Does Religion Add Any Value to Our Lives?

"God is love," someone said. If you believe in love, how can you not believe in God? Whether or not there is a God depends on how you define God. If God is all things good or if God is nature or chance, it is hard to refute the existence of such a deity.

However, there are many today who don't believe in god(s) of any stripe. I personally have trouble believing in talking serpents, and a god that says, "Thou shalt not kill," on the one hand, but then allows Joshua's army to kill every man, woman and child in its path to the promised land.

If that isn't enough of a mixed message, God allows the Egyptian and Babylonian heathens to enslave his chosen people because his devotes were slightly less devoted than he thought they should be. If there was any godly justice, the heathens should have gotten the worst of God's wrath, not those who were trying to please him but came up short.

Then there was the whole business of God creating Man from a clay figurine--when there is so much evidence of evolution. According to Genesis, the first day and night were created before God created the sun!

Yet, notwithstanding my doubts (which have no doubt plagued so many), notwithstanding atrocities like the Spanish Inquisition, religious wars, etc., most of the world's population choose to believe in the Judeo-Christian/Muslim god, or some other gods/goddesses.

According to some anthropologists, Homo sapiens (that's us) can do something that other hominids (Neanderthals, Homo erectus, etc.) can't do: We can imagine!

Imagination has allowed us to be the high-tech, scientific, artistic and philosophical wonders that we are. Is religion and the belief in gods simply a product of our over-active imaginations?

If so, shouldn't we discard such beliefs in favor of ideas based solely on empirical evidence?

What about perfection?

No one can prove that perfection exists. Show me a perfect anything. Show me perfect love. Show me perfect happiness, perfect goodness, perfect knowledge and wisdom. It is impossible.

So then why do some people strive for perfection? Why do they reach for the unreachable star?

Because it makes them better! Not perfect, but better. Human progress has occurred over the ages because people had this "fool-notion" that pursuing something that can not be proven to exist would somehow better their lives.

And reaching for perfection did improve their lives and made them better people. Although they sometimes called perfection by different names. Some called it God, and some still call it by that name today.

If God is perfect love, perfect goodness, perfect wisdom, and everything perfect, it can be argued that there is no evidence that such a god exists, but anything perfect that we reach for, strive toward, and model ourselves after adds so much value to our lives. In that sense God is real!

Is it any wonder that the dream, the faith and the hope lives on?