What do you mean by "Christian Atheist"?

Let me start by explaining what I don't mean by the term.  Years ago, I was chatting with a professor who mentioned that he was "an Orthodox Jew."  I thought this was interesting and started asking him about his lifestyle.  After answering a few of my queries, he said something like this: "Yes, well, the only thing I'm really orthodox about is my atheism."  He was a Jewish atheist.  At the time, I found this curious, even absurd, but it described him pretty well.  He was an unbeliever, who was practicing a particular religion for reasons apart from belief.

So there are many Christian atheists, I suppose.  These are people who don't believe, but who practice Christian religion for reasons apart from belief.

But when I write as The Christian Atheist, I write as someone who is the converse of that portrayal.  I do believe, but culturally and intellectually and even religiously, I'm an atheist.  I act and think more like a humanist or a skeptic than like a typical Christian.  I'm more comfortable around atheists than I am around most Christians – I'd rather spend a week on a cruise with nothing but skeptics than an afternoon with a clatch of earnest evangelicals.

I'm naturally skeptical, and habitually prone to disbelief.  I trust atheists more than I trust believers.  I tend to hate religion as much as atheists do.  It's not enough to say that I'm embarrassed by Christians, or apologetic about the failures of Christianity.  I'm distrustful of Christians, and suspicious of Christianity as a system.  Yes, I've seen and heard and experienced evil at the hands of Christians, but I have no dramatic story of persecution or suffering.  Rather, I'm just someone who finds most of what is said and done in the name of God to be worthless or worse.  And I'm someone who has found that the questions of the skeptics are good questions, and that the answers of the faithful are not always honest or helpful.

So why not "The Skeptical Christian"?  It would be more accurate, but it doesn't sound quite right.  The Christian Atheist bespeaks the tension and the contradictions.  And it sounds better.