God Is Not 3 Guys

From a reader: How can you be a Catholic and an atheist simultaneously?  Help! Thanks for asking.   I am an atheist but not a materialist. Atheists reject gods. Materialists reject God. To put it more kindly, they don’t believe there’s any non-physical reality, in that way denying the existence of what’s called “God.” I relate intimately with the Inner Realm and culturally I am Catholic. But I do not receive nourishment from religion devoted to a god or set of gods—Lord, Father, HeHimHis. I reject that kind of theism—hence, I am a Catholic atheist. I can't get through a day without relating to my Inner Beloved. At the end of most days I reflect on the activities of the day. Not rarely I realize that what I accomplished that day veered from my morning plans, which needed revision. An inner force directed me to the right work, which I had not known when the day began. I love it when I fall into an unpleasant job I’ve been putting off, putting off. Suddenly ther...

When a family member of our Catholic priest Mary was preparing to start chemotherapy for cancer treatment, she said to him, “You are walking the Hero’s Journey,” The Hero’s Journey is a tale as old as humankind. An individual leaves home and all that is familiar and secure. He goes out into the world, encountering along the way many challenges, some marvelous and some horrifying, even life-threatening. At times the person’s path joins with other travelers who can be companions in the experience. At times the journey is solitary, even painfully, agonizingly lonely. The traveler comes to a deeper understanding of the world and of self. At the end of the journey, the traveler arrives back home to the familiar and the loved, but forever changed. In setting out to seek new discoveries, the seeker has discovered the self. In her homily for Palm Sunday, Mary likened the Hero’s Journey to the story of Christ’s Passion. You don’t have to believe the story of Christ to see its her...

From Time magazine, April 14, 2014: Activist, atheist and best-selling author Barbara Ehrenreich: I was educated as a scientist, and one of the things I learned was that you do not discard anomalous results. If you have a result that doesn’t fit your theory, . . . you don’t get to erase that. You have to figure out what’s going on. Materialists, however, ignore evidence of an immaterial realm or dismiss it in the same old predictable ways—drugs, schizophrenia, etc. etc . Ehrenreich in the NY times wrote about her mystical experience and others’: [My family] were atheists and rationalists, a stance I perpetuated by opting, initially, for a career in science. . . .   But something happened when I was 17 that shook my safely rationalist worldview and left me with a lifelong puzzle. . . . It was a furious encounter with a living substance . . . I felt ecstatic and somehow completed, but also shattered. . . . When the early 20th-century Protestant theologian Rudol...