Washington Post Columnist Shankar Vedantam writes about a study by two neuroscientists at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland. Their work on brain chemistry indicates that genorosity or altruism is as hard-wired into the human brain as our baser desires for food or sex.
In other words, according to this 2006 study, "moral decisions can often feel like abstract intellectual challenges, but a number of experiments...have shown that emotions are central to human thinking. (See article below.)
http://www.santafenewmexican.com/news/62163.html
The good news, from my perspective, is that humans are not simply selfish animals with advanced brains, as some materialists would have us believe, but creatures designed by evolutionary forces to sacrifice our pleasures to prevent the pain or discomfort of others. I've suspected for a time that a sense of guilt we sometimes feel when we leave other people out of our equation was something more than what has been inflicated upon us by pastors, rabbis, mullahs, shamans, parents, angry primary grade-school teachers, et al. This sense of good feeling from helping others that most of us feel (who aren't damaged mentally by external or internal disorders) could be the result of a survival technique...or perhaps an instrument of the Divine that we need go no further than our own inner minds to find.
The question raised by these conclusions are already being debated. Theological and scientific experts will no doubt go back and forth in argument on this, but for me it affirms our conduct isn't limited to survival-at-all-costs for us as individuals alone: we would not have advanced as far as we have in many societies otherwise.
Maybe when Jesus and Buddha and other great religious figures from the past said something along the lines of "the Kingdom of Heaven is within you,"* they weren't kidding.
*Gospel of Luke 17: 21
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