what i mean by “christian atheist”
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>Sorry, if you don't [mind] me asking, what do you mean by "Christian atheist"?
i don't mind at all! i confess i don't know much about the history of the term, i encountered it studying theology at a liberal arts college, i think it might be related to the death of god theology movement but i could be wrong. personally when i describe myself as a Christian atheist i mean to designate, on the one hand, that I'm still very culturally and philosophically informed by Christianity. i was very devout from a young age, and even intended to go into the priesthood for a long time. but over a number of years, my thinking changed--politically, philosophically, theologically. the idea of an omniscient, omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent, omnibenevolent God who is immanently at work in the world between to hold less water for me. not just that i doubted the existence of such a being, that wasn't even the main thing. i was okay going forward with Christianity as a practice if i didn't actually think it was literally true. more that the existence of such a being became, well, untenable. i began to have more and more sympathy with the anarchist idea that if God did exist, it would be necessary to abolish Him. atheist as a kind of Paradise Lost-esque lable of rebellion, i suppose.
i was sympathetic to that view and sometimes i espouse it, other times i don't. i honestly do sometimes think something like God or Gods or gods or G_DS exist, sometimes i don't. i think decentering/outright negating God in the following of Jesus, for example, makes for interesting spiritual exploration. i also pray to my house gods and Jesus and angels and idols and all sorts of stuff lol, so if the definition of an atheist is one who doesn't believe in God, i would say I'm an atheist who isn't very good at being an atheist lol.
god, belief practice, Absoluteness and multiplicity, harm, sacrifice, solidarity, time, consciousness, love, betrayal, these are some of the motifes of my (a)theology which are all tanged up in a way that kinda demands a paradoxical or oxymoronic name. Christian atheist, and ig/gnostic, and apost(le)ate are some of the names I've gravitated to for that reason.
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