Toaster strudel alliance takes on drugs, atheists and liberalism

[Angrboda]

I keep using the word logic casually, don't I? Okay, I mean reason, with respect to empathy. Humans aren't machines; they don't function on raw logic and shouldn't be expected to. Simple empathy is enough to understand why killing is generally immoral, but a defense by reason (i.e. avoiding societal degredation) is also possible. Empathy and a basic understanding of right and wrong is innate; you don't need to read the bible. Some people say that this understanding was written on our hearts by god, and while I disagree, they do at least acknowledge it. For less obvious moral issues, we may need to use reason to determine to possible harms and benefits of an action (to yourself and others).

Empathy is not a sufficient cause of the morality of something (consider a case in which people are empathetic but they get the wrong answer) nor is empathy in all cases good (in a case in which you were fighting in a war, it would not necessarily be good to be empathetic toward your enemy, and if the war was a just war, to fail to fight could be considered morally blameworthy, an act of cowardice).

Funny, because the U.S. military's use of the M4 carbine in Afghanistan and Iraq is a direct consequence of finding that the bulk of soldiers in combat intentionally avoided firing their weapons in a way that was likely to kill the enemy. Maybe they were just not good Christians, in addition to being moral cowards. Damn them soldiers and their secular morality. It's a good thing the moral lights at Abu Graib are there to lead us out of our slavish obedience to empathy.

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"The most savage controversies are those about matters as to which there is no good evidence either way. Persecution is used in theology, not in arithmetic."
— Bertrand Russell

"The study of theology, as it stands in the Christian churches, is the study of nothing; it is founded on nothing; it rests on no principles; it proceeds by no authority; it has no data; it can demonstrate nothing; and it admits of no conclusion."
— Thomas Paine

"Many statements about God are confidently made by theologians on grounds that today at least sound specious. Thomas Aquinas claimed to prove that God cannot make another God, or commit suicide, or make a man without a soul, or even make a triangle whose interior angles do not equal 180 degrees. But Bolyai and Lobachevsky were able to accomplish this last feat (on a curved surface) in the nineteenth century, and they were not even approximately gods."
— Carl Sagan