Thanks for your reply :) You seem to radiate plenty of enthusiasm to me!

I'll check out your links and save the Jesus seminar stuff for later; I'm going to finish the rationality ebook and then researching historical Jesus will be my next project, but it looks like a good resource!

As for your questions...when I wrote this original post, by "how" I was still hoping that some sort of objective morality might exist... one not related to the human subject (a hope I now see as kind of silly but maybe natural so soon after my deconversion). I was hoping for some solid rules to follow that would always lead to good outcomes and never cause any emotional disturbance, but I've come to accept that things are just a bit more complicated than that in the real world...