Skip to main content

Easy As Pistachio Ice Cream

By Susan G. Bonella ~

Empathy plays an important role in humanity. It can identify someone who is hurting or simply create a platform for peaceable relationships. It requires a certain level of intelligence, but we can see the process of empathy in the face of a small child who watches her friend’s pistachio ice cream fall to the ground and says, “I hate it when that happens.” It doesn’t matter if the child hates pistachio and would have chosen chocolate for herself; she still feels empathy for her friend because she knows what it’s like to have something she wanted and then lost.

When I was a child I practiced empathy pretty well in school and with neighborhood friends. My class and I swarmed the first wheel-chair using kid to enter our tiny school and let him know he was welcome. We swarmed the first black girl to ever enter our tiny white neighborhood school and showered her with hair compliments and friendship. When someone cried, we were on it. When someone was absent, we were on it because we all lived close together. Empathy was easy. I don’t know the reason it was easy for the other kids, but I’m sure I was able to do this because I knew I was adopted and I didn’t quite fit in my family. My skin was a tad bit darker as a child leaving my uncle to use interesting names for me. My hair was curly and course and my mother didn’t really know how to manage it. I wanted to play drums and go camping, but those things did not fit the family criteria and neither did empathy. Situations are not always real as they seem when you’re a child, but the feeling of exclusion is very real. The memory of the feeling is valuable.

I believe, as ex-fundamentalists turned humanist or naturalist, etc., many of us have a grand scale problem with empathy toward believers. I assume the problem stems from the very personal sense of loss we feel from having given over a great portion of life to what now seems like a fraud and the need to place the blame somewhere. I know that I felt that way for a long time until I remembered where I came from… again. Once I was a child who felt empathy for others because I identified with a feeling of exclusion, and then I was a Christian who felt empathy toward the excluded “sinner” and wanted to save them.

There are no people groups who stand without preconceived notions, and so we should keep ourselves in constant check as individuals.Except for certain power mongers here and there, the ultimate goal for a born again Christian is to show empathy through the spread of life saving information which leads to Heavenly inclusion. Someone who truly believes that the person next to him will die without this knowledge does not show empathy by withholding the lifesaving information. Instead he throws it out there like a life preserver on it’s way to a drowning man to be drawn up to the safety of the ship. The God experience is real to them, and it was as real to me as the childhood feelings of exclusion which, importantly, were not justified in entirety. I propose that Christian empathy is real, regardless of the source or lack of source that drives it, and regardless of the prejudices and idiosyncrasies that may accompany it.

While Christianity has it’s quirks, the grass is never greener on the other side. There are no people groups who stand without preconceived notions, and so we should keep ourselves in constant check as individuals. Whether we choose the label of Humanist, Naturalist, Atheist, or anything else, empathy is essential in our quest to be on top of our truth game if our goal is to critique ourselves into the best humans we can be. Fact-addicted people like me get into conversations about truth and perception all the time. Is the mind a world within a world? Is truth what we see or is the truth so big that our human eyes only allow us to see a miniscule portion? (Quantum physics, String Theory and M Theory usually come up right about there in the conversation if not after comparing our view of the park with that of an ant’s view.) But a more useful truth may be that if our empathy is stunted by personal offense, we can no longer critique ourselves and may in fact hinder the positive characteristics that we longer for during our time as fundamentalists. This is not to say that religious-affiliated human rights and freedoms attacks are not worth the fighting over. But that the anger over bigotry may be better directed toward the institution instead of the individual.

You’ll recall hearing that Satan (“the opposer”) hates humans because we were created in the image of God. It can be said that he has no empathy for humanity because humanity represents his adversary. But are Christians really the adversaries of all the “ists” mentioned above? I think it should be easy for a human to, if not completely love, empathize with another human being’s intentions. As very philosophical and scientific people, I would think that more of us “ists” would be inclined to examine what drives human behavior – not withholding Christians – and empathize with it. Whether we view ourselves as God’s creations or the product of the stuff of asteroids, here we stand on the same rock – looking for truth. Maybe our empathy for fundamentalists is as simple as demonstrated by the girl who hates pistachio ice cream. Maybe it’s as simple as saying, “Hey, I’m a truth seeker too.”

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Are You an Atheist Success Story?

By Avangelism Project ~ F acts don’t spread. Stories do. It’s how (good) marketing works, it’s how elections (unfortunately) are won and lost, and it’s how (all) religion spreads. Proselytization isn’t accomplished with better arguments. It’s accomplished with better stories and it’s time we atheists catch up. It’s not like atheists don’t love a good story. Head over to the atheist reddit and take a look if you don’t believe me. We’re all over stories painting religion in a bad light. Nothing wrong with that, but we ignore the value of a story or a testimonial when we’re dealing with Christians. We can’t be so proud to argue the semantics of whether atheism is a belief or deconversion is actually proselytization. When we become more interested in defining our terms than in affecting people, we’ve relegated ourselves to irrelevance preferring to be smug in our minority, but semantically correct, nonbelief. Results Determine Reality The thing is when we opt to bury our

So Just How Dumb Were Jesus’ Disciples? The Resurrection, Part VII.

By Robert Conner ~ T he first mention of Jesus’ resurrection comes from a letter written by Paul of Tarsus. Paul appears to have had no interest whatsoever in the “historical” Jesus: “even though we have known Christ according to the flesh, we know him so no longer.” ( 2 Corinthians 5:16 ) Paul’s surviving letters never once mention any of Jesus’ many exorcisms and healings, the raising of Lazarus, or Jesus’ virgin birth, and barely allude to Jesus’ teaching. For Paul, Jesus only gets interesting after he’s dead, but even here Paul’s attention to detail is sketchy at best. For instance, Paul says Jesus “was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures” ( 1 Corinthians 15:4 ), but there are no scriptures that foretell the Jewish Messiah would at long last appear only to die at the hands of Gentiles, much less that the Messiah would then be raised from the dead after three days. After his miraculous conversion on the road to Damascus—an event Paul never mentions in his lette

ACTS OF GOD

By David Andrew Dugle ~   S ettle down now children, here's the story from the Book of David called The Parable of the Bent Cross. In the land Southeast of Eden –  Eden, Minnesota that is – between two rivers called the Big Miami and the Little Miami, in the name of Saint Gertrude there was once built a church. Here next to it was also built a fine parochial school. The congregation thrived and after a multitude of years, a new, bigger church was erected, well made with clean straight lines and a high steeple topped with a tall, thin cross of gold. The faithful felt proud, but now very low was their money. Their Sunday offerings and school fees did not suffice. Anon, they decided to raise money in an unclean way. One fine summer day the faithful erected tents in the chariot lot between the two buildings. In the tents they set up all manner of games – ring toss, bingo, little mechanical racing horses and roulette wheels – then all who lived in the land between the two rivers we

Christian TV presenter reads out Star Wars plot as story of salvation

An email prankster tricked the host of a Christian TV show into reading out the plots of The Fresh Prince of Bel Air and Star Wars in the belief they were stories of personal salvation. The unsuspecting host read out most of the opening rap to The Fresh Prince, a 1990s US sitcom starring Will Smith , apparently unaware that it was not a genuine testimony of faith. The prankster had slightly adapted the lyrics but the references to a misspent youth playing basketball in West Philadelphia would have been instantly familiar to most viewers. The lines read out by the DJ included: "One day a couple of guys who were up to no good starting making trouble in my living area. I ended up getting into a fight, which terrified my mother." The presenter on Genesis TV , a British Christian channel, eventually realised that he was being pranked and cut the story short – only to move on to another spoof email based on the plot of the Star Wars films. It began: &quo

Why I left the Canadian Reformed Church

By Chuck Eelhart ~ I was born into a believing family. The denomination is called Canadian Reformed Church . It is a Dutch Calvinistic Christian Church. My parents were Dutch immigrants to Canada in 1951. They had come from two slightly differing factions of the same Reformed faith in the Netherlands . Arriving unmarried in Canada they joined the slightly more conservative of the factions. It was a small group at first. Being far from Holland and strangers in a new country these young families found a strong bonding point in their church. Deutsch: Heidelberger Katechismus, Druck 1563 (Photo credit: Wikipedia ) I was born in 1955 the third of eventually 9 children. We lived in a small southern Ontario farming community of Fergus. Being young conservative and industrious the community of immigrants prospered. While they did mix and work in the community almost all of the social bonding was within the church group. Being of the first generation born here we had a foot in two

Morality is not a Good Argument for Christianity

By austinrohm ~ I wrote this article as I was deconverting in my own head: I never talked with anyone about it, but it was a letter I wrote as if I was writing to all the Christians in my life who constantly brought up how morality was the best argument for Christianity. No Christian has read this so far, but it is written from the point of view of a frustrated closeted atheist whose only outlet was organizing his thoughts on the keyboard. A common phrase used with non-Christians is: “Well without God, there isn’t a foundation of morality. If God is not real, then you could go around killing and raping.” There are a few things which must be addressed. 1. Show me objective morality. Define it and show me an example. Different Christians have different moral standards depending on how they interpret the Bible. Often times, they will just find what they believe, then go back into scripture and find a way to validate it. Conversely, many feel a particular action is not