previous title was "toxic empathy pulling christians to the left"
this post was submitted on 17 Jul 2025
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chapotraphouse
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No anti-nautilism posts. See: Eco-fascism Primer
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Holy cow what a trip. Get a load of this:
The Christian Right: famous for not validating lies, affirming sin, or supporting destructive policies. Don't sprain your arms patting yourselves on the back for your feats in moral discernment.
Transphobia/discussion of abortion:
spoiler
Because we feel so deeply for this one purported victim, we say, well, maybe deportation is wrong, or maybe I should affirm this person’s stated gender, even though it mismatches their biology, or maybe I should affirm the right to have an abortion because I feel so deeply for this person’s plight.That is when your empathy has led you in a bad direction and has turned toxic.
....
Her story was first told by NPR. She found out that her baby had a fatal fetal anomaly at the 20-week mark, but in Texas she wasn’t allowed to abort her child. NPR tells the story as if this was horrible for Samantha, who had to go through the financial, physical, emotional burden of bearing this child, only to have this child to die.
By the end of the story, the reader feels exactly how it seems NPR wants them to feel, which is that this is a great injustice toward Samantha. How dare these draconian laws force her to do something so painful, so financially burdensome. We need to liberate women from these anti-abortion laws that are making them go through so much.
You have so much empathy for Samantha that you support the pro-abortion position by the end of this, through the mode of storytelling. What I try to do is tell the story from the other perspective: The actual victim in this story — that NPR and most mainstream media outlets do not want you to know about — is the baby.
They don’t want you to think about the actual victim of abortion. What would have been the fate of this baby, whose name is Halo? What would have been her fate if Texas had not had this — quote, unquote — pro-life law? She would’ve been poisoned. She would’ve been dismembered. She would’ve been discarded like toxic waste.
But instead, she was delivered and clothed and named and held and loved and buried like the full human being that she is. My argument is that toxic empathy — when it comes to any issue, not just abortion — is actually cruel and destructive and deadly, both for the individual and for society because it only focuses on one purported victim and ignores the actual victims on the other side of the equation.
There will be no excuses for the terror.
The Reddit atheists were right and we need another skeptic movement with better guardrails.
Nah, we need a modern left wing American Orthodox Catholicism to wage a fucking crusade on these blasphemers.
I support both of these options and seek dialectical synthesis
Militant Atheist-Catholics. Cathiests. Aetholics. They reject all supernaturalism except transubstantiation. That eucharist is 100% the literal flesh of Christ and the pope is the sole earthly vicar of a god they do not believe in. They're trained to hunt Evangelicals in the dark by listening for the sound of their "speaking in tongues" babbling.
Atheist Catholics are just warhammer 40k fans
I was thinking man Matt would have made a great Pope of this religion before the stroke but reading your comment I think it's only made him a stronger candidate.