re: I’m staunchly “agnostic”... my SO is not

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The way I see it, I'd argue most atheists are agnostic. I see agnostic

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Gnosticism is about knowledge. All humans are or should be agnostic about a god(s) as we do not know what is on the other side.

Theism is about belief in a god(s). We are all atheist with respect to most of the gods in human history, some just go one god further.

Thanks for attending my TedTalk.

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whereas I believe in logic/science/etc.

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Do you do your due diligence and test the science and logic you believe or do you just believe it? I bet you have faith in the science and logic but have never tested what you've learned on your own- a major assumption on my part so I apologise. This is called scientism which is kind of a religion if you think about it.

Condemnation without investigation is ignorance, search all things...

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Please expand.

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He or she said something was true. If that's just his or her opinion then why should I listen or care?

Fun tip of the day:

Agnostics and atheists are not really agnostic or atheistic. Deep down in their being, they know there is a God.

The doctrine of today's RCC is clearly Pelagian.

Eta: especially the current Pope.

This is an interesting Catholic.com article attempting to wriggle around the issue. Pretty decent job tbh.

LINK

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ARTICLE

Faith and Works

JIMMY AKIN • 7/1/2015

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“Protestants believe in faith alone, while Catholics believe in faith and works.” You hear both Protestants and Catholics say this all the time.

But it’s a misleading oversimplification. If you tell a typical Evangelical, “You believe in faith alone, but we Catholics believe in faith and works,” you will cause him to think that the Catholic Church teaches something that, in fact, it says is false.

Here’s why . . .

The justification connection

The discussion of faith and works doesn’t take place in a vacuum. It occurs in a specific context—the doctrine of justification.

The New Testament uses the word justification to refer to one of the things that God does for us by his grace. Unfortunately, there is considerable disagreement about what justification involves.

The way typical American Evangelicals use the term, when God justifies someone, he declares that person’s sins forgiven and proclaims the person righteous. This is occurs at the beginning of the Christian life, when a person first turns to God.

As far as it goes, this description is accurate. Catholic theology would say that there is more to justification than that, but it is true that at the beginning of the Christian life God forgives a person’s sins and declares him righteous.

Faith alone

When Protestants use the phrase “faith alone,” they are describing how we are justified. The idea is that in order to come to God, be forgiven, and be declared righteous, you don’t need to do anything to earn your place before God except have faith in Jesus Christ.

In practice, Protestants give different meanings to the “faith alone” formula. Lutherans, for example, don’t see the idea that baptism grants salvation as conflicting with this.

In his Small Catechism, Martin Luther asks, “What does baptism give? What good is it?” His answer: “It gives the forgiveness of sins, redeems from death and the devil, gives eternal salvation to all who believe this, just as God’s words and promises declare.”

Various Protestants—including some Calvinists, Anglicans, Methodists, and others—believe baptism plays a role in salvation, but others sharply disagree. Some—particularly Baptists—claim that if baptism were to play a role in salvation it would violate the “faith alone” formula. They thus understand this formula in a way that excludes baptism. This is the most common position in American Evangelicalism.

Regardless of how they interpret the “faith alone” formula, there is one thing that Protestants agree would violate this formula: works. “Works”—whatever they may be—are precisely the thing that the “faith alone” formula is meant to exclude.

Much can be said about what “works” are in the Bible, but, for reasons of space, we won’t be going into that here. It will do for our purposes to note that most Evangelicals understand the term to mean “good works” (feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, etc.). Some understand it even more broadly to mean anything that you do.

Both groups commonly envision works as somehow earning our place before God.

Faith and works?

If a Catholic tells a Protestant, “We believe in justification by faith and works,” it will cause the Protestant to believe something about Catholic doctrine that is not true.

Remember: Protestants use the term justification to refer to an event at the beginning of the Christian life where God forgives us and declares us righteous. As a result, a Protestant will think that the Catholic is saying that we need to do works in order to come to God and be forgiven.

This will confirm his biases against the Church and play into all those stereotypes left over from the Reformation—the ones where Catholics are depicted as holding a false gospel according to which we need to earn our place before God by our own efforts. But the Catholic Church does not teach this.

Trent Speaks

Following the Protestant Reformation, the Catholic Church held an ecumenical council in the Italian city of Trent to deal with the theological questions that were being debated. The Council of Trent issued the Decree on Justification (DJ), which set forth the Catholic position on the subject.

In the heat of the times, Protestant leaders painted the Council of Trent as a great villain that simply reiterated the Church’s false teachings and its false gospel. That characterization is still found today in a lot of Protestant literature on the subject.

But if you read what Trent says, you find it actually denies much of what is attributed to it. This is the case with the idea that we need to earn our place before God by doing works—particularly at the beginning of the Christian life when we are first justified.

According to Trent, “none of those things that precede justification, whether faith or works, merit the grace of justification. ‘For, if by grace, it is not now by works, otherwise,’ as the Apostle says, ‘grace is no more grace’” (DJ 8, quoting Rom. 11:6).

When we come to God and are justified, it happens without any merit on our part. Neither our faith nor our works—nor anything else—merits justification. Trent thus denies the very thing our Protestant brethren fear it asserts—and that we lead them to believe if we tell them simply that we believe in “justification by faith and works.”

Isn’t that our language?

Given how common the “justified by faith and works” language is in some Catholic circles, the idea that we should be careful using it with Protestants may seem unfamiliar. “Isn’t the language we use when summarizing our beliefs about justification?” one might ask.

It depends on whom you mean by “we.” Many Catholics use this as a kind of top-level summary of justification, but you don’t find the magisterium—the Church’s teaching authority—using it that way.

If you go through Trent’s Decree on Justification, or the section on justification in the Catechism of the Catholic Church (CCC 1987-1995), you won’t find the phrase “faith and works.” And you won’t find the word works at all in the Catechism’s section on justification.

This may be surprising, but the fact that the magisterium does not express its teaching in this way is a signal that we need to look more closely at what it says.

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I’m atheist and my husband is not. He’s not super religious but he certainly believes. He even went to undergrad at a seminary. Lol. We just agree to disagree. I don’t demean him or imply he is stupid for his beliefs and he doesn’t tell me I’m going to rot in hell and try to preach the gospel. It has worked for us. We’ve had some debates but never a big argument. One thing I do that helps is I will participate in prayer or what not when we go to his family’s house for dinner. They don’t even know I’m atheist. So we avoid any possible issues like you just mentioned. If it had been me I would have just watched the damn service and gone on with life. You can watch it without believing in it if it will keep the peace.

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Agnostics and atheists are not really agnostic or atheistic. Deep down in their being, they know there is a God

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that’s a new one for me

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Fun tip of the day:

Agnostics and atheists are not really agnostic or atheistic. Deep down in their being, they know there is a God.

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Nah. I was raised Catholic, catechism, confirmation, all that jazz. From a young age it all felt like bullshite to me.

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 disagree with that but at least there's an argument for it

saying all atheists and agnostics actually believe in a God is nonsensical

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Morality and cooperation came through the mechanism of natural selection by the processes of evolution.

We can start there ..