So, what the heck is a Christian atheist?

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It is pretty simple. I follow Jesus Christ's teachings but regard the concept of a deity as something those who started a religion after he was long off the planet use as a ploy. I believe in a concept of continuing life rather than an afterlife, with my current incarnation merely a way station in eternity.

"Current Incarnation"? So you believe in an afterlife, after all ... you're more like an agnostic than an atheist.

We in the church call your beliefs "Philosophical Christianity".

I’m a moral atheist. I don’t believe in God, but I’m interested in ethics and morality. I don’t believe in the Bible, but the Golden Rule reflects my attitude to an extent.

Where does your Golden Rule come from if you don't believe in the Bible?

The "Golden Rule" did not originate with the Bible. It seems to have originated with Gung Fu Tsu (a.k.a., Confucius, 551–479 BCE).

It’s just a concise way of stating something that I value. The Golden Rule predates the Bible, actually.

Anyway, even though I am an atheist, I can relate to some core Christian values. I don’t believe in following the Golden Rule because Christ said so but because it’s usually the right thing to do.

I think any reasonably, caring, logical human being could arrive at the "Golden Rule" rule without any outside source. It's quite pragmatic. If you treat others badly, it will only come back to bite you in the ass.

I prefer the Jewish version which goes something like 'do not do unto others what you would not want done unto you.'

But even if there is no bad consequence a person’s sense of morality should be evolved enough to err on the side of goodness and compassion. That’s not usually the case, though.

I agree, it should be. One could argue that all human actions are based on selfish reasons, I suppose -- even the seemingly selfish act of pushing a loved one out of the path of a speeding car. The argument being we'd rather die than go through the pain of losing someone we love. But I'm not cynical enough, yet, to argue that too strongly.

Here’s an interesting scenario: a cashier you don’t know accidentally gives you $10 more in change than you have coming to you. Do you let her know the mistake or keep the $10 so you have extra coffee money for the week?

I’ve given the money back. I would worry that she’d lose her job (what if she’s a single mom?). Besides keeping the money would be the wrong thing to do. To me, it’d be stealing.

Yeah, that's a no-brainer for anyone with an ounce of compassion for others. I have been in that situation before and always made it right.

Especially these days----where they are very vigilant about cash register counts.

What if they weren’t vigilant about cash register counts? What if no one would know that the cashier’s register was off?

Then I would make the moral choice, regardless.

Vigilance about counts is just one more confirmatory item---which solidifies the notion that one must make the moral choice.

There are probably several other ways you could look at yourself:

1) Simply being a non-materialist/non-physicalist who believes in the eternal value of stories.

2) Someone perhaps who might consider the eternal nature of awareness (perhaps in the panpsychist sense) who may consider that all stories technically come from nature (ie. us) and in that sense speak a certain kind of symbolic truth about the nature of things.

Technically I think you could even be full evolutionist, naturalist in most meaningful senses of the word, and just be open-minded to the idea that evolution has occurred in more media (even on our planet and in our solar system) than might be readily apparent to us. A very interesting example of someone saying interesting things not necessarily about consciousness but suggesting the thought of inorganic evolution - was Bret Weinstein when he was speaking with Travis Pangburn (Pangburn Philosophy podcast) a while back.

Seems like so much of what we chose to include or omit has a lot to do with context. Seems like it used to be popular to omit views when people disliked or looked down on the people who they thought of as commonly having them, however the right person parsing it the right way seems to tell a very different and even far more plausible story even if the overarching content is mostly the same.