An athiest fighting her Catholic background gives up the war....

A big Catholic welcome to the “geeky atheist” Leah Libresco, who chronicles some of her journey here:

I decided to take a little time to make sure I really believed what I thought I believed, before telling my friends, family, and, now, all of you.  That left me with the question of what to do about my atheism blog.  My solution was to just not write anything I disagreed with.  Enough of my friends had accused me of writing in a crypto-Catholic style that I figured no one would notice if I were actually crypto-Catholic for a month and a half (i.e. everything from “Upon this ROC…” on) .  That means you already have a bit of a preview of what has and hasn’t changed.  I’m still confused about the Church’s teachings on homosexuality, I still need to do a lot of work to accept gifts graciously, and I still love steam engines.

Starting tomorrow, this blog is moving to the the Patheos Catholic channel (the url and RSS will remain unchanged).  Meanwhile, I’m in RCIA classes at a DC parish, so you can look forward to more Parsing Catholicism tags (and after the discussion of universalism we had last week, I think it will be prudent to add a “Possibly Heretical” category).

This post isn’t the final word on my conversion.  I’m sure there’s a lot more explaining and arguing to do, so be a little charitable in your read of this post and try to give me a little time to expand my ideas over the next few weeks.  (Based on my in-person arguments to date, it seems like most of my atheist friends disagree two or three steps back from my deciding Morality is actually God.  They usually diverge back around the bit where I assert morality, like math, is objective and independent of humans.  As one of my friends said, “Well, I guess if I were a weird quasi-Platonist virtue ethicist, this would probably convince me”).

And how am I doing?  Well, I’m baking now (cracking eggs is pretty much the least gnostic thing I can do, since it’s so, so disgusting to touch, and putting effort into food as more than the ransom my body demands for continued function is the second least gnostic).  I’ve been using the Liturgy of the Hours and St. Patrick’s Breastplate for most of my prayer attempts.  and, over all, I feel a bit like Valentine in this speech from Arcadia.

It makes me so happy… A door like this has cracked open five or six times since we got up on our hind legs. It’s the best possible time to be alive, when almost everything you thought you knew is wrong.