previous title was "toxic empathy pulling christians to the left"
Southern Baptist and calvinist are as far as you need to read of this drivel.
this post was submitted on 17 Jul 2025
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chapotraphouse
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Holy cow what a trip. Get a load of this:
And so, having been there, being able to put yourself in someone’s shoes can lead you to do the right thing. It can lead you to sacrifice. It can lead you to selflessness. It can lead you to acts of love and kindness. But putting yourself in someone’s shoes, feeling what they feel can also lead you to do three things that I say makes empathy toxic: One, validate lies. Two, affirm sin. And three, support destructive policies.
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.
people got mad at the annoying thing instead of the thing that has actual real-world political power
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.
Jesus FUCKING Tapdancing Christ. I guess IT showed us clowns can be monstrous, but what the fuck.
searching bible for my hatred of lgbt and mexicans
reading bible for my usury and stock market behavior
To his very very limited credit, Douthat tries to pin her down on the immigration stuff (and then keeps letting her weasel out of it):
Douthat: But wait. Isn’t that a reasonable thing to say? Don’t you want people in the position of the Christian supporter of Donald Trump to say: I support deportations, but the way we’re deporting people to a prison in El Salvador seems like a violation of natural law? ...
Stuckey: It might be reasonable. I’m not saying that it is always unreasonable to listen to those critiques of Trump or to see those highlights of supposed cruelty from the Trump administration and say: Wow, that does seem bad.
I’m saying that if Christians are looking to have credibility with the left or credibility with progressives or credibility with the world, and they are looking for an escape route to no longer like Donald Trump or support Donald Trump, that they so easily — without thinking — latch on to the deeply feeling stories that we are given and say “This is just too far for me” without even digging in and asking the question: But is this true? Or what is the other side to the story? That’s what I see as a form of toxic empathy. That’s what leads to what I call the mushy middle. That’s where I see a lot of evangelicals are going. That’s the question that I always want people to ask, whether I’m talking or The New York Times is talking.
But is this true? If it sounds too good or too bad to be true about either side, that’s the question that we need to ask: But is this true, and what is on the other side of it? Like I said, not always unreasonable, but it’s unreasonable if you’re not using reason.
Douthat: ...A president whose stance on immigration doesn’t just say we need to build the wall, he also clearly uses the language of scapegoat and cruelty around the very large number of people who have understandable reasons to migrate to the United States, whether or not it’s reasonable for the United States to welcome them.
Sincere Christians recoil from this man, recoil from his takeover of the Republican Party and, in the process, end up kind of inevitably pulled somewhat to their left on issues where previously they were further to the right. But isn’t that understandable? Doesn’t that seem understandable to you as someone who disagrees with these people?
Stuckey: It’s totally understandable, and I have given a lot of credit to that over the years not only because I sincerely understand it but because it’s more persuasive when you try to steel-man someone’s concerns rather than diminish them. I’ve never voted for Donald Trump in a primary because I’ve had plenty of issues with how Donald Trump talks or conducts himself.
My critiques have been from the right, though. I have been troubled by some of the things that he said about abortion and worried if he was really strong enough on the issues that I care about or if the second term would only be about a personal vendetta. I’ve actually been very pleasantly surprised and pretty satisfied with a lot of the things that he has actually done in the way of conservatism.
What I want the other side to understand is that I hear you, I absolutely hear you. However, from my perspective, the other side is worse. Was Donald Trump my pick in the primary? Obviously he was the pick of a lot of people, but was he my pick in the primary? ...
i think to the end of interview my eyes glazed over from: well, it doesn't say so and i'm not for trump, but i'm against trump, and we have to support his policies, i love people, and these policies are bad but we have to support trump and bible says in appendix fuck em kids, and also i like trump, but i hate his policies, and i didn't vote for him
Yeah, Douthat never succeeds in forcing her to square that circle. He's clearly "outmatched" because it's a friendly interview and it's designed to make Stuckey surface-level palatable to his audience of Christians with a still-barely-functional moral compass so the obvious follow-ups never happen. It's proof the Gish Gallop is still alive and well in conservative Christian circles.
The Bible literally gives a recipe for abortion and Jesus never talks about it in the New Testament IIRC. You know what he doesn't like? Divorce. How much you wanna bet these Christians are going to eventually be on their third or fourth marriage?
The interview is littered with Douthat pointing out those contradictions, Stuckey dismissing them or word salading around them, and then Douthat changing the subject. There's a long part about the whole "women aren't permitted to teach in the church" rule.