FIrst, I'm happy for people to resurrect "Toonces". First, I'm clearly not driving anything so the metaphor doesn't really apply well to me. But it does apply well to GWB.
Second, when I wrote "what *you* mean by 'God'" I meant "what *one* means by 'God'".
Purely as a description of myself, I have realized that relative to the meaning it has for most people, I just don't understand the concept of Greater Power.
I'm not an "evangelical" atheist by any means. I've always loved religion. But I realize now that's because I don't really take it seriously in the way most people do. Because I have this kind of defective understanding, I really wouldn't be able to add to the development of a "Greater Power" thesis, except maybe to offer a suggestion of where in the intellectual world one might place that "Power".
Mystery - to me - resides in the irreducible indeterminacy of the relationship between our "self" (really any living "self") and reality. I think it also resides in freedom of choice and creativity. For me, it's impossible to see ethical guidance and meaning as any but human constructs. They come from a mysterious place, but only to the extent anything else does. Music is far more mysterious than ethics, I think.
Personally, I never have understood and find it impossible to understand the idea that ethics come from somewhere or something outside us. I know most people do, but I don't get it. It's a defect, I guess.