Christianity has failed to…

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1

Christianity has failed to…

I claim that the Christian religion has failed to teach empathy; one of the most important moral concepts we have.

There are various definitions of empathy given by various individuals but almost all of them point to the same meaning. Empathy is defined as the ability to understand the feelings, thoughts, and beliefs of another person. Empathy is often characterized as the ability to “walk in the shoes of another”, i.e. to acquire an emotional resonance with another.

In his classic work about modern art, “Abstraction and Empathy”, Wilhelm Worringer provides us with a theory of empathy derived from Theodor Lipps that can be usefully applied to objects of art as well as all objects including persons.

“The presupposition of the act of empathy is the general apperceptive activity. Every sensuous object, in so far as it exists for me, is always the product of two components, that which is sensuously given and of my apperceptive activity.”

Apperception—the process of understanding something perceived in terms of previous experience.

What does in so far as it exists for me mean. I would say that something exists for me when I comprehend that something. Comprehension is a hierarchical concept and can be usefully considered as in the shape of a pyramid. At the base of the comprehension pyramid is awareness that is followed by consciousness. We are aware of many things but we are conscious of much less. Consciousness is awareness plus our focused attention.

Continuing with the pyramid analogy, knowing follows consciousness and understanding is at the pinnacle of the pyramid. We know less than we are conscious of and we understand less than we know. Understanding is about meaning whereas knowing is about knowledge. To move from knowing something to a point when that something is meaningful to me, i.e. understood by me, is a big step for man and a giant step for mankind.

My very best friend is meaningful to me and my very worst enemy must, for security reasons, also be meaningful to me. The American failures in Vietnam and Iraq are greatly the result of the fact that our government and our citizens never understood these ‘foreigners’. We failed at the very important relationship—we did not empathesize with the people and thus failed to understand our enemy. It is quite possible that if we had understood them we would never have gone to war with them.

[b]If we had empathy with Germany in the 1930s would we have stopped Hitler before he forced us into war?

If we had empathy with Germany before August 1914 would we have prevented WWI?

Do you agree that we understand our best friend and that we must also understand our worst enemy?[/b]

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american failure in iraq?

propaganda is an interesting thing…

the enemy in iraq was understood completely… the enemy at home on the other hand…

-Imp

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Riiiiight. They did greet us as liberators, didn’t they?

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As long as your version of empathy doesn’t mean sympathy for the Devil.

Cause, of course you understand, that understanding without demands for improvement is liberalistic tolerance. The belief that, “Your perfect just the way you are,” and, “You don’t have to try to be a better person;” is what high school students are translating from liberalistic tolerance. For, the idea of a good divorce is saying that you need to tolerate the other as long as you don’t have to live with them. It’s always the other persons fault. Thus, working out the problems is never resolved.

Of course some relationships may never have been God ordained. I think they would have gotten together in relationships of convenience, or fantasy from TV images.

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Empathy is about understanding. We empathesize with our best friend and we must empathesize with our worst enemy. We can more easily manage an enemy when we understand that enemy.

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The fullness of understanding needed, at times, may be to much.

Having a wide perspective takes…? Getting others to widen their perspective takes dedication to specific people.

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Should empathy be given to a child molester? In that I mean the person who touches a child indecently is not responsible due to the probabilty they may have been done the same way when they were younger. The perpetrator has had their psyche altered because they were victims to someone elses indiscretion. I have heard that people with that problem can not control what they have become. Some of those people opt to have castration performed on them because the desire even with therapy won’t leave them. I find it sad that someone who had been defiled as a youngster now has an imprint in their mind which they can’t control. Perhaps if they look to God for help, then that cycle will stop.

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A Ritual To Read To Each Other

If you don’t know the kind of person I am
and I don’t know the kind of person you are
a pattern that others made may prevail in the world
and following the wrong god home we may miss our star.

For there is many a small betrayal in the mind,
a shrug that lets the fragile sequence break
sending with shouts the horrible errors of childhood
storming out to play through the broken dyke.

And as elephants parade holding each elephant’s tail,
but if one wanders the circus won’t find the park,
I call it cruel and maybe the root of all cruelty
to know what occurs but not recognize the fact.

And so I appeal to a voice, to something shadowy,
a remote important region in all who talk:
though we could fool each other, we should consider?
lest the parade of our mutual life get lost in the dark.

For it is important that awake people be awake,
or a breaking line may discourage them back to sleep;
the signals we give, yes or no, or maybe
should be clear: the darkness around us is deep.
-William Stafford

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Umm, I’m not sure upon what you’re basing your claims. Firstly, you’re assuming that Christians are not empathetic and secondly, you’re assuming empathy can be taught. For the first one, I don’t know the answer. Obviously, I’m not other people. I have no idea whether or not they are empathetic. I believe that I am fairly empathetic, but having never experienced empathy as another person, perhaps I’m not. For all I know, Christians are the most empathetic people on earth, they could also be the least. Are you basing this on the fact that they go to war? Since war is a near-universal condition, I’d be forced to assume then that no one is empathetic except perhaps the Amish and the Quakers and a few Buddhist sects, so maybe they are the most empathetic of us all. I also don’t know if empathy can be taught. There seem to me to be obvious cases where people are unable to be empathetic (autism sufferers, sociopaths, etc.) If there are some who can’t be taught empathy, then why assume that any of us can be taught empathy? (I know this is a bit of a stretch, but I’d like to see examples of people that have been taught empathy before I just assume that it is a learned behavior.) It may just be an inherent condition, either you are empathetic or you are not. I don’t know, but I think we have to ask the question before we get too judgemental.

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I assume that religion is the primary teacher of morality in the US society.

I am convinced that empathy is one of the principle concepts of morality.

Evidence indicates that less than 10% of Americans know the difference between empathy and sympathy.

Christianity is the principal religion in the US.

Ergo Christianity has failed to teach empathy.

Empathy is about understanding. We empathesize with our best friend and we must empathesize with our worst enemy. We can more easily manage an enemy when we understand that enemy.

Ignorance is never a good policy.

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Couple of issues with your logic. Firstly, you only gave me what percentage of Americans understand the difference between empathy and sympathy and not what percentage of say Thais understand the difference. Maybe ten percent is really good we could be really tearing up on the global scale. You also assume that not knowing the difference between one thing and another means you don’t possess it. I may not know the difference between my kidney and my liver, but that doesn’t mean I don’t possess them.

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Religion speaks constantly about love. What actions does one take in order to love someone? I claim that empathy is a necessary step toward loving someone. Religion has a problem with intellection; religion wants to focus on emotion. Reason is necessary for empathy; if so, it is necessary for love and thus religion fails when reason fails. Therein lay the paradox of religion.

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how loving!

allah allah ackbar!

-Imp

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I think you’re making a lot of claims without evidence here. Is empathy a necessary step toward loving someone? Is an autistic person capable of love, despite their inability to empathize? In my dealings with autistic children, I would say so. You say religion has a problem with intellection, I would disagree. Most of the intellectual advances prior to the enlightenment came from the religious sphere, whether Averroes or Newton. There are still a great number of religious scientists throughout the world. Iran has a nuclear program and I’m quite certain that 95+% of the scientists working on it are devout Muslims. That doesn’t seem to me to be having a problem with intellection (in fact if we look at the word intellection, one of the first contexts in which it was used was in reference to it being an attribute that divine and angelic beings possessed) You also say that reason is necessary for empathy and empathy is necesssary for love. This leads to the conclusion that an unreasonable person is incapable of love. That seems to be a bit out of step with what I have observed. People with severe Down’s Syndrome who are almost completely unreasonable are capable of some of the greatest acts of love I have seen. I’m not sure if unreasonable people can empathize as that’s an extremely hard concept to gauge, but I don’t see a reason they couldn’t. Your conclusion that when reason fails, religion fails, may be valid (although, based on your premises, I find it suspect), but I don’t see where that is a paradox. All it is really saying is that religion is reasonable.