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Bob Doyle suggested Michael Graziano's "God Soul Mind Brain" might be a good book for the kind of stuff my Science and Spirituality group is approaching. Here's some of what I wrote back to him on finishing the book:

So "God Soul Mind Brain" was a pretty easy read.

It didn't present me with too many new-to-me ideas. I think the most interesting one reframing God as Qualia - like since we can't know "Ding an sich" and sensory perceptions are "our" reality, then "God is Real" in that sense, when combined with human's sensory apparatus that is highly biased towards looking for intentionality and purpose behind every damn thing:

Indeed, calling God a belief is a misnomer. It is more than a belief; it is more than a theory; it is more than imagination; it is a perception. That is precisely why it feels real to people. It is one of the reasons why atheists and religious people talk at cross purposes. To the religious, God is not really about theories and deductions, reasons for and reasons against. It is not really a cognitive proposition. To those who have the perception, the pervasive universal consciousness feels like external reality. One experiences the love and the anger and the awareness of God. Is God real? In the view described here, God is as real as the color red, also a perceptual construct of the brain.

But in that way the book doesn't engage with the main thrust of many (probably most) believers, which is that God and religion represent a shared, objective, supernatural reality. Unlike my mushy view of "divinity" possibly emerging from mundane stuff, the traditional religious view is fundamentally topdown. In this view God's purpose and intent comes from outside and precedes our system of mundane matter and energy.

Graziano writes about the brain basis of morality:

At its core is the realization that when we plumb inwardly for moral truth, we follow a specific process of firing up thought X and assessing its emotional tinge. We may say to ourselves, "On deep reflection, I realize that X is wrong," or, "X is right." But the inner reflection does not reveal anything about a moral framework of the universe. Instead, the inner reflection is a way of assessing our own quirky, culturally and personally learned emotional associations.

I'd argue this view is wrongfooted because it's implicitly referring to a single brain; but if morality is a property that emerges from connected group of lots of brains and subjective feelings/thoughts/observations, that might offer a way that transcends this description of a more purely subjective process.

Finally I'll wrap up with him pointing out

To be honest, I am not sure that religiosity is statistically correlated with brutality or decency. I tend to think that people are brutal and decent, selfish and incredibly generous, whatever level of religiosity they may practice. Yes, wars have been fought in the name of religion, but the Soviet Union also did a good job of violent mayhem with an atheistic premise.

I'd say what unites religious and atheistic bellicosity is authoritarian self-assuredness. I recently finished Vonnegut's "Hocus Pocus" and this observation of the narrator comes to mind:

The most important message of a crucifix, to me anyway, was how unspeakably cruel supposedly sane human beings can be when under orders from a superior authority.

I feel like the view I've developed - that there IS absolute moral truth (and thus any purely subjective/"it's existentially up to you!" view should be rejected) but we can not be sure about what that truth is (and thus authoritarian certainty must also be vigorously fought, especially when it makes commands that would go against our subjective sense of humanistic sympathy and empathy) gets around this kind of atrocity-provoking dogma. But I worry that it might not get as much good stuff done in the world - maybe certainty (however unjustifiable) and faith might be prerequisites for action, and also for girding ourselves for "good" action against people with greedier intents. (as Bertrand Russell put it, "The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, but wiser people are so full of doubts.")

(Of course thinking of the counterfactual world populated with go-with-the-flow folks like me quickly brings one to, well, what is a good direction to try and get humanity aiming for anyway.)