Without a God to push our love for each other, why should we reach out and help? The answer is simple.
Goodness is driven from within us and not from a force outside nature or humanity.
Our world, and it is ours to grasp and shape and love, is filled with tragedy and suffering, and we cannot look to a God to save us but only to ourselves. We have to reach out our hands, and we have to give what we have.
Now we have human groups, not motivated by salvation, but driven by the most beautiful human feeling we have – empathy. At the vanguard of this movement is We Are Atheism and the Atheists Giving Aid initiative.
Atheists Giving Aid is already making headways into the national and international charity arena, giving to help victims of the Boston bombings last year.
You do not need belief in a deity to give all you can to your fellow man, woman or child. You simply need love and empathy. Those are not religious values. They come from the heart, not from the pages of a book or the pulpit.
The range of problems facing people across the globe is almost endless. From natural catastrophe through homelessness, health crises, identity theft and more atheists realize suffering of any kind is something to which only we can provide solutions.
It is important to everyone involved in We Are Atheism that, despite the name, our desire and action of help goes out to ALL people, regardless of ideology or creed. They are an organization that believes in the betterment of all the people of the world. The name may state a position of un-belief but the actions will always reflect a love and hope for the betterment of all people.
This is our world, the only world and the only life, and we must do all we can to help.
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A recent study suggested that when you teased out the charitable giving that religious people give to their denomination (only some of which involves helping other people) and look at the amounts actually ending up on the active floor, believers and nonbelievers are fairly comparable. I suspect that the cognitive processes involved in contributing may well be comparable in the two groups, and may be related more to mirror neuron or amygdala feedback loops than the degree of their religious convictions (ior lack of them) but only subsequent research can clarify that end.