Group prayer on Skype on behalf of our Christian members

[Edwardo Piet]

Empathy is a gateway to compassion.  You are talking out of your ass.

That's not the same as them being the same thing. When you say that people with no empathy are serial killers you are talking out of your ass. Many people without empathy are very decent people and even absolute psychopaths—who aren't decent people at all, and have no conscience at all—aren't all serial killers. In fact most of them aren't.

The only one talking out of your ass here is you. For starters, you don't even know me, so it's not your place to insist I have empathy. I don't know what kind of empathy you think I have. There are at least three different kinds of empathy.

Yes empathy helps people be compassionate because it helps to know how another person feels when you care about how they feel. But it isn't necessary. I have no idea what anyone feels besides myself and I often don't even know how I feel. Which is one of the reasons it's so hard to feel how others feel. Because to imagine how it feels for others I have to project my own emotions onto others (that's how empathy works. Mirror neurons, vicariousness and all that jazz).

I believe it's objectively bad when people suffer. I don't have to feel what other people feel (and technically no one does. They just imagine what they think the other person is feeling. We're not telepathic. We only even actually feel our own feelings. That's why they're called their own feelings. I can't imagine how other people feel though. I just know that things hurt for people or feel good for people like they do me. Although only on a physical level, most of the time, as most of the time I struggle to understand emotions at all).

Again, you don't know me, and yet you pretend to know me. And empathy being a gateway to compassion is one statement but to say that they are the same thing is another. And to say that people without empathy are serial killers is absolutely absurd. Only one here talking out of your ass here is you.

But I have to remind myself how illogical you are and that it's a waste of time trying to explain stuff to a dimwit.

Paul Bloom is someone who is very much not a psychopath or a serial killer but has written a highly successful book on how empathy makes you immoral and is very much not compassionate.



So suck it. I know what I'm talking about.