@Julie808 At the bottom is the old problem, that you can not get to morality, or perhaps even truth, from first principles via philosophy alone, even less from its even more refined version natural philosophy, or science. At some point you must start with a belief, such as, “the world is real”, in answer to solipsism. Or. “I wish to live in a happy world”. Or “I wish to live in a fair world.” from which you may then begin to derive your moral principles and perhaps world view by logic and observation. Which ideas I would call, prerequisites. Though others would perhaps more often call them, beliefs.

Because of course, most atheists and agnostics, do not have a complete absence of beliefs, they just do not hold religious or theist beliefs. Many hold to beliefs like the three above. Which I am certain are much better, if only because they are plainer and more direct, than most religious beliefs, and do not come with the, so often demonstrable bad, unforeseen consequence side effects which even the most seemingly moral parts of theist beliefs, like Christianity, carry. Atheism and agnosticism is not, and never could be, about abolishing belief, only about abolishing proven harmful beliefs with better, plainer and more universal ones.

To which the issue of metaphor is simply an irrelevant distraction at best, or at worst a covert attempt to rescue bad inherited traditions. Take for an example from another field of ideology the idea called racism. Suppose that you had a racist parent, who repeatedly told their child that. “All those people are ugly and look nasty.” Then one day the child returns home, having met a member of the other race and says. “But they were not ugly. He/she was really hansom/beautiful.” To which the parent returns. “Yes but the ugliness is metaphorical.” Does that make it better, or does it in fact make it far worse ? And the same applies to many religious beliefs, such as. "You are chosen." or "We are chosen." Or ideas like hell as a metaphorical fear of death, which even if taken metaphorically still promotes the idea that fear of the unknown is good and healthy.