"Japan is often cited by me as an example against the stupid assertion that you cannot have morality without God. It is a country with one of, if not the, lowest crime rate in the world."
That is true, but I have heard that that statistic is due to public executions and hangings; which use fear to show others what would happen if they do such. And Japan has a noble and chivalrous system (well, it did, but I am guessing that is now lessening due to globalization, as the samuris (sp?) are dwindling (no more?).
"It seems that there has always been, for the inquiring human mind, the need to know the ultimate purpose of existence."
Bingo! I am reading a book entitled "View from the Center of the Universe" which examines such and our current view of the universe. It quotes Hawking saying something along the lines of 'It seems logically improbable that the universe would even had existed in the first place, I do not know why it does.'
Each and every culture (with perhaps a few excetions) had their own mythology or gods or beings they worshipped. The ancient Egyptians, the Greeks, Romans, native Americans, Christians, Buddhists, Eskimos, Aztecs, etc. But today, asserts the book, we do not have a unified beleif. Since we are so globilized and so tolerant of beleifs, the Western world has thousands of mythologies, creation accounts, scientific theories, and creeds. Accordingly, we have no defining beleif of our universe at the current time, and have not since the Newtonian revolution (says the book).
I have not finished it yet, so I do not know the solutions the writers suggest. But so far it is saying that all the mythologies, like the Romans', were correct for them, as the Judeo-Christian stories were true to their beleivers, as were the stories of Quetzal were to the ancient Aztecs living in Mexico. It is not for us to hypocritically say that evolution and a however-billion-year-old universe is Fact with a capital F, for the ancient Egyptians thought the same about Osiris as the keeper of the dead.
Why?
