Compare Luke 6:43-45
These verses contain one of the most obviously useful rules in scripture.
Sound religious teaching should have positive implications in day-to-day life.
Obviously, of course, any particular religious individual may be inferior, in terms of behavior, etc., to some particular irreligious or theologically-different individual. And particularly so at any particular time.
I’m talking in the aggregate, of overall tendencies. Of communities over time.
And, of course, any specific given religious person may have started off from a less advantaged point than some particular secular person, so that, for him, having started out at 2.3, reaching 5 on a “goodness scale” of 1-10 may be a more notable achievement than the secularist’s reaching 8 may be, the secularist having started out at 7.5 (or at 9!).
”How could you be so wicked?” Nancy Mitford once exploded at the English Catholic novelist Evelyn Waugh after he’d behaved particularly badly, even for him. (He was famously difficult, and a notorious curmudgeon.) ”I thought you were supposed to be religious,” she said. ”You can’t imagine,” he replied, ”how much worse I should be if I were not religious.”
Please note that I don’t really think such things are quantifiable, and that I don’t actually have a judgmental “goodness scale.” Spare me the expressions of outrage and indignation on that score, please. And don’t bother to tell me that unbelievers can be good people. I know that. I know many of them.
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