[Serious] Over the top

[Abaddon_ire]

You are intentionally concealing your actual beliefs.

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

Nope. You refuse to identify what you actually believe despite me and others directly asking you. You appear to be a theist or deist of some stripe, but also so ashamed of that belief ~(whatever it might be) that you feel the need to avoid and evade all questions about whatever it is you believe. That is on you and nobody else. Now, I lack any belief in any gods, or spirits, or ant supernatural claptrap. Because there is zero evidence for any such.

Do you think you could bring yourself to state YOUR position on any such meta topics? I contend you are unable to be honest because you refuse to do so thus far.

It's puzzling to me why people are unable to accept what I say.

You don't say much. You compose walls of non-commital text that say nothing much and call such crap meaningful. It isn't.

Is there some assumption that an atheist must not be interested in religious issues or religious art?

Nope. Once again that is on you. The cistine chapel is a fabulous work of art, for example. Doesn't equal evidence for a god of any sort however.

A devout person might well accuse me of being unserious

An atheist can make the same accusation. You are neither hot nor cold, neither fish nor fowl.

that I approach the whole thing aesthetically, looking for beauty rather than truth. 

I don't believe you. To me you are simply using deception to insert whatever form of crap you happen to believe. You can say that I am wrong. I could be. But that is how you self present and that is the only thing I have to use as a basis for assessing what you say.

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. 

Sure, we get that you are immensely impressed by ancient philosophers. Some of us are not so impressed.

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. 

We don't have to imagine anything, we can just read what you write.

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. 

Yet somehow, you are unable to explain in detail any of that, preferring to deal in amorphous undefined nonsense. One would think that 60 years would have taught you something, but apparently not.

I'm not expecting any empathy from you on this. That's OK.

Well that is clearly dishonest because you next say...

Some people, for their own reasons, interface with the world in an irate and judgmental way.

...Which is irate judgmentalism from YOU.

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.

Look to your own self. You have stated that what is normal to YOU should be normal to EVERYONE.


ETA: You could short circuit all of this by actually stating your actual beliefs. But that seems a bridge to far for you.