I have been pondering the whole God thing again. Does God exist? What about science?
For those that know me, I am not really wondering if God truly exists. No, internal truth has been revealed to me long ago. Instead, I am just drifting through the questions themselves. There is a lot of aggression on both sides of the debate. The poor saps on the fence are probably turned off of the whole thing. I can picture a curious agnostic observing a debate about God and concluding that there is no God, the world is flat, and it is just best to go to bed and dream (which is another version of reality).
For myself, I try to be the adult in the room. However, I doubt that I am very good at it. I can only talk with any kind of conviction from my own perception. Still, one has to try lest he gets caught up in the game - the major sporting event that pits the Godless Invaders vs the Superstitious Crusaders.
I recently read an article that compares giving between the religious and non-religious. The nonreligious tend to be more compassionate in their giving than the religious. Although the study states that they are not saying that the nonreligious are more generous or compassionate than their religious counterparts, certain aspects of the study would lead one to believe that.
This makes sense to me. I am not going to get into why the religious seem to be less generous or compassionate (I will save that for another time), my comments will be more about those generous and compassionate atheists. Why would they be either?
Morality has to be based on something. People doing things that are not in their personal best interests flies in the face of "survival of the fittest" ideology. They may argue that compassion has evolved down to help preserve the overall species and not just the self. That makes sense . . . except for the part that compassion and generosity seems to be part of an elaborate design to preserve the species. It isn't too likely that random mutations and chance survival would lead to such a thing. But what do I know? These same folks are convinced that we humans have common ancestors with turtles and tomatoes. I am not open-minded enough to embrace that yet.
So what could it mean that it just may be that nonbelievers are, at least, as generous and compassionate as those who champion God as their Creator and Lord? Doesn't that slide the weights to the side of the secular? I say just the opposite. One doesn't have to understand or even believe in something to be effected by it.There have have been people in the past (and perhaps some even today) that do not understand gravity or even believe in this unexplained force. Yet, they are constantly under its influence.
Such as it is with God. Sometimes things effect us no matter where are mind is. All we have to do is be.
When outsiders who have
never heard of God's law follow it more or less by instinct, they
confirm its truth by their obedience. They show that God's law is not
something alien, imposed on us from without, but woven into the very
fabric of our creation. There is something deep within them that echoes
God's yes and no, right and wrong. Their response to God's yes and no
will become public knowledge on the day God makes his final decision
about every man and woman. The Message from God that I proclaim through
Jesus Christ takes into account all these differences. ~Romans 2:14-16 (the Message)