The collection of books others called the "bible" did seem to me a sincere effort to try to understand what the word "god" means. But for many like me the meaning of "god" had grown, evolved, and expanded so that we could recognize the ethnocentrism and bias of ancient efforts to compose portraits of "god." The jealous, envious, vain, angry, homicidal, genocidal "lord" of the Hebrew scriptures seemed clearly the human projection of "his" "believers," nearly all of them men, and obviously not an all-knowing, all-powerful deity. No thinking person like me could believe the agent of such unjust, vindictive acts was a true "god."