Empathy Is a Sin
Not only is untethered empathy “a” sin, but it is the primal sin, the root of all our sin, the ur-sin.
In Douglas Wilson’s own words: 5 quotes from 2021 to 2026, from Blog & Mablog, each cited to the source.
Not only is untethered empathy “a” sin, but it is the primal sin, the root of all our sin, the ur-sin. How so? Back to the Garden. [...] If you follow Milton’s reasoning on this topic, as I do, the reason Adam ate the forbidden fruit was because he didn’t want to lose Eve. He was forced to choose between the authoritative Word from God and his feeling of identification with his wife.
This deadly process begins by empathizing with people without any obligation to find out whether their claims are objectively accurate or true. This leads to emotional tyranny, which in its turn leads to actual tyranny.
To review, empathy is when you identify with someone completely, doing so without judgment. I’ve used the illustration before of someone drowning in the river. Sympathy throws him a rope, always keeping a footing on the bank of objective reality. With empathy, however, the requirement of no judgment means that you have to take a header into the river yourself in order to drown alongside the person you are identifying with... Once you’ve detached from objective standards, not only do you have trouble distinguishing one crime from another, at the end of the day, you have trouble distinguishing one kind of empathy from another. Empathy, toxic empathy, suicidal empathy, psychotic empathy—it’s all one.
If you empathize with a woman who says that her stepfather molested her when she was a child, you must accept her account without judgment, which means that you must accept it without evidence. You must not budget for the possibility that her account might be false. It also means that you must reject without mercy any attempt on the part of the stepfather to produce exculpatory evidence.
Empathy is just a noisome belch pretending to be a cool morning breeze off a mountain lake.