The moral imperative that I feel most intensely is to acknowledge, respond to and relate to realities who are not myself, and to value most of all those real others who want to return my acknowledgment, to respond back and to form a relationship with me — or at least to some degree. 

My difficulty is in the ethics of “to some degree”: how does one relate to an other who prefers to reduce some or all of one’s own reality to that of their own self? That is, they prefer their belief of you to the reality of you? That is, they do not share your transcendence ethic? Or are hostile to your transcendence ethic? Clearly, we cannot treat those who approach us as mere idea the same way as those who approach us as transcendent realities of our own, but that does not mean we should respond to them as they respond to us.

This is a digression, though. The main point I wanted to document is this: I believe the moral requirement to acknowledge, respond to and relate oneself to the reality of transcendence, however it approaches us (which is generally more burdensome than magical), is absolute. I hang my belief in God on this simple but all-pervasive faith: I cannot not believe we are commanded to transcend. 

This faith is compatible with many forms of atheism, actually, though I prefer to interpret God into my understanding. It is incompatible with all denominations of Fundamentalism, which I do not accept as religion, and in fact reject as anti-religion, being as it is the attempt to reduce transcendence to mere idea, factual “faith” and “belief”, leaving the “believer” hostile to what stands outside their faith, that is, whatever reality transcends what they can grip with their mind’s little fingers.