For what it’s worth, I still get a kick from time to time out of being able to recite long passages of Hebrew and engage in pilpul with my Jewish geek friends (both frum and otherwise), despite in no meaningful sense remaining a practicing Jew.
I also get a kick out of being fluent in Spanish and I’ve been known to enjoy hairsplitting discussions about Buffy the Vampire Slayer and reciting long passages of scripts of plays I performed in. I also get a huge thrill out of being able to recite the first sentence of the Oddysey in Greek. None of this has anything to do with religion or atheism, admittedly.
All of which is to say I suspect you can probably find atheists (both strong-sense and weak-sense) who share your appreciation for history, tradition, shared birthright, the intellectual pleasure of memorization, and learning foreign languages.
The comfortable feeling of safely believing the proper things, on the other hand… yeah, that one will be more of a hard sell, at least to talk about. (You will find many people in sufficiently large soi-disant atheist communities who enjoy this feeling, of course, like any other group of humans, but they probably won’t admit to it and may well get upset at the suggestion.)
To my mind, actively endorsing and championing beliefs that are popular in one’s community has many of the same issues as passively believing them. If everybody agrees about everything important, something is screwy.
For what it’s worth, I still get a kick from time to time out of being able to recite long passages of Hebrew and engage in pilpul with my Jewish geek friends (both frum and otherwise), despite in no meaningful sense remaining a practicing Jew.
I also get a kick out of being fluent in Spanish and I’ve been known to enjoy hairsplitting discussions about Buffy the Vampire Slayer and reciting long passages of scripts of plays I performed in. I also get a huge thrill out of being able to recite the first sentence of the Oddysey in Greek. None of this has anything to do with religion or atheism, admittedly.
All of which is to say I suspect you can probably find atheists (both strong-sense and weak-sense) who share your appreciation for history, tradition, shared birthright, the intellectual pleasure of memorization, and learning foreign languages.
The comfortable feeling of safely believing the proper things, on the other hand… yeah, that one will be more of a hard sell, at least to talk about. (You will find many people in sufficiently large soi-disant atheist communities who enjoy this feeling, of course, like any other group of humans, but they probably won’t admit to it and may well get upset at the suggestion.)
I agree that there’s an actual problem with the “safety” of passively believing what one’s told and I don’t actually want that part back.
To my mind, actively endorsing and championing beliefs that are popular in one’s community has many of the same issues as passively believing them. If everybody agrees about everything important, something is screwy.