Goodness

Nominally I identify as atheist.  But when I'm favorably minded to it, when some religion is not being jammed down my throat, but somebody is making a fair argument while using religious terms, I can translate 'God' to something like Goodness or Everything.

With that translation, some of religion can make sense.

Right from the start, the First Commandment, which is the First Commandment for a very good reason--you can't have monotheism without it.

An atheist translation would go like this:

Goodness, being the best person you can be towards everyone and all that exists, is the most important thing of all, you must not let any concentration towards some people or some things get in the way of being a good person to all.

Now, what about bad people?  People who cause unwarranted violent harm to others.  Must we be good to them too?

Of course.  We must lock them up to protect others, and only humanely so they might repent their crimes and repair their ways and thereby save their own "souls" (histories as known to others).  But meanwhile, of course, we should treat them as well as we can, otherwise anywise any such repent will likely be inhibited--applying torture is never being a good person.  Getting revenge is never being a good person.  Our aim as good people is to repair the world and everyone in it, not to commit further crimes.

All this is pretty obvious, really.

Now I'm a member of many cults.  One of the is the audio cult, of 'Audiophiles.'  Anyone visiting me would certainly believe I'm an audio cultist.  But most would view it as OK as long as I'm not killing, lying, stealing, etc, to maintain my audio hobby.  I'm not putting being a good person ahead of my self indulgence.  Now perhaps it's bad to have any material excess at all--to be the best possible person.  That's a significant concern, and where the point of 'excess' and the degree of badness that entails begins to apply is debatable, but of a lower concern than the things previously mentioned, at least among humans, and within at least some relatively reasonable bounds.

So, unless you take it too far, or do bad things to support your habit, Audiophilia is not in violation of the First Commandment.

OTOH, building a 'state' for your religious ethnicity (which had only very partial claim on the history, development, and population of the region), based on dispossessing the former inhabitants by means of theft, destruction, murder, and terror sustained for generations, is in clear and fundamental violation of the First Commandment.  We don't even have to get into the details, the very thought of it is.  And Jewish leaders in the time of Herzl reacted to it that way, long before the bombings and genocide began at part of the (sadly inevitable from the start) Final Solution.

(Which right now, doesn't seem to be going that well for Israel, actually.)  But one thing we do know is that in the long run it is not sustainable either.  From it's inception, it sowed the seeds for it's own destruction, and Jewish critics of the time like Albert Einstein said so.