(July 28, 2023 at 9:15 pm)Belacqua Wrote: I've seen people claim that all morality is based on empathy, but I'm skeptical about this.
It is based on empathy but in humanistic societies. In theocracies, empathy is not important, thus there are no elections but the clergy commands what people need to think, do and behave. If someone needs to be killed because he or she broke a religious taboo, then there is no empathy for them and people were encouraged to cheer for their execution.
Yuval Harari has a lecture about those differences - how morality functioned in the past under religion, and how it functions today.
teachings of the Bible are so muddled and self-contradictory that it was possible for Christians to happily burn heretics alive for five long centuries. It was even possible for the most venerated patriarchs of the Church, like St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, to conclude that heretics should be tortured (Augustine) or killed outright (Aquinas). Martin Luther and John Calvin advocated the wholesale murder of heretics, apostates, Jews, and witches. - Sam Harris, "Letter To A Christian Nation"
