After an evening hanging out with some friends, DH & I were driving home. We agreed it was a travesty that they were raising their child Catholic & I complained about the excess of Catholic comments throughout the evening (this makes it sound like I hated it, but really I did enjoy the evening), one of which involved something along the lines of “I can’t believe atheists believe in [something] but not in God!” followed by “aren’t they just so stupid it’s cute” laughter. I bristled and said that “everyone encounters God differently” but I don’t think that went over well. Anyway, my response to this hours later was “That’s exactly why I am an atheist!” Do which DH responded, “… You’re an atheist?”

This may signify a lack of communcation betwixt us both but we don’t discuss it an awful lot. He knows I come from an ex-Catholic background and he’s never had any religion in his life. So it’s a touchy subject for me and a foreign one for him. He then went on to explain that he considers himself “spiritual, of course”, the classic cop-out, and we went on to describe what we did believe in (the soul) and what we do not (a personal god). It reminded me of Sunflower P‘s comment about being able to be an “atheistic pagan” and it got me thinking. I could also call myself a “spiritual atheist”, DH could be a “humanist buddhist”, and so on.

One of the reasons DH didn’t like the designation “atheist” was all the fundamentalism that that implied, in his mind. I think that’s why the double-worded labels make more sense for a lot of people. “I’m not a Christian, I’m a liberal Christian” or whatever. Now of course, summing up all your beliefs in one word is impossible, and two is only slightly less so. I think I could call myself a “recovering Catholic secular humanist spiritual pagan atheist” and still have some things missing. But the double-words seem to be a better descriptor: not too long, yet still informative.