He certainly sounds like an admirable person.
If I may, I'd offer some basic metaphysics on some of these topics. Time for instance.
The problem is that as these mobile organisms, we experience reality as a sequence of perceptions, necessary for navigation, so we think of time as the point of the present, moving past to future. Hence the narrative basis of culture and civilization. Physics codifies it as measures of duration, because "math."
The reality is that change turns future to past. Tomorrow becomes yesterday, because the earth turns. Duration is the present, as the events come and go.
There is no literal dimension of time, because the past is consumed by the present, to inform and drive it. Causality and conservation of energy. Cause becomes effect.
Energy is "conserved," because it is only present, as it creates time, not the other way around.
It is similar to temperature, pressure, color and sound. Frequencies and amplitudes. Time is frequency, events are amplitude.
Ideal gas laws correlate volume with temperature and pressure, but are not referred to as the 5th and 6th dimensions of space, because they are only foundational to our emotions, bodily functions and environment, not the sequence of thought.
So energy, as process, goes past to future, while the patterns generated go future to past.
In terms of a wave, the energy drives it, while the fluctuations rise and fall, come and go.
Products go start to finish, while the production line goes the other way, consuming material and expelling product. Lives go birth to death, while life moves onto the next generation, shedding the old.
Consciousness goes past to future, while perceptions, emotions and thoughts go future to past. Yet it is the digestive, respiratory and circulatory systems processing the energy, while the central nervous system sorts the information precipitating out. Thus our mental fixation on form(tenseless time, for example) over process.
As for God, logically a spiritual absolute would be the essence of sentience, from which we rise, not an ideal of wisdom and judgement, from which we fell. The fact we are aware, than the details of which we are aware. The light shining through the film, than the images on it.
While the father figure lawgiver is a useful social construct, for instilling respect for authority in a constantly regenerating population, conflating the ideal, which is aspirational, with the absolute, which is elemental, is an epic conceptual fail.
When the ideal is assumed to be absolute and universal, it instills the assumption there can be no logical alternative to one's beliefs. Which has plagued many of the belief systems seeking to replace monotheism and its political expressions of top down authority.
Good and bad are not some cosmic conflict between righteousness and evil, but the basic biological binary of beneficial and detrimental. What is good for the fox, is bad for the chicken.
All the higher order emotional and social contructs; love, honor, trust, respect, responsibility, etc, are emergent, so when good is assumed to be aspirational, rather than elemental, conflicts do become a race to the bottom, of us versus them, as all nuance and subjectivity is suspect.
If you want metaphysical concepts that can directly affect social institutions, consider that money functions as a contract, enabling mass societies to function, while we treat it as a commodity, to mine from society. The difference between a market economy and capitalism is that while markets need money to circulate, the medium, like blood, people see it as the message, the signal to extract and store, like fat. See any problems?
I could go on, but my experience with professional philosophers has mostly been fruitless. They are too far into the box.
