Does religion expose the shortcomings of empathy based moral systems

[Angrboda]

No.

We all create theories, conscious or unconscious, about what reality is, how it works, and what the underlying picture really is. Moral systems -- all moral systems -- are layered on top of these theories and interpreted through them. Just as the meaning of a mathematical theorem depends upon the definition of its terms, and a sentence depends upon the meaning of individual words, so too, moral theories depend upon metaphysical and naturalistic assumptions. Our morals are built out of these underlying theoretical assumptions. A world that contains a God who is an embodiment of the good is going to inspire a different set of morals than a world which contains no god. It is the underlying worldviews which are constraining the nature of the resultant moral systems; not any defect in sourcing morals to empathy. My empathy is always going to be framed by what I view as the truth about the world, whether that truth is religious or not. So no, religion doesn't expose any such shortcomings, or, if it does, it exposes them as being shortcomings which all moral systems share, namely a dependence upon the physical and metaphysical views of the holder for the ultimate content of those moral systems.