“Universal religion” has not taught or improved compassion or empathy. They teach that compassion and empathy are results of adhering to the religion. Membership confers the attributes of compassion and empathy, and minimizes or negates those attributes in non-members.
Religions aiming at universality are inherently unaccountable and divisive political entities. They devalue and dehumanize non-members and present clear and direct threats against those who oppose them, or do not want to comply with behavioral standards established by the worst kind of absentee manager.
Look at the Abrahamic cults. The overwhelming majority of their sacred texts are justifications for genocide and ethnic supremacy. Their brand of compassion and empathy have overseen 2,000 years of the worst violence in history. Christianism, for example, continues its tradition claiming to be the of arbiter of compassion, while simultaneously acknowledging compassion as something only they can provide.
It’s the pinnacle of right by might and it’s the worst possible model for training anything except an ethnic monoculture of racially similar ideologues with a penchant for violence.
If you want to learn about compassion and empathy, it’s best to go to the source of it all. Plato, and the Platonic School, are where Second Temple Judaism and Christianism, and to a large degree Islam, got their concepts of compassion and empathy. They twisted and perverted Platonic ideals to suit their political aims. They took away the individual accountability and put all the responsibility on some nebulous, ever changing supreme being who, oddly enough, always agrees with them. Best to go to the source and leave the politics out of it.
1. **Religious texts and violence**: While Abrahamic texts do contain violent passages, characterizing the “overwhelming majority” as “justifications for genocide and ethnic supremacy” is factually incorrect. These texts contain diverse content including ethical teachings, poetry, historical narratives, and legal codes. The violent passages represent a minority of the content.
The overwhelming majority of the praise hymns, poetry, and historical narratives are praising and expressing gratitude for genocide, ethnic cleansing, colonialism, and violence and the deity they claim caused those things to happen on their behalf. The ethical teachings are ethnic supremacy practices that are reserved solely for use by the practitioners.
2. **”2,000 years of the worst violence in history”**: This statement ignores that violence has existed in all human societies regardless of religion. It also overlooks that many historical atrocities were driven by non-religious ideologies (e.g., 20th century totalitarian regimes).
It doesn’t ignore them at all, it categorizes them as they worst. Based on loss of life and economic costs the religious warfare and religious expansionism of the last 2,000 years has no precedent in history.
To ignore the religious basis for 20th century totalitarian regimes is to ignore history. The expansion of Christianism into the “godless Soviet Union” was a key element in Lebensraum and the ethnic persecutions of the NSDAP were entirely based in Christian doctrine. With “Gott mit uns” (God with us) on their belt buckles, Bibles that portrayed Jesus as an anti-Jewish warrior in their pockets, banners that read “Hitler’s fight and Luther’s teaching are the best defense for the German people”, they marched to a war that still defines the world today. They felt really good about it because, like Manifest Destiny, it was undertaken with religious authority. As everyone’s least favorite Austrian corporal said “We tolerate no one in our ranks who attacks the ideas of Christianity. Our movement is Christian.”.
3. **Religious monopoly on compassion**: While some religious groups do claim exclusive moral authority, many traditions explicitly teach universal compassion that extends beyond group boundaries. The comment oversimplifies complex theological positions across diverse traditions.
They teach universal compassion under their own banner. The era of colonialism was viewed as compassionate. Forced birth is viewed as compassionate. Abrahamic religions view soteriological concerns compassion as outweighing physical compassion. Canada and Australia are still grappling with the compassionate religious programs that separated families. The U.S. has yet to address their own history of kidnapping and killing native children to advance their religious religious.
4. **Platonic origins claim**: The assertion that Abrahamic religions derived their concepts of compassion and empathy primarily from Plato is historically questionable. While Hellenistic philosophy influenced later Jewish and Christian thought, these traditions also drew from their own cultural and textual sources that pre-dated significant Greek influence.
The Platonic concept of the imperishable soul as the basis for the fragmentation of Second Temple Judaism into the sects of the Saducees and Pharisees isn’t questioned by scholars. It marks the introduction of the “post-kleos society” into Canaan where (like in India and Greece) glory was previously obtainable through acts of tremendous bloodshed or martyrdom. The imperishable soul, and its continued existence in an afterlife, gave compassion and empathy persistent value that transferred to that afterlife both with the giver and recipient. For the first time, compassion had salvific value. Christianism took it even further and gamified compassion and empathy through their quantification. In both cases compassion and empathy resulted in direct reward in Plato’s afterlife. Prior to the introduction of Platonic concepts of compassion and empathy, the closest thing Judaism had was helping other Jews meet their religious obligations. A good introductory read on the topic is “Heaven and Hell: A History of the Afterlife” by Bart Ehrman. It’s written in an approachable style and doesn’t require a lot of background on the subject.
5. **”Universal religion”**: This term is never clearly defined, making many of the claims difficult to evaluate precisely.
Agreed.