My guess about you is that you were mislead by religion and later enlightened, as it were, by science, correct?
People get "enlightened" by attending classes, doing homework and passing tests. That includes some science, of course. What is your grievance with science, and why did you join a science board if not to hope to engage reasonably "enlightened" people with some interests in discussing matters of science?
Typically people in that position can be most bitter.
Educated people are not necessarily bitter about the attacks on science and academia, except of course the direct victims of public attacks. Many of them are simply outspoken about the harm it produces.
You don't seem to me at this point to be bitter and that's a good thing.
Not necessarily. Insight is a good thing.
I respect that you have rejected the Bible. That is the way it goes most often. The point of being introduced to it isn't so much to blindly accept it but to make an informed decision, and apparently you have done so.
Generally speaking, introductions to the Bible usually involve the indoctrination of vulnerable minds.
To answer your questions, the Bible is relevant in my life as an accurate history of mankind,
That's not reflected in some of your posts, nor does it demonstrate any insight into what history teaches, nor does the use of the term "mankind" score you any points on the question of misogyny.
as an example, as well as the purpose of my creator for mankind in the future.
Your creators were mankind and womankind, your parents. The belief that humans were created out of thin air amounts to a denial of the vast evidence of evolution, geology and the related sciences promoted by the main forums of this site. The site goals of intelligent discussion are hardly achieved by propounding beliefs strongly contradicted by physical evidence.
This involves an explanation of, put simply, where we were, where we are, where we are headed and why.
We were, and are, living organisms inhabiting our niche of the ecosystems on Earth. The reason for that is explained in biology as survival of the species.
Do I derive morality from it?
By morality you mean ethics.
To a degree, I suppose, I attempt to as the example set in an historical context mentioned earlier can dictate. Most of those examples are far from flattering but it all comes from the same place.
A lot of your content is simply lost to obscurity. If you want to be understood, you should strive to be clear.
The discussion of morality is an obfuscated one though.
Then perhaps you should instead speak of ethics and you'll get more general agreement without causing people to shrink from the hubris.
Morality is inherent in all of us, God given, I believe, whether we acknowledge it or not,
The rest of us (most everyone) call it ethics, and recognize it as the natural product of human acculturation into a cooperative society. This is the predictable outcome of behaviors genetically transmitted to us by our protohuman ancestors.
but it is also in part a product of all sorts of influences of a cultural or traditional narrative.
The narrative is a matter of the arts. The sciences take care of fleshing out the facts, such as our genetic roots in behaviors found in more primitive animals, but adapted according to the faculties of human reason. Ethics is both a consequence of evolved behavior, and the logic arising from the evolved faculty of human reason. The empathy which motivates ethics is biologically endowed. Even Darwin noted the empathy a gorilla shows for her young, as something superior to humans in the throes of savagery.
Speaking of the practicality of the soul, consider also, the practicality of the spirit.
Depending on what people believe, they may call them the same thing. The question originates in the absence of sciences like biology, which explains quite clearly what animates organisms. In short, it's the ability to convert and use energy for purposes like locomotion, metabolism, tissue growth, reproduction, and everything else we associate with physically living. All of those practicalities are a matter of survival of species.
The Hebrew term ruach is translated as spirit, but can also, depending upon the context, be translated as breath, wind, breeze, or mental inclination.
It's a dead language, having been replaced by Greek and Aramaic due to Hellenization. Hence the fascination with this concept in Christianity (to include Messianic Judaism) of this word as it applied to the ontology of Greek Stoicism, which infused itself into the legends of the New Testament.
It basically means any invisible active force.
In common speech it normally refers to a principle of religious doctrine, which extricates human beings from their biological physical reality and replaces that with usually archaic superstitious explanations that were invented to explain phenomena for which there was no science.
Something unseen yet producing results.
Which is the focus of just about all mathematical and scientific inquiry. The alternative was to rely on Greek philosophy, such as Stoicism, which is why some of these themes appear in the New Testament,
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For example, the Greek word translated spirit is pneuma, from which comes the English pneumonia and pneumatic.
Which tells you it has nothing to do with Hebrew tradition, but results from Alexander the Great's conquest of the Levant, and the consequent absorption of Greek religious, ontological and philosophical ideas into the failing Hebrew culture -- esp failing to repel Babylon, Greece and Rome, despite the belief their God favored them above all other nations, a notion clearly rooted in the paranoid xenophobia of a culture that was constantly being bullied by the superpowers of its time.
So we have all of these practical but subtle influences that we can't see but should, I think, try and be aware of.
. . . or just turn to the life sciences and not have to invent explanations that are already worked out from the preponderance of evidence.
This doesn't put me on a moral pedestal but only makes me aware of the things that influence me, negative and positive, quixotic and mundane, real and imagined.
Sounds like a quagmire of dubious rhetoric.
Analyzing the Bible has not only proven to be fascinating but also has made me self aware.
You were not sentient before you could read?
Then you must know little of history and nothing of exegesis.
More than anything I have ever been taught or learned.
If you were educated in an accredited school (or the equivalent) anywhere in the world, then you were taught fundamentals of history and biology which render fundamentalism (even in its incarnation as what purports to be Messianic Judaism) moot. You would have been taught this, but for some reason you didn't learn it.
Though infallible, it has never let me down.
The belief that the literally interpreted Bible is infallible is refuted by all of history and exegesis, biology, physics, and science and academia at large.