Empathy, Knowledge and Compassion
Empathy, knowledge, and compassion are the things that people seem to be recognizing as critical to our development and are seriously missing from our daily life. By calling out the privilege of those of us who can be nontheist you’ve shown me a huge gap in my thinking. Thank you.
This recognition seems to reinforce a way of understanding the larger picture of the collapse of shared belief that we all are struggling to either deny or restore. The steady decline of religion has been a major battlefield that many people could simply ignore but the brutal reality of Trump has made the collapse of our shared reality frighteningly obvious. Coleridge’s “suspension of disbelief” has come to haunt me lately and it, I think, applies here, too. It is very hard to restore a shared illusion even if people realize both politics and culture is shared illusion. If you don’t realize that then it is your own life story that is being destroyed and that is almost impossible to grasp empathically. . .
