Ok... got a question for you then babe:
"Can you truly love another human being (who is not your family/clan) - if you don't believe in God?"
Because if you believe in evolutions, "survival of the fittest", loving someone outside of your family/clan doesn't add to he cause. It's natural to be selfish and only live to survive.
If you believe in God and truly loves God, however, you understand that because God has created all of us, and loves all of us, by loving God, we automatically loves all human beings as ourselves as well.
Nobody really believes in God. Maybe we have some abbreviated concepts, something like a vague intimation of some infinite expanse beyond our seeing. . . . but when it comes right down to it we just don't know what we don't know. . . . and all of our efforts to fill in the blanks with some stick-figure projections of what we do understanding. . . . I'm pretty sure it all fall short of actual comprehension, or specific belief in what God actually is. Some of us try. That's about all we can really claim.
I love my dogs. . . .. even my cats. . . . . and my cows. . . . . . and sometimes I'm not really too sure the way I love my own kids, or my wife, or other people is really all that much better than the way I love my dogs.
The Russian writer Dostoyevsky has had a great influence on me. In the novel
Crime and Punishment, for example, he makes the point about how everyone needs someone who can love him/her, no matter how low we can go. And about the human triumph it is for someone to actually care about "the least of us". And Jesus said whosoever shall give even a cup of water to the least of us, will in no wise lose his reward.
I don't think even determined atheism or actual enmity against God can destroy all the positive value that is in man. The tragedy of not reaching for the stars, or hoping and believing in the infinite, is the loss of the opportunity that lies before us today.
Another person influential to me was my great Aunt, who told me "A man's reach should exceed his grasp".
I have a corollary case to the above paragraph.
I don't think a trite or baseless religion crafted with pecuniary or evil designs of any kind can destroy all the positive value that is in man, either. And the tragedy of this case is roughly equivalent to the case above. Both short-circuit people's capacity for comprehension of the infinite, and the respect we ought to have to for one another, with the blindness that mere ideology creates in our minds.
The most difficult thing is to learn how to believe without falling captive to our own minds.
I've only joined recently too! But apparently it's kinda like a place to hang out and chat about stuff .. babe is basically our host .. he's pretty non threatening... so if you have life's problem you need someone's opinion on or some philosophical theory you want some feedback on or even if you wanna talk football.. just bring a topic..
