Have A Care; Go Lightly On the Spirit

It's all very well for people who consider themselves to be entirely civil, psychically balanced, fairly well educated and involved with the world at large to eschew the fairly prevalent belief in the presence of a spiritual being who looks over us. More; that the universal spirit is our very maker, a giant intelligence that visualized humankind into existence. Not, as atheists and agnostics would have it, the reverse.

Those who believe we are creatures of nature and nature alone, and that there was no other intelligent force responsible for having created us, believe as we do because we depend upon the credibility of an idea and explicable observation, and see no personal need to ascribe to a mysterious belief in an Almighty presence. We think of ourselves as being secure in ourselves, even as we're assailed with doubts, because we are human.

We consider ourselves to be sufficiently mature to find ourselves responsible for the decisions we make. We feel ourselves free to make choices based on the knowledge we have acquired through our lifetimes. We act and react in accord with the circumstances in which we find ourselves through weighing action and reaction through the prism of ethics and moral human interactions and behaviours.

And too often we consider those among us who have a spiritual need which can only be fulfilled through the belief in a Holy Spirit that guides them - that instructs them in their behaviours - to be in a state of arrested adolescence, incapable of demonstrating true maturity. The simple fact is, if we really do feel contempt for believers, and deride them, condemning their weakness in aspiring to goodness through the creator's injunctions, we've no need to.

Quite simply put there are those who feel prepared to accept life as it is; that we may simply represent a random selection process through the auspices of a gregariously-inclined Nature which instructs her molecular and chemical forces to interplay and throughout that process themselves create the matter that is life. And in various and multifarious life forms. All, apparently, pleasing to Nature.

And those that have been too hastily crafted, too incapable of mutating over time to adapt to their surroundings, simply respond as the failed experiments of nature that they may represent. While higher life forms, or even simple ones that have managed to overcome difficulties to react in accordance with their environment, prosper and evolve and make their place on the Earth.

Those people who instinctively and unequivocally require a belief in divine intervention to explain their existence, and to guide them through the insecurities of life, find peace and solace and hope in their belief. That being said, there is no reason for those who cannot conceive of intelligent beings clinging to the security that God's presence gives them, to think poorly of those given to religious belief.

We're not very enlightened, not very empathetic to others' needs if we censure them for their need to believe in the spiritual guidance they receive from a Holy Spirit. If this is their ship of salvation through the dangerous shoals of existence, then why not embrace it, and who are we to judge?

We claim that religion and religious belief is the cause of much misery in the world, from ancient history to the present. There is no reason to believe that without a belief in the divine, people would still not behave as atrociously toward one another as we do. The vehicle by which people derive assurances that we're doing the right thing - and through that process often doing the wrong thing - would simply change.

Even the most jaded onlooker, however, would have to come to the conclusion, however grudgingly, that religion is far more a force for good in the world than for ill. Even if we look only at the hope that springs into humankind's souls at their lowest ebb, believing that an all-powerful, all-seeing, and compassionate being somewhere in the upper atmosphere is there to care for them and protect them. That represents an enormous good.

That most religions also teach their devotees to respect the most basic of human rights, to refrain from doing harm to others is true, and that too is an enormous good. For believers then develop their religious conscience to adhere to guidelines wise men have written in an effort to civilize the wilderness that exists deep in the visceral beings of most humans; the selfish, egotistical self.

That unbelievers are capable of disciplining themselves, to observe universal rules of self governance and decency and justice, is simply another route to the same end.