Discussion
#WritersCoffeeClub 26 Sept: How does your faith feature in your works?
As I'm an atheist, it doesn't. But I'm not an ex-Christian atheist: I'm an ex-Reform Jewish (British subtype) atheist, so my atheism is axiomatically different from yours …
(Hint: if you think the term "Judeo-Christian Values" describes a real thing, you would be wrong—Judaism has no afterlife, no hell, and no Devil, for starters. Then it rapidly gets even more different.)
PS: in my fiction I mock religious fanatics.
@technothrasher Judaism is not simply a set of ritual practices (it's possible to be an observant Jew who doesn't believe in God, per the rabbinate): it's also an ethnicity. It's amazing how many non-Jews can't wrap their heads around that …
Anyway, I'm an atheist who is ethnically Jewish—when the Nazis come, they won't give a shit that I'm an atheist: I know where I stand. (OTOH I'm also anti-Zionist, which is an entirely orthogonal issue.)
@cstross no afterlife? Maimonides’s 13th article of faith is just that, belief in the resurrection of the dead.
@kevin Physical resurrection of the dead *on Earth* is not heaven/hell. (Nor is being remembered in the Book of Life the same thing.)
@cstross that is very similar to what (creedal) Christians believe, that after the last judgment, the resurrected will be given new bodies to live in a new Earth. The Christian afterlife is not disembodied platonic ghosts either. I can’t see how resurrection, bodily or not, is not an afterlife
@kevin It's definitely not an as-currently-constructed Christian one, complete with a Devil, and redemption for folks who believe in Christ. So of necessity Jewish atheism is *not* Christian atheism—you're rejecting different beliefs.
@cstross
Fun! I'm an ex-Catholic atheist (well, more or less), so I'm currently stuck between being extremely anti-clerical and thinking that maybe the Church had something to recommend it. I've very little love for Rome, but they do very well at keeping a lid on their extremists, and well... honestly, I wish we had the option of just out and excommunicating a lot of people.
But then, my parents were awful enough that going to mass each week and meeting other adults is why I'm at least
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@cstross The biggest difference I see between the atheists I know that have come from Christian faith and ones that have come from Jewish faith is that the Jewish ones often still consider themselves Jewish, but non-religiously so, while the Christian ones almost never describe themselves as still Christian.
My parents forced me to go to a protestant church as a child. But I'm not sure I'd consider myself an ex-Christian atheist, as I never thought of myself as Christian to begin with. I guess that makes me axiomatically atheist 😉