Are some theists afraid of atheists?

[The Grand Nudger]

It is not simply a matter of epistemological limits, like predicting outcomes and imagining intentions, or though choices, like the street car problem. In all of the above you are making moral evaluations without first supporting the framework within which you make them.  Of course my examples were ridiculous! They were meant to demonstrate the importance of supplying warranted premises. You mention being logically consistent about how a generic human should be treated without reference to what it even means to be human or what it means to cause harm. You also keep mentioning empathy as if I had not already definitively shown that empathy is not a rational principle just because you prefer it so. Reasoning from an irrational premise cannot make the conclusion rational. That should be as obvious to you as the silly claim that something is true just because it's in the bible.

You really aren't paying attention at all.  I told you at the outset that I didn't reason from empathy, or apply empathy as a rational principle.  I even juxtaposed it -against- reason by calling it moral intuition.  I simply accept that empathy is, at least, a useful tool that provides a similar practical effect to any moral reasoning....and that any objection to it;s utility or validity in reaching moral conclusions as having been "evolved for x" is equally an objection to my rational faculties. That, additionally, your attempt to discredit it as a instrumental goods- by way of reference to someones assessment of your value to themselves couldn't possibly describe all empathetic impulse or assessment. Personally, I don't think it describes empathy in the least.

In short, that you couldn;t have been more wrong if you tried, and boy did you try.

However, if a persons moral framework specifically referenced their feelings of empathy - if that was the aim of their framework..if that;s what they maintained morality was about, then nothing stops them from making rational inferences from that.

Good luck, btw, establishing that the particulars of any empathetic feeling are irrational n the first place.  I find that part highly amusing, in that empathy explicitly denotes an ability to put ones self in some others place and posit how they might feel by reference to how you would.........there's simply nothing preventing it from being a cold, hard calculation of rational inference...though, granted, it may not always be..it may not always work......

Don't take this, btw, as some notion that there are no problems or weaknesses or flaws in such a system. All moral systems have problems, weaknesses, flaws. I'm just pointing out your failure to accurately describe such a flaw specific to this given system in your own comments. If the best objection to a moral system you can muster, amounts to comments as to whether or not it always works..or. worse; "That's just, like..your opinion...man" then you should probably give it up.