Those who never believed in a God

[mordant]

My oldest brother believes in something, but it's a loose, generalized spirituality.

It's useful to remind ourselves now and then that we have some sampling errors with the theists we get in places like this. They seem to be 90% fundamentalist or some really eclectic roll-your-own dogma, maybe an occasional conservative Catholic, but worldwide, most pew-warmers are just that. They hold their faith relatively loosely.

I just finished a conversation on another forum with a guy who thinks we atheists straw-man Christians sometimes. He seems to be more or less a liberal Christian who believes in the golden rule, thinks the Bible is a flawed book intended to teach general principles, and is pretty much a live-and-let-live type. He used to watch US televangelists and thought it (and a few fundies he's encountered in his earlier life) was some insane fringe. He also had some really odd and naive ideas about his own faith, for example, that the god of the OT and the god of the NT were two completely different gods. But his main contention was that what Christianity seems to be to us, looks like the product of ignorance and indifference. He didn't realize he had his own ignorance and indifference, and hadn't bothered to learn about his own faith enough to understand at least in general terms all the different theological camps. It didn't help that he'd lived in Europe most of his later adult life, where he fit in better, never encountered fundies, and it's considered bad form to ask people about their religion. And he seems to studiously ignore Catholics.