Christianity has failed to…

You know, I've thought a bit about empathy previously, and I don't think your definition is possible.

It is not possible to know exactly how another feels, because you don't have the same experiences, values, needs, desires, etc of the person. You can approximate, but not truly understand, even if you've been through a similar experience.

So empathy to me is the attempt to understand the other, their perspectives, values & views… and the acceptance of the feelings resulting from their perspective of an event, and attempt to comprehend the effects the events has on the person, and to find validity in their perspective. It is walking in their shoes whilst knowing that their feet aren't truly the same size and shape as yours.

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BTW - You didn't really establish how Christianity has failed to teach empathy. It does have quite a number of stories that are there to teach empathy. Obviously it makes no attempt to teach empathy for gays. And little attempt to teach empathy for sinners (even if Jesus showed this is exactly what should be happening)

You obviously have a firm grasp of the obvious.

Re: Christianity has failed to…




As is the norm for you, you make a claim and then fail to provide any evidence that your claim is true. How do the decisions of the U.S. government magically become a reflection of Christianity?

None of your screed supports your opening claim.

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.

Definitions first:

Empathy - noun
1. the intellectual identification with or vicarious experiencing of the feelings, thoughts, or attitudes of another.
2. the imaginative ascribing to an object, as a natural object or work of art, feelings or attitudes present in oneself: By means of empathy, a great painting becomes a mirror of the self.

Sympathy - noun
1. harmony of or agreement in feeling, as between persons or on the part of one person with respect to another.
2. the harmony of feeling naturally existing between persons of like tastes or opinion or of congenial dispositions.
3. the fact or power of sharing the feelings of another, esp. in sorrow or trouble; fellow feeling, compassion, or commiseration.

Apathy - noun
1. absence or suppression of passion, emotion, or excitement.
2. lack of interest in or concern for things that others find moving or exciting.

First I would caution over the statement that empathy is not taught by Christianity. I am not Christian but I know enough to defend the core doctrines in that whether it is called empathy or not, the concept is valued. I think I could agree with where you are going in the sense that Christianity (and American culture at large through derivation) seems to accept the application of empathy as a value only to like people. I guess I would have to say that it's more that we are not taught to value intellectual or critical thought. The entire system is based on "simple truths" and it would seem that empathizing is not a simple task. By definition, it is an intellectual act. What Christianity has taught (indirectly) is that if there is no simple answer, apply apathy. (indirectly)

An interesting analysis would be our own relationships. Look at middle class white America and it's empathy regarding Black America and the inverse. The misconceptions are amazing! Why? I suppose it has to do with our inability to think through the circumstances of the other. In many cases, we cannot even interact with the other, or initiate a rational dialogue. If we cannot get through that, how in the hell could we possibly fathom the plight of the thirty-something Sunni Muslim living in central Iraq? Or the German citizen who has empowered their Nazi leaders? I would contend that we are not much different in that sense from 1934 to today.

I would also correct that "our Government does not understand" I believe very ardently that the US government for a long time has counted on us "the simple thinkers" to consent to their wars, usurpation of rights and pilfering of our resources by our own ignorance. Some of the government stooges were as ignorant as the masses and some were worldly enough to understand but in the end it didn't matter, they just need the consent of the masses to put their plans into movement.

If you want to take shots at Christianity, I would start with how we are taught to think. We as a (self described) Christian people dichotomize everything. I think that goes back to the simple truth concept. I am fairly sure this is a result of eons of Christian faith (rejection of logic). You can see this today in our acceptance of retarded logic like George's, "If you are not with us, then you are against us" which was somehow accepted en mass. In logic, this is called a false dilemma, Christianity and the modus of it's thought is full of this sort of ****. I think that indirectly this teaches us to accept false dilemmas and malformed syllogisms.

I suppose that indirectly this makes your original statement shadily true. Insomuch as the institution degrading our ability so think beyond simplistic terms and thus incapacitating genuine empathy.

Considering your exact wording, and similar claims by many others, your cynicism is misplaced. Your words are in error, simple.

My point was it is not the understanding that makes empathy, but the attempt at understanding - which no one happens to ever point out.

I suspect that the average level of intellectual sophistication in the US is lower today than in 1934. I read an article in the Sunday New York Times op-ed page that makes that point. We are getting dumber by the year. We are getting more anti-intellectual likewise.

I went digging for the op ed you are talking about on nytimes.com and couldnt find it. is it published somewhere online? If you need to quell your irritation on this idea, watch the movie "Idiocracy" it at least allows a god laugh at that very point...

But can you prove any of those to be true and, in turn, apply that proof to the original assertion?

You have a leap in logic here that I don't think can be proven. For starters, the estimates of those who claim to be religious that actually attend any sort of religious services regularly is (according to Religoustolerance.org) ~20% of the U.S. population. And that is for all religions.

If that holds true, why should it be assumed that religious orgainzations are the primary source of education on morallity? Why shouldn't we presume that public school systems (which a much larger portion of the population attends regulalrly for the first 18 years of their lives) are the primary teacher for it?

I cannot conform or deny either claim but here is my basis for my understanding of (our) morals being founded in religion:

(citation needed, i'm still diggin) in a poll taken (poll is repeated every 10 years) on the religious makup of the US of the populations "self-identified" religions, the population as a whole itentifies itself as 90% christian (with individual denominations cited). Now if a person identifies themselfs as Christian, I can only assume (whether they attend or not) that they are saying that they identify with the values and ideologies of that blanket label. It has been that way (for the most part) since the inception of our nation and and thus our legal and moral base is steeped in it.

I'm guessing the article (actually a book review) to which Coberst is referring is this one:



Dumb and Dumber: Are Americans Hostile to Knowledge?
By PATRICIA COHEN

A popular video on YouTube shows Kellie Pickler, the adorable platinum blonde from "American Idol," appearing on the Fox game show "Are You Smarter Than a 5th Grader?" during celebrity week. Selected from a third-grade geography curriculum, the $25,000 question asked: "Budapest is the capital of what European country?"

Ms. Pickler threw up both hands and looked at the large blackboard perplexed. "I thought Europe was a country," she said. Playing it safe, she chose to copy the answer offered by one of the genuine fifth graders: Hungary. "Hungry?" she said, eyes widening in disbelief. "That's a country? I've heard of Turkey. But Hungry? I've never heard of it."

Such, uh, lack of global awareness is the kind of thing that drives Susan Jacoby, author of "The Age of American Unreason," up a wall. Ms. Jacoby is one of a number of writers with new books that bemoan the state of American culture.

Joining the circle of curmudgeons this season is Eric G. Wilson, whose "Against Happiness" warns that the "American obsession with happiness" could "well lead to a sudden extinction of the creative impulse, that could result in an extermination as horrible as those foreshadowed by global warming and environmental crisis and nuclear proliferation."

Then there is Lee Siegel's "Against the Machine: Being Human in the Age of the Electronic Mob," which inveighs against the Internet for encouraging solipsism, debased discourse and arrant commercialization. Mr. Siegel, one might remember, was suspended by The New Republic for using a fake online persona in order to trash critics of his blog ("you couldn't tie Siegel's shoelaces") and to praise himself ("brave, brilliant").

Ms. Jacoby, whose book came out on Tuesday, doesn't zero in on a particular technology or emotion, but rather on what she feels is a generalized hostility to knowledge. She is well aware that some may tag her a crank. "I expect to get bashed," said Ms. Jacoby, 62, either as an older person who upbraids the young for plummeting standards and values, or as a secularist whose defense of scientific rationalism is a way to disparage religion.

Ms. Jacoby, however, is quick to point out that her indictment is not limited by age or ideology. Yes, she knows that eggheads, nerds, bookworms, longhairs, pointy heads, highbrows and know-it-alls have been mocked and dismissed throughout American history. And liberal and conservative writers, from Richard Hofstadter to Allan Bloom, have regularly analyzed the phenomenon and offered advice.

T. J. Jackson Lears, a cultural historian who edits the quarterly review Raritan, said, "The tendency to this sort of lamentation is perennial in American history," adding that in periods "when political problems seem intractable or somehow frozen, there is a turn toward cultural issues."

But now, Ms. Jacoby said, something different is happening: anti-intellectualism (the attitude that "too much learning can be a dangerous thing") and anti-rationalism ("the idea that there is no such things as evidence or fact, just opinion") have fused in a particularly insidious way.

Not only are citizens ignorant about essential scientific, civic and cultural knowledge, she said, but they also don't think it matters.

She pointed to a 2006 National Geographic poll that found nearly half of 18- to 24-year-olds don't think it is necessary or important to know where countries in the news are located. So more than three years into the Iraq war, only 23 percent of those with some college could locate Iraq, Iran, Saudi Arabia and Israel on a map.

Ms. Jacoby, dressed in a bright red turtleneck with lipstick to match, was sitting, appropriately, in that temple of knowledge, the New York Public Library's majestic Beaux Arts building on Fifth Avenue. The author of seven other books, she was a fellow at the library when she first got the idea for this book back in 2001, on 9/11.

Walking home to her Upper East Side apartment, she said, overwhelmed and confused, she stopped at a bar. As she sipped her bloody mary, she quietly listened to two men, neatly dressed in suits. For a second she thought they were going to compare that day's horrifying attack to the Japanese bombing in 1941 that blew America into World War II:

"This is just like Pearl Harbor," one of the men said.

The other asked, "What is Pearl Harbor?"

"That was when the Vietnamese dropped bombs in a harbor, and it started the Vietnam War," the first man replied.

At that moment, Ms. Jacoby said, "I decided to write this book."

Ms. Jacoby doesn't expect to revolutionize the nation's educational system or cause millions of Americans to switch off "American Idol" and pick up Schopenhauer. But she would like to start a conversation about why the United States seems particularly vulnerable to such a virulent strain of anti-intellectualism. After all, "the empire of infotainment doesn't stop at the American border," she said, yet students in many other countries consistently outperform American students in science, math and reading on comparative tests.

In part, she lays the blame on a failing educational system. "Although people are going to school more and more years, there's no evidence that they know more," she said.

Ms. Jacoby also blames religious fundamentalism's antipathy toward science, as she grieves over surveys that show that nearly two-thirds of Americans want creationism to be taught along with evolution.

Ms. Jacoby doesn't leave liberals out of her analysis, mentioning the New Left's attacks on universities in the 1960s, the decision to consign African-American and women's studies to an "academic ghetto" instead of integrating them into the core curriculum, ponderous musings on rock music and pop culture courses on everything from sitcoms to fat that trivialize college-level learning.

Avoiding the liberal or conservative label in this particular argument, she prefers to call herself a "cultural conservationist."

For all her scholarly interests, though, Ms. Jacoby said she recognized just how hard it is to tune out the 24/7 entertainment culture. A few years ago she participated in the annual campaign to turn off the television for a week. "I was stunned at how difficult it was for me," she said.

The surprise at her own dependency on electronic and visual media made her realize just how pervasive the culture of distraction is and how susceptible everyone is ?- even curmudgeons.

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

In my opinion, where Christianity has failed is not in teaching empathy, since for those that truly practice his/her Christianity, empathy is felt for the poor, the sick, the downtrodden.

Where I believe Christianity has failed is for not replacing the original pagan culture. I believe, Christianity replaced the pagan Gods, but not the pagan culture. I say this in context of Monday night football, high school/college wrestling, the gore and violence in the media, pornography, etc., etc. All this reflects the pagan culture of two millenia ago; strength and/or lust is glorified; weakness and/or puritanism is held in contempt.

There are pockets of Christian culture. Some people even go on retreat to experience it. But back in many cities/towns/villages, I believe there is still the preeminence of the old pagan values still alive.

I'm just giving the original post a sociological perspective, rather than put the onus on each person's individual learning curve. (Which brings up the question of whether Christianity may not have failed per se, but Christianity could be beyond the ken of some people?)

HOLY ****!!!! You are going to put the barbaric / retarded customs of our culture on Pagans or Pagan Values? Wow... All I can say is that the Christians own that crap...

I notice you used the word "barbaric" above. That, I thought, equates to the pagan times, whether trees where worshipped, or stone idols.