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mckn1ghtyesterday at 6:15 AM1 replyview on HN

It’s at least an option for consideration. I shouldn’t have spoken normatively.

Is your position that compassion is only possible via religion?


Replies

pbh101yesterday at 6:22 PM

Agree an option for consideration.

I don’t think religion is the only path, but that it has functioned as a prosocial positive-sum cooperating/compassion technology/mechanism in many cultural contexts. Not without downsides, of course.

That many today relatively reflexively default to ~‘we can all be nice to each other; this is obviously the (only) moral approach’ without stated precepts/priors/fundaments upon which that morality is moored I think tends to implicitly borrow priors from Western Christian tradition, albeit incompletely and sometimes critically so. Sam Harris’ recent appearance on Ross Douthat’s ‘Interesting Times’ podcast was IMO an example of this.