Carl:
But how does a society generate compassion without the command of God to love one another? And what religion, other than the one founded by Christ, asserts this virtue as its central teaching?
You will certainly not find compassion as the central doctrine of Darwin, or Nietzsche, or Sartre, or Freud, or most other famous atheists/agnostics. This doesn’t mean there aren’t atheists who are very compassionate. But, as discussed earlier in this thread, how much of that spirit of compassion is the residue of a once dominantly Christian culture or personal family history?
You know, this is very interesting to me. I am an ex-atheist, ex-agnostic, Catholic Christian, so I don’t know if my answer will make much sense to anyone or not. This question of how does a society generate compassion without the command of God to love one another, I think is easily answered but not easily proven.
My response is the society does not generate compassion without the command of God. Whether people recognize it or not, God’s plan is always at work, know what I mean? However, how does a society generate compassion without the RECOGNITION of God, could be answered another way. I think perhaps the answer is the society will be ruled according to its ruler, meaning if the ruler or gov. is compassionate then the laws and punishment will reflect this, but if the ruler is bad, then there will be no compassion. I hope this isn’t a frustrating answer. Some rulers are allowing their “hearts” (God) to guide them and some aren’t. My main point with this is to say that there is a difference between being without God and being without the understanding that God exists. No one is without God, but many just don’t know that God is a part of their lives.
As an atheist, I think I would have thought of it as a mystery as far as why are humans compassionate, but I would’ve thought that it is how we evolved and that society determines what is acceptable behavior or not. Also, atheists value life very much in my opinion.
As an atheist, I did not think of an afterlife, so you had to make this one on earth good because there was no second chance. Because of this desire to have a good life on earth, then I think an atheist may be more likely to want to “make things right”, than some Christians. In other words, we, as Christians, may say that an “evil” person will get their punishment after death. An atheist would think this bad inhumane person must be punished now on earth (i.e. death penalty). There also is no concept of redemptive suffering, so atheists do not see much good in suffering except maybe to build character to handle more situation in life. I think this leads some to suicide since there is no fear of punishment for suicide. Life is very valuable to many atheists because our life on earth is the only life we have in their view, but many see no purpose in suffering. It makes the sudden death of loved ones even more difficult for the atheist in my view. However, they don’t want to see suffering, so they are probably more likely to accept euthanasia, I think. As Christians, we have hope that the loved one will have everlasting life and we know the sin in not allowing God’s plan to play out by using either suicide or euthanasia or abortion or whatever. Am I getting into too many subjects. I’m new at this forum stuff. I’ll work on shorter responses.
Are you an agnostic?
