You don't make it clear perhaps, but I re-read your OP and now I take it that you are rejecting the problem of evil in order to defend some kind of theism?

So, (e.g. JCI) religions aren't in the  theological & liturgical/pastoral businesses of trying to "justify" their "beliefs" in order to "authorize" the applications of said "beliefs" in practice? — 180 Proof

Often enough, yes. But I maintain that religion is misunderstood when it's examined as a mere set of silly concepts. The concepts can afford to be silly, because the concepts aren't really it.

My comments on humility aren't anti-Socrates. I'm just pointing out a tension. We orient ourselves. We want to experience ourselves as dignified, noble, decent, valuable, etc. We abase ourselves only to be exalted. Personally I love the notion of learned ignorance. And non serviam. I will not serve. I assert my learned ignorance as (more importantly) the ignorance of those who would dominate me with their tales of this and that. The questioning mind is a weapon, and its target is whatever humiliates or diminishes the questioner (who sits so sly). The fiction of God the monster actually gets something right, as an image of our impossible project. Once out of nature [and its vulnerabilities and indignities], I shall never take my bodily form from any natural thing....

You said we can 'freely' decide. In the same way an addict can 'freely' decide to stop using --which is to say ideally or theoretically. And yet for much of the rest of the time we experience our fellow humans are bound by implicit 'laws' of human nature. People are free when we want to blame them, but bound when we want to forgive or predict them.

So godlessness suggests that man is another beast caught up in nature who more or less cannot violate the 'prime directive' of feed-to-breed.

And we (most of us in affluent western economies anyway) can freely decide whether to exercise it. — Bartricks

How free are we in this hypothetically godless world? Personally I think the world is godless, but I also think that we are animals who exaggerate our freedom. Freedom is a potent fiction. It's a vague goal. We want to be like God, above the disgusting machine of Nature.

Man distinguishes himself from Nature. This distinction of his is his God: the distinguishing of God from Nature is nothing else than the distinguishing of man from Nature. — Feuerbach

religion-in-general goes deeper than that, into the essence of human nature. It's not just intellectual assent to a list of specific "truths", "facts" or commandments. Instead, it's an emotional bond to a family or tribe or social group. The details differ from tribe to tribe, but the feeling of belonging is the same for all people of all places and all times. It's the same emotional connection that unites a family or football team, or military unit. And it may even be motivated by the same neurotransmitters (e.g. oxytocin) that bond a mother and her baby. — Gnomon

Yes, and it's manifest in actions. The obsession with beliefs misses what religion shares with other expressions of membership. Religion is continuous with politics and art. Life and action are primary. We bookish philosophers inherit the fantasy of justified systems of beliefs. What we don't like is our radical immersion in material circumstance and tacit knowledge that not only cannot be justified but also cannot even be made explicit. (This immersion itself can be and has been made fairly explicit by various famous 'anti-philosophers' who tended to have more sophisticated notions of religion like yours above.)

Though he still manages to believe that beauty=knowledge=virtue. That death is not important. That people do evil out of ignorance. (and if he knows nothing, how does he avoid this?) He certainly seemd to have epistemological beliefs; iow he has his process for demonstrating ideas are incorrect. He seemed to know the qualities that made up virtue; courage for example. He seemed to be a dualist, since our true self was our soul - not like the Christian soul but neverless not the body, but the internal thinking and deciding self - rather than what we own and status, etc.

Of course this is all reported by others, but then so is his quote about his knowing he knows nothing. — Coben

All good points. He abases himself to be exalted. I like Socrates, but he's only different from other gurus on the level of quality. He's not playing a different game altogether or refusing to play the game. To engage in conversation at all is already a self-assertion, a claim on attention, respect, trust, etc. And then a truly ignorant person is not only useless but dangerous.

If knowledge of our own ignorance is the most important kind of knowledge, then somehow this wonderful humility ends up back on top. What a surprise...

Some folks replace God with History and religion with politics.

Freedom is itself its own object of attainment and the sole purpose of Spirit. It is the ultimate purpose toward which all world history has continually aimed. To this end all the sacrifices have been offered on the vast altar of the earth throughout the long lapse of ages. Freedom alone is the purpose which realizes and fulfills itself, the only enduring pole in the change of events and conditions, the only truly efficient principle that pervades the whole. This final aim is God’s purpose with the world. But God is the absolutely perfect Being and can, therefore, will nothing but Himself, His own will. The nature of His own will, His own nature, is what we here call the Idea of freedom. Thus we translate the language of religion into that of philosophy. — Hegel

Another popular substitute for religion is irony/cynicism/absurd-ism.

Hitherto men have constantly made up for themselves false conceptions about themselves, about what they are and what they ought to be. They have arranged their relationships according to their ideas of God, of normal man, etc. The phantoms of their brains have got out of their hands. They, the creators, have bowed down before their creations. Let us liberate them from the chimeras, the ideas, dogmas, imaginary beings under the yoke of which they are pining away. Let us revolt against the rule of thoughts. Let us teach men, says one, to exchange these imaginations for thoughts which correspond to the essence of man; says the second, to take up a critical attitude to them; says the third, to knock them out of their heads; and -- existing reality will collapse.

These innocent and childlike fancies are the kernel of the modern Young-Hegelian philosophy, which not only is received by the German public with horror and awe, but is announced by our philosophic heroes with the solemn consciousness of its cataclysmic dangerousness and criminal ruthlessness. The first volume of the present publication has the aim of uncloaking these sheep, who take themselves and are taken for wolves; of showing how their bleating merely imitates in a philosophic form the conceptions of the German middle class; how the boasting of these philosophic commentators only mirrors the wretchedness of the real conditions in Germany. It is its aim to debunk and discredit the philosophic struggle with the shadows of reality, which appeals to the dreamy and muddled German nation. — Marx

An arguably more interesting position is a stereoscopic fusion. Indeed criticism has often taken a Left-Hegelian form. 'If minds are freed, then all the messy real world stuff will clear up on its own.'

Philosophy, however, dispenses only Red Pills to those looking for aporetics "more profound" than self-help nostrums and (psycho)therapies for flagging self-esteem. — 180 Proof

I like this, but I'd emphasize that perhaps philosophy (the good stuff) is simply a more profound self-help nostrum. The organism grasps for orientation and status.