Atheists, tell me, a Roman Catholic: why should I become an atheist?

[Ignorant]

So... you're so desperate to love something, that you'll love an idea. [1]

I don't know about you, but I prefer to love another human being. [2]

1) If the idea is true, then I try to love it for what it is.

2) As do I. Loving a person is much more concrete a thing  to love. We claim that the abstract and harder to grasp reality of god's-being became the concrete reality of a human being (i.e. Jesus), so that we could love him the way we naturally prefer. It's hard and not often satisfying to love god purely as the abstract concept of "being" or "goodness" or "truth". It is much easier if "truth" itself becomes a human being whom we may love.

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I love people just fine without having to also love some deity. [1] My love is reserved for real things that I actually interact with in some meaningful way. If I'm interacting with this "God" thing, I'm entirely unaware of it. [2] I have no feelings towards it at all. I have no desire to love everything; nor could I make I myself, even if I wanted to. [3] I hold no ill will against this weird "God" thing, I simply have no fucking idea about it or what it's meant to be doing. [4]

If we have no choice but to love it, then it simply can't exist, because I don't love it. I don't even know what it is. [5]

This also addresses the ideas I've sometimes heard that "if religion X is true then we have no choice but to love God". If that is the case, then the religion is not true, because I do not love God. Pretty simple. [6]

1) I know you do. I'm not saying you can't. I'm saying that you could love them more if you loved the truest and fullest image of what-those-people-are. On the Catholic account, that full image includes their true source and direction in life, which is the Trinitarian life (i.e. the divine life) itself. It's not that you can't love well without loving god, but rather, you can't love in the fullest sense without god (if the Catholic claim is true).

2) Exactly. You can't love what you don't know. The Catholic faith claims knowledge about what-we-love and how-we-love. That is not to say that you can't love anything without that knowledge. It just means that you can't love as much.

3) I can understand what you are saying. But we can't help but love what is good. We may get the truth about what is good wrong, but we can only love what we find good. The Catholic claim is that there is real goodness in everything that exists, and because of that, you can love everything according to the goodness within them. That doesn't mean you love a tree in the same way that you love your wife, but it does mean that you can love everything in so far as you know what is good about it. That is the claim anyway.

4) Exactly! That abstract oddness of this weird god-thing is difficult if not impossible to love given our own tools to know anything about it. But if that weird thing becomes a human person and lives among us and loves us as a human, then he has given us a way to love the divine in a truly human way.

5) You have no choice but to love the good. IF god is goodness itself, you already love him whether you know it is god or not. Revelation, if through it you know god by faith, provides the knowledge with which you can love the good as god-made-human in Jesus.

6) See #5. The "have no choice to love god" bit isn't an ultimatum. Loving goodness as we understand it is just what human beings are doing. That is what we do. If god is goodness, then the "reason" you have no choice but to love him is because you were already doing it in a mediated and abstract way (i.e. loving goodness in things).