[Serious] Over the top

[Belacqua]

You are intentionally concealing your actual beliefs.

I am not. I have been completely honest concerning these things. 

It's puzzling to me why people are unable to accept what I say. Is there some assumption that an atheist must not be interested in religious issues or religious art? A devout person might well accuse me of being unserious -- that I approach the whole thing aesthetically, looking for beauty rather than truth. 

I also find the unprovable mystical contemplations, like Buber's rewriting of Nietzsche's Dionysus vs. Apollo system, to be fascinating and informative about personal relations with the world. Not on a neurological level but on the level of empathy, emotion, valuation. 

There's no way I can know this, but I think that people may be assuming I'm a liar because they can't imagine that a person like me is real. That is, I seem so far from their own relation with religion and art, etc., that they don't see how it could work. Not that I am advanced or unique -- I think there have been many such people, especially before the age when atheists vs religious demanded the drawing of battle lines. 

But I'm a pretty old guy -- just turned 60 -- and I grew up in a tiny town with no culture and (in those days) no talk of religion. But ever since I escaped that I have been immersed in an intellectual and aesthetic world, first in Chicago, then New York, then London, and for many years now Japan. And this has led perhaps to different kinds of experiences and different expectations about what may be put together. 

I'm not expecting any empathy from you on this. That's OK. Some people, for their own reasons, interface with the world in an irate and judgmental way. But I am surprised by the reaction to what I consider to be normal -- something which grew organically just from studying what I like. It doesn't seem odd to me, but others who merely hear about it can't believe that I am speaking honestly.