All that some of us are saying is that the values and qualities you value and live by are not directly derivative of any formal religion or holy book of *any* sort. They are innate in Nature and the awareness structure of the human as such. We don't have to postulate a christianist "God" in order to have those virtues, else they would not have existed before the third century when christianism was politicized into the ancestor of today's over 300 forms of it and over 40,000 named and practicing sects.
In fact, if there is anything useful in the Bible to be acted on, whatever it is that we misunderstand intellectually and through our beliefs as "God" is what we are made in the image and likeness of. That accepted, regardless of time or geography from the dawn of human awareness, the keys to the kingdom have always been immediately present as one's own Nature. In support of this, we can see that no matter the stream of faith or philosophy anywhere and anywhen, there is always the admonition to go within.
Why does anyone suppose that injunction to silence ("Be still, and know that I AM (is) God") and sonship is in the christianist or any Bible? Is not to discover *how* it is that "I" am the image and likeness of God? It is already so by our very nature. Atheism and agnosticism aren't really about a denial of Nature or Reality, but only of the necessary rejection of imposed belief systems arbitrarily ascribed by birth. That is to say the arbitrarily conceptualized "God" of imagination.
That rejection, in the same way as a teenager *must* rebel in order to gain the psychological muscles of maturity and self-reliance, must also be made, eventually, by anyone in the bounds of a formalized belief, whether scientific, political, or religious. That is why one man accurately said: "The search for Reality is the most dangerous undertaking; it will destroy your world. Yes, it will, as you thought it was before you re-assessed from a standpoint of deep inquiry, the one extant before any attempt to formalize it and put it *on* others, not draw it out from them as a pre-existing Reality.
In fact, if there is anything useful in the Bible to be acted on, whatever it is that we misunderstand intellectually and through our beliefs as "God" is what we are made in the image and likeness of. That accepted, regardless of time or geography from the dawn of human awareness, the keys to the kingdom have always been immediately present as one's own Nature. In support of this, we can see that no matter the stream of faith or philosophy anywhere and anywhen, there is always the admonition to go within.
Why does anyone suppose that injunction to silence ("Be still, and know that I AM (is) God") and sonship is in the christianist or any Bible? Is not to discover *how* it is that "I" am the image and likeness of God? It is already so by our very nature. Atheism and agnosticism aren't really about a denial of Nature or Reality, but only of the necessary rejection of imposed belief systems arbitrarily ascribed by birth. That is to say the arbitrarily conceptualized "God" of imagination.
That rejection, in the same way as a teenager *must* rebel in order to gain the psychological muscles of maturity and self-reliance, must also be made, eventually, by anyone in the bounds of a formalized belief, whether scientific, political, or religious. That is why one man accurately said: "The search for Reality is the most dangerous undertaking; it will destroy your world. Yes, it will, as you thought it was before you re-assessed from a standpoint of deep inquiry, the one extant before any attempt to formalize it and put it *on* others, not draw it out from them as a pre-existing Reality.
