> It's quite a bit above our pay grade to proclaim categorically who supposedly cannot be redeemed; it verges on blasphemy.

And the idea that atheists can be saved isn't novel in Catholic teaching – it is implicit in the Holy Office's 1949 condemnation of Feeneyism, [0] in which it declared that a person who doesn't believe in Catholicism due to "invincible ignorance" can be saved by an "implicit desire" for God. Although it didn't include the case of atheists, it didn't exclude them either – suggesting that an atheist who doesn't believe in God in their head (due to some intellectual issue) but nonetheless believes in God in their heart can be saved.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feeneyism

> ... who doesn't believe in God in their head [..] but nonetheless believes in God in their heart ...

I'm racking my brain right now dissecting what that even means. Believing there is no one but wishing it wasn't so?

In Catholic theology, God is believed to be Goodness itself – in a sense, identical to Plato's Form of the Good (but going far beyond Plato's idea at the same time).

Hence, anyone who loves Good loves God... so a person who truly loves Good, but who due to some intellectual obstacle, isn't able to call that Good "God" – from a Catholic viewpoint, it can be said that they love God without knowing that it is God whom they love – and by that love they can be saved

if you're good but in your mind reject God, I guess they're saying that it's good enough

Pretty much, although it also depends on your mind's reasons.

If you start from the assumption that Christianity is true, and some people know this, and others don't – you have to ask why the people who don't know it, don't know it. And this is where Catholic theology distinguishes between "vincible" and "invincible" ignorance - "vincible" means the ignorance is your own fault, "invincible" means your ignorance is through no fault of your own.

How to distinguish the two? Ultimately, it is up to God to decide – nobody else knows for sure what's going on in your head. At best, theologians would give some examples of hypothetical situations which could be said to be one or the other – but the real world is often much messier than any such hypothetical can capture.

Which is part of why, the traditional Catholic teaching, is that (with rare exceptions) you can't actually know where people are going to end up. The idea is that if you make it to heaven, you might be surprised to find a lot of people there you weren't expecting, and also maybe some people you were sure would be there aren't.

As an agnostic who spends a lot of time reading scriptures of several religions, trying to grasp the themes and motivations of others I share a world with -- those passages are particularly inscrutable.

It's pretty easy to parse if you understand that God isn't actually asking anyone for the dimensions of the Earth. It's more about proffering humility to Job by comparing his understanding of things to God's.

It's repeating, over and over, the extreme ignorance, and thus presumption, of Job in running from what God told him to do.

Edited to add: this is a single passage with verse markings.

You might enjoy unsongbook.com, a main theme of which is contemplating the meaning of that passage (and, related to that, making whale puns).

> As an agnostic who spends a lot of time reading scriptures of several religions, trying to grasp the themes and motivations of others I share a world with -- those passages are particularly inscrutable.

I think the author's intent is to remind us that some things are simply beyond our ken (to which I'd add: For now).

> It's quite a bit above our pay grade [...] it verges on blasphemy.

Cheers! As I understand the term blasphemy, our presumptuous species has a great deal to assert about the unknowable. ^_^

Absolutely, but Pope Francis said a lot of things that were absolutely core, canon, Catholic beliefs but still made a bunch of Catholics unreasonably angry.