I’m reading a thought-provoking book aimed at “skeptics,” “nonbelievers,” and “secular” people (some names are worse) called “Making Sense Of God” by Timothy Keller.

I don’t love the characters of people like me – a hopefully spiritual human who does not believe in the conventional notion of God. That doesn’t make me a skeptic or a nonbeliever.

I think a lot about the idea of God, the way most Christians would define him. Mostly, when it comes to morality and empathy, I wonder why it seems vanishing from our culture, both in how we speak to one another and in our tattered but powerful ideas about what it means to be a moral human.

A few years ago, I talked with a new friend I made up here, and even though we both know better, some political talk slipped into one of our conversations. I was talking about my work helping refugee children, and he suddenly blurted out that he didn’t understand that we were responsible for assisting the vast numbers of refugees and poor people worldwide.

“Why do we have to do that?” I asked. I started to say it was because it was the right thing to do, that is what I was taught. You’re a Christian, I said to my friend. “Isn’t that what your God has instructed you to do? Isn’t that what it means to be a Christian?”

The truth was, I couldn’t say why it was a reasonable thing to do. I had never before had to justify my feelings about it.

The man is still my friend, but we haven’t returned to the conversation.

But the book is challenging and compelling. It makes me think about why we created the idea of God in the first place, why he and his various incarnations first launched the concept of being human, caring for the poor and the needy and the refugee, and why it is better, to tell the truth than lie to be obedient and observant and respect of the entity we claim to call God.

Before the evolution of religions like Christianity, Judaism, and the Muslim faith, no one argued that it was the responsibility of all of us to care for the poor and the vulnerable. Christian leaders like Jesus and St. Augustine stated that idea most forcefully.

Keller points out that this movement invited the concept of morality being telling the truth and caring for others in need, for the weaker among us.

Today, many Christians reject the idea that it is their responsibility to care for the needy people in the world. There are too many of them, they say, and they seem to get poorer and more numerous. Why should we pay for them to survive and prosper when no one pays for us?

Fyodor Dostoyevsky famously wrote, “Without God and the future life…everything is permitted, one can do anything?

Dostoyevsky’s troubling warning has become a prophecy.

The idea of being a leader in our country is that everything is permitted; everyone can do anything and survive and prosper, even becoming more prosperous and more powerful for lying and rejecting the call for mercy and caring.

This sounds like a moral horror story, something that came from Poe, not Florida.

In his book, Keller claimed that secular Western society (people like me) is one of the most moral cultures in history, especially compared to the past bloodshed and cruelty in the world.

I like to think of myself and my friends as moral people; this culture takes it for granted that ethical behavior is helping others, not just ourselves. I took to heart the Christian belief that our morality is defined by what we let go of, not what we gain.

But here is where it gets very complicated for me.

Yet, Keller wrote, “If today we ask “Why should we live in these ways? Why should we support equality, guard rights, and sacrifice to help people experiencing poverty? Our cultural institutions cannot answer the question.

But the question is at the heart of the great divide.

In the past, he wrote, previous societies could point to some shared, outside ethical source – whether sacred writings or ancient tradition of the wisdom of the sages. These teachings and writings, he said, expressed what was understood to be the moral order of the universe.

Help the poor. Help the oppressed. Free the slave. Liberate women.  Help the refugee. Seek meaning, not money. These values are, to me, the center of my purpose in life.

Every one of them is under siege.

In the non-religious culture, says Keller –  the culture of the skeptical, the nonbelievers, morality is “self-authorizing.” there is no God or Rabbi or Iman shaping our culture alongside us, covering our back, giving us boundaries, and emphasizing the sacred character of helping the needy.

As organized religion is under constant attack, so is the God responsible for it. Our society was not prepared for it; the shock is felt every day.

Religion is in decline as a powerful moral influence. Fearing God is not the motor anymore, there really is no motor other than our individual sense of right and wrong.

Politicians stand up and lie every day, and value money much more than people, they wound others and seek vengeance, not mercy, on their “enemies” – me and us.

Where has all that morality gone so suddenly? Why don’t even many Christians believe it anymore? Did Donald Trump do this? I don’t believe this. It is obvious he took too much power, it is also obvious he has and will have too little.

I do get the point Keller is trying to make. It’s not an argument, but something I need to think about.

If we have to create our shared moral values individually – how do we share values individually? – and there is no God or dictum or, yes, threats – to guide us, when what is our basis for accepting them?

This is not about my belief in God. It is about understanding the purpose and sense of God, real or not, a powerful shaper of Western culture and morality.

I grew up in a Jewish household worshipping an angry and ill-tempered God who didn’t threaten immoral people with Hall but with lightning bolts, dead children, disease, and famine.

I decided to look elsewhere every having a religious holiday dinner that celebrated the slaughter of innocent firstborn children whose leader wouldn’t do what God told him to do. That’s not my story.

In my early life, if you didn’t help the needy and lied and be quiet, you would feel God’s wrath in one way or another. Lying, money worshipping, and cruelty were sins not to be tolerated.

The people around me, when I grew up were frightened to disobey these commandments, terrified of being immoral, and sure of being punished if they were. God’s name could not ever be pronounced, and my grandfather, a religious man, was considered so holy that he couldn’t be seen when he prayed; he had to have a sheet over his head.

And he was the Pa of a tiny Ma and Pa store. He was only a King for a few minutes each morning when he prayed to his God—every day of his life.

I left the Jewish faith and became a Quaker when I was 14, and am still. I love being a Quaker, but since there is no overpowering single way of seeing the world other than pacifism, the influence of Quakers has shrunk rapidly and is struggling for viability in a fast-moving and increasingly amoral world.

For me, there are many ironies. I couldn’t and can’t accept him as a God, but Jesus has inspired me more than any other religious or secular leader. I believe in every word he has said to have uttered.

I like to say I follow him, not worship him. To me, it’s often the same thing.

This confusion about God has stuck us in an intellectual kind of schizophrenia, says Keller.

We, the secular but increasingly spiritual people, have a strong moral sense of right and wrong, but at least half of the country is no longer buying the argument that came from their God in the first place. It seems we are no longer trusted as seers and guides.

I am somewhat startled to realize that many of our moral values came from people who believed in a just and demanding God but who don’t any longer.

This split reality leaves us unhappy because so many people no longer accept our values, treat them with contempt, and threaten them.  We did get lazy; we are often smug. We no longer get to define what is good; just look inward and follow our hearts.

We are sad because we see ourselves living in an amoral world with no consequences for the people who behave in a way we believe is immoral or worse.

Our ideas about gender, race, honesty, and empathy are no longer shared with most of our fellow Americans.

It’s as if they are worshipping a God that no longer exists in the old ways in their minds and hearts, and we are left holding the bag in a way, embracing values we don’t quite understand ourselves.

Perhaps one answer to the awful divisions in our country is for both sides to find a way to start explaining themselves to the other rather than demonizing and ridiculing each other. That is supposed to be one of the things religious people want – peace.

I never knew until recently that Christianity, not the Greeks, invented the idea of an equal society. And it was Christ and his followers  who created the idea that a moral society cares for the less fortunate and the vulnerable.

If it feels confusing, it’s because it is. I am doing better at understanding why God makes sense to so many people. I thank Keller’s book for that.

I also am pondering the very original and different idea of Keller’s that we are not to explain to the broader world why our values are moral, and theirs are not.

I’m not a seer and can’t predict the future; I am still largely ignorant of the past.

I’ve chosen a spiritual path, not a religious one. My life is inspired by Christian values I never really understood and cannot explain.

What, I am thinking, will I say to a person asking me why it is so moral to help people experiencing poverty, refugees, and older people? It’s true that there are more and more of them all the time, and they keep getting poorer.

I will never give up on that gentle and loving idea of morality, but I will be thinking about how to explain it in a new and more relevant way.