are you an out of the closet atheist?

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

No, because I'm not an atheist. Even if I didn't believe in God I wouldn't be inclined to use that particular label.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

No obviously.

But apparently I was a closet Catholic to my old boss until this week until one of my friends inadvertently told him. Not that it matters since a majority of the people in my old group are religious and my boss is a semi-observant Jew so I doubt anyone would have cared. But apparently no one knew. These sorts of things just don't come up in a professional setting in casual conversation much.

And in a way...nor should they.

Well... I don't necessarily think someone should be made to feel uncomfortable about sharing their religious beliefs (whatever they happen to be) either.

Well of course. All of my friends know that I'm a liturgical Christian and most are probably able to identify my denomination by now, although I think a couple of them may be under the impression that I'm Lutheran. Conversely none of my professors do except for my academic advisor, who I told because it's relevant to my graduate school and career wishes, and the head of my department, because we go to the same church.

I definitely think that the United States has a broadly healthier attitude towards religion in public life than many other developed countries despite the recent hostile takeover from a formerly minor strand of conservative pietist Protestantism. I'd credit this to never having had an established church and to the historical willingness to discuss different sorts of beliefs as the populations in the country shifted about.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

My current identification is "none," not atheist.  Atheist is so constraining, leaving atheism was like taking off a straitjacket.

I would be interested in "hearing" more about your personal story as to the bolded part, if you are willing Mikado.

Atheists tend to be impossible to talk to regarding everything I'm interested in and passionate about.  I love to debate theology, but (afleitch and Dibble are good examples) tend to always go "that never happened," which is totally a nonstarter and besides the point of what I'm trying to talk about (I always approach works from an in-universe analytical point of view, and "God doesn't exist" is frustrating in the same way as "Raskolnikov doesn't exist").  If I want to discuss whether Krishna's argument with Arjuna that he is a divine, all-seeing entity is an appropriate backing-up for his claim that Arjuna, as a Kshatriya, has to follow his Dharma to go into battle (is "I'm Vishnu and you're not" an argument with legitimate moral force?), I'd always get a response of "Krishna/Vishnu and Arjuna never existed."  If I'd try to talk about the ethics of Jesus' pronouncements on divorce, I'd get some "Jesus never existed/didn't say that" response, which is basically the reason I stopped going into the Religion and Philosophy board.  It's intellectual sophistry of the first order on the part of the atheists to dismiss arguments from Sacred Texts as illegitimate because they weren't authentic: that doesn't address the actual meanings of the words at all.  I've read the Bible (Old and New Testaments), Koran, Bhagavad Gita, and the Dhammapada, as well as extensive works by Augustine, Aquinas, some Schleiermacher, some Kierkegaard, etc. and anytime I try to talk about them I get a "God doesn't exist," followed by the person going to talk about the new Batman movie.  I've refrained from posting "Batman doesn't exist" over and over again. 

The existence/nonexistence of God is utterly irrelevant to the validity of religion and its study and the contemptuous dismissal of it leads to social diseases like positivism, the utter contempt for the past, and the slavish worship of the new God Science that are endemic in certain well-educated parts of modern society.  Michel Foucault writes in The Birth of the Clinic in specific and throughout his works in general how the medical and other scientific institutions have assumed the language and rhetoric of Truth from religion and have attempted to invalidate all truths other than the materialist, physical "reality" they peddle in order to enhance their own power, and its worked stupendously.  Foucault's "biopower," the power that physicians and scientists have gained through their obsessive categorization, classification, and prying into the most private and intimate aspects of human life down to our cells, nay, down to our DNA, has led them to have an amazing degree of control over all aspects of our lives, and the destruction of the substitution of religious truth and power with theirs is one of the key aspects of that rise.  His History of Sexuality Part I, Civilization and Madness, and The Birth of the Clinic in specific and his entire works in general have shown the huge disadvantages of accepting scientific truth as a cultural replacement for religious truth, and is one of the big reasons why he ended up fanatically supporting Ayatollah Khoemeini in his last days despite clearly not believing in God himself.  In many ways, Science is a far more dangerous master than Religion ever was, and the twentieth century has already clearly demonstrated that the road to Progress leads straight into the gates of Auschwitz.  "Modernity" and "Civilization" are orders of magnitude more gruesome and morally repugnant values than anything "Savagery" ever offered.

TL/DR I have no problem with the disbelief of God, I have a problem with the summary dismissal and rejection of religion and the blind worship of the false gods of Science and Progress, and that's what modern atheism entails.

I'm reminded of my Japanese language instructor, who's from a Zen priestly family from a very rural part of western Japan. Japan is what we'd call a religious society in a lot of ways but being given to much explicit religious thought isn't one of them. At some point between the Tokugawa era and the post-war (there's a lot of debate over this) most of the religious institutions in Japan stopped being taken really seriously in terms of truth-value, but what happened here is that many Japanese people stopped caring very much about the truth-value of their metaphysical and cultural narratives. Obviously this has led to problems. We can probably think of a really obvious one right off the top of our heads. But what this has meant is that aesthetically and culturally elements of this society have stayed more or less constant despite surface-level extreme secularization (and I do think that secularization is a process that admits of getting extreme or going way too far). This isn't in all ways a good thing but the last attempt to reverse or redirect the set of processes going on here led to State Shinto, which was at its core an attempt to rationalize--and, not to put too fine a point on it, contextualize within Modern ideas of the nation and the state and what constitutes 'reasonable' public reliogisity (this was of course a fascist context but fascism is still a type of modern context)--a religion that originally...well, the Atlantic recently ran a surprisingly good article on the subject of the De Beers cartel and I couldn't take it as seriously as I would have liked because it used the phrase 'Shinto law'. That's what Shinto is. It doesn't use that language. Christianity and Buddhism do, but that's not really what they should be about either.

I'm a little inarticulate right now both because I'm more tired than I am at this time of the evening and because my Internet is slow as sh**t right now and I don't know why, but I think it's worth considering the idea that the mechanisms for self-validation that modernist metanarratives claim are somewhat crueler than religious ones, because they don't validate themselves on their own terms but in terms of so-called positivist or rational ideals that everybody is supposed to hold or something. Which puts those of us who partially agree with those ideas but aren't willing to make them the absolute acme of values in an odd situation. Religious ideas may be more flagrant in their lack of immediately obvious resemblance to the level of reality that most people perceive most of the time but at least, except in particularly toxic examples of theocratic academia or government, they at least have that benefit. Since they're self-referential, as Mikado said, even if you don't believe in them, using your unbelief to shut down conversations about them is a dick move. Not even Paul of Tarsus did that, and he used other dick moves relatively frequently.

Beet: I think that we as a people privilege the idea of personal belief a little too strongly in some of these types of conversations.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

the modern world has actually been getting less violent overall, and that WWII was actually an exception to the rule.

This is the kind of 'thinking' that makes me despair.

Genocides and wars in the twentieth century killed a comparable number of people to how many were alive on Earth at any given point during the Crusades.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

the modern world has actually been getting less violent overall, and that WWII was actually an exception to the rule.

This is the kind of 'thinking' that makes me despair.

Genocides and wars in the twentieth century killed a comparable number of people to how many were alive on Earth at any given point during the Crusades.

But Progress! Forwards - to the Future!

And always twirling, twirling, twirling towards Freedom.