On the Cultural Jewish Movement

One of the most fascinating aspects of being enrolled in a class that focuses on Jewish Identity is just that--learning about what it means to be Jewish in todays world. Before I enrolled in this class, I was under the assumption that there was basically one Jewish faith and values system. I had heard of the main movements including reform, conservative, and orthodox, but I could not believe just how different from one another each of them were.
In life, we as humans are always comparing new, different, and unseen things and ideas to aspects of our life that we are familiar with in order to make sense of the thing we have just learned or seen. In my studies and discoveries in the realm of Judaism, I have found myself comparing the separate sections of Judaism with that of the Protestant movements or denominations of Christianity. I do this for several reasons. Just like every denomination of Protestantism identifying themselves as Christian but have major fundamental differences, I am seeing the same qualities in the realm of Judaism. For instance, a difference that absolutely blew my mind was the issue of what is central to Jewish identity. Since I have seen that in the Torah the Jewish people came into being through a covenant between God and the patriarchs. So, when I discovered that there was a movement called Cultural Judaism that did not only not have God at the center of its philosophies and teachings and as the basis on which the movement stood, it even defines God as being an "idea" that was invented by man a way to think of spiritual life. This in turn led me to other questions concerning modern Jewish movements (particularly Cultural Judaism): then what is Spiritual Life? What is the human Spirit? From where did it come? Even as an outsider of the Jewish faith (however, Christianity would not have existed if it were not for the Jewish faith), to see any facet of Judaism without God as, at least, a driving force in its existence and identity is counter-intuitive and, in my opinion, begs one to ask the question, is it even Judaism?