Maybe I should make another thing clear, Steve. My feeling that it is very probable that there is a God was not put in me by the Bible. I came to the feeling that there probably was a God long before I had given the Bible or Christianity any real attention at all. The time in life when I first began seriously thinking there was a God was in my 20s, and it was due more to experiences with the Native American community and Native American traditional religion and my reading of various books from several Asian traditions (Buddhist, Taoist, and Hindu).

All of the above gave me the feeling that there is a guiding moral and spiritual purpose to life and a purpose that is found throughout the Universe, not just here in our little human societies.

That life is about far more than survival and competition, that it has a much higher moral purpose than those concerns.

That life did not develop by accident, but through that higher purpose.

And NONE of the above conflicts in any way with my modern science-based understanding of life, which understanding I already had well in place from the time I was a very young child, and which includes the usual scientific viewpoints of evolution, natural history of the planet, astronomy, physics, chemistry, math, etc.

So your problems with the Bible, Steve...I can understand what concerns you there...there's a lot in the Bible that I have problems with too...but the Bible is not the origin or the cornerstone of my faith. Life itself is the Holy of Holies...depending on how you look at it. If you think it's all just a fortuitous accident, then maybe not. If you think it's a sacred and purposeful Unity, then yes.