#language
There is a word in English that I saw defined _one_ time, and cannot remember, and couldn't find the original source.

It means a person who tends to be law abiding, but not because they ascribe to any authority of law, but because they happen to be good participants in the social contract and tend to have personal ethics that mean they _happen_ to not break any laws (like, they don't lie, kill, cheat, steal, etc., just not because there's a law or punishment).

Anyone know it?

@AskTheDevil
Umm, Atheist?

@Usama_Backhair No, a word for a kind of person that doesn't require them to follow some artificial philosopy or creed, like atheism.

It's a natural quality a person can have, rather than a joined one.

I know atheists like to believe they're better than everyone else, but that's not what I was asking.
: )

@AskTheDevil The word atheist means precisely that. It means literally "not following a set theism, including any rare theism around being "an atheist". it means "of no theology".
I'm with Frank Schaeffer: He describes himself as a "Christian Atheist" (son of the creator of the evangelical movement in America, Frances Schaeffer Sr)

and that's not to say I agree with all of his positions, but he's got a pretty good idea of how one can obtain their "North Stars" in life. IMO.

@Usama_Backhair If the word were "atheist" I wouldn't have any trouble. There's copies lying all around. ; )

Since a person can have this trait and also believe in whatever supernatural hooey they like, atheist doesn't fit.

@AskTheDevil
Receiving an electrical signal through the air was once "supernatural", now your phone does it so fast you take it for granted, there's another word that deserves more care than it's users take, methinks

@Usama_Backhair
I agree!

I often remark that I don't believe in the supernatural.

However, I think there's things that people _think_ are supernatural, because they look it, and they're weird, hard to measure, and we tell ghost stories about them. I think lots of that stuff gets thrown into "hooey we don't have to think about" by people who believe in scientism as their spiritualism.

Those things, however weird, are still natural. We just don't understand them yet!
: )

@AskTheDevil
That’s right: I don’t believe in the supernatural either: I simply believe in the natural that I have yet to understand the mechanisms of.

It is quite reasonable to believe in the possibility that a being became so advanced and so expansive that if there was an omnitience or omnipresence it would be indistinguishable from that being, such a being, by this monkey’s standards at least, would certainly qualify as G-d. Therefore I can’t possibly be arrogant enough to say “no G-d’s”.

@Usama_Backhair I've wrestled a bit with whether the "Creator" I know is even the same critter that people are talking about when they refer to the God of the bible, or El, or whoever a particular religion's sky-beard is, in that the only real attribute they often have in common with the stories is that they created a universe out of nothingness and void.

Are they ascribing bad or silly traits to the being that made me, or are they making up gods and claiming they did what the Creator did?

@AskTheDevil look up a guy on Instagram who calls himself "maklelan", His name is Dan McClellan, he is a scholar of the bible, the REAL Bible (which never said anything about "created from nothingness" that was added by "translators" far later) He speaks and reads Greek and Hebrew (original languages the Bible was written in), and he debunks a LOT of the utter crap that NIV, KJV, Catholic, etcetera "Bibles" have utterly fractured Christianity from Christians with. It's astonishing how much crap.

@Usama_Backhair People seem to forget that "the bible" is a cherry-picked collection of older stories, which themelves often evolved out of even older traditions.

Not everything that the Bible came from is in the Bible, and the people who the old testament came from continued and continue to have an active evolution of their own ideas about Creation.

The people that picked what went in the bible left things out they didn't like.

@AskTheDevil @Usama_Backhair

Virtually every priest and pastor knows that the Bible they teach from the pulpit on Sundays bears no resemblance to the Bible they study in seminary or Bible college; and the language they use to discuss it among themselves is entirely different, in content and tone, from the language they use with their parishioners.

They refuse to share what they actually know about the Bible for fear that it would empty their collection plates.