..... What mattered to Confucius, Socrates, Christ, and Isaiah was not what you believed but how you behaved. Show me, don’t tell me. “God” was the experience of loving compassion, not an all-powerful, judgmental, and often angry patriarch.....

In Armstrong’s words, “The Axial Age pushed forward the frontiers of human consciousness and discovered a transcendent dimension in the core of their being, but they did not necessarily regard this as supernatural…. If the Buddha or Confucius had been asked whether he believed in God, he would probably have winced slightly andexplained—with great courtesy—that this was not an appropriate question.”22 What mattered to Confucius, Socrates, Christ, and Isaiah was not what you believed but how you behaved. Show me, don’t tell me. “God” was the experience of loving compassion, not an all-powerful, judgmental, and often angry patriarch.