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No you do not undertake my point, or are willfully misinterpreting it.
Yes he does. Yes I do, and that is my point.
No, he actually doesn't, and I do not believe you do either - how can you claim to be a Catholic while simultaneously appreciating the Dao? Daoism makes a series of claims about the universe that are fundamentally incompatible with Catholicism... which means that if you can appreciate the divinity of the Dao without being a Daoist, then nothing stops an atheist from doing the same to your Catholic understanding of the divine. There are real and serious differences between Buddhism, Catholicism, Daoism, Hinduism and Yezidism - they paint very different pictures of the nature of the underlying reality. The Buddhist draws different lessons from the Basilica than the Daoist who draws different lessons again from the Catholic, and while they are all religions, "the divine" means incredibly different things within each of them, and if you want to put them all into a generic category then you cannot actually keep atheism or pantheism from joining that category as well (see Spinoza once again).
If I've continued to misunderstand your point, please explain it to me in simpler terms.
Have you considered that your model of religious people is simply wrong?
How, exactly, are you capable of simultaneously being both a Daoist and a Catholic? These are two sets of competing beliefs about the world that cannot be held simultaneously, and I am fairly certain that the Catholic church will excommunicate you if you loudly talk about how other religions are also true and correct. If you can appreciate and understand the Eternal Dao without being a Daoist, then an atheist can appreciate and understand the divine significance of the Basilica without being a Catholic.
If my model of religious people is wrong, and people are capable of belonging to any number of religions which make mutually incompatible claims about the world with no worry, then I'll concede that point - but you're going to have to do a lot more work to convince me of that.
Don’t I remember something about pope Francis blessing a pagan idol, or is my long lost inner prot just fabricating reasons to stick it to the papists?
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