this to me sooner.
A "Christian Atheist" is a modern phenomenon, and our materialist culture is the heart of that perspective and one that's deeply misunderstood and flawed.
I'd argue St. Paul and other biblical era scholars would find a western atheist not only very Christian, but also having a very childish and ignorant understanding of reality.
When everything is a thing, we have no room to see the fractal nature of happenings through time and synchronicity up and down layers of abstraction. Reality is just as much an interactive story between narrative and conscious threads as it is space/time, matter/energy. We've lost the first personal perspective of that with our modern "atheism".