(March 9, 2012 at 5:57 pm)thesummerqueen Wrote: Even if we were all to be more saccharine than my ex's mother's sweet tea, the fact that we don't believe in God would mean we were obviously capable of becoming raging criminals at a moment's notice. What's to stop us? Which cracks me up - why wouldn't God stop us?The only thing that stops us lies within us.
For me, the fact that we are able to empathize with people who suffer, to be able to kind of "feel their pain" is what keeps us from becoming raging criminals.
Because we empathize with people and are able to feel their pain, we feel the need to overcome that pain in ourselves, so some of us will switch off the television, put away the newspaper or navigate to another website, while others will feel the need to actually help, by giving to charity, volunteering or something like that.
A forensic psychologist once told me, that an overwhelming number of violent criminals he worked with, lacked the ability to empathize, due to different circumstances.
"Isn't it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too?"
-Douglas Adams
-Douglas Adams
