/lit/ - Literature

>>16292558
>>Perfection includes existence.
Ever seen perfection? How come existence is pure imperfection on imperfection?

>>15680251

>>15446878
damn... God must have really hated all those born before Christ, and those who lived in a remote geographical location, and unborn children, and aliens...

What's the criterion for empathy?

There's the california-zen "eternal oneness" take where we're all one big body anyways in which total empathy should be achievable, but then you ask what this empathy is and, unless we start positing "others," it starts to sound like this supernatural process by which you can just squint your eyes real hard and thus move into someone else's head and begin looking out through their eyeballs, perhaps at nuclear launch codes, etc.

Alternatively we do suppose others, which in turn throws out at least "total" empathy. Even if I am empathizing with someone strongly enough to see their nuclear launch codes, there should be something qualitatively distinguishing our two perspectives so long as I retain my distinct sense of self: specifically, the mere thought "that's not me." Short of that separation, you fall back into the zen thing. But if we want to avoid that and we don't mind there being only "degrees" of empathy, then having it between individuals is fine.

The problem then is that I still see no criterion for what even an ounce of empathy is. I think generally it's regarded has having an X% identical perspective or set of emotions, but then what happens if someone on the opposite side of the planet just so happens to feel 5% the same as me? Am I actively 5% empathizing with this person whose presence I am simultaneously unaware of? That doesn't seem right, and this is surely just the first of all the issues with empathy that you can fashion off of old-timey causality issues. Of course I don't mean to ask some annoyingly precise question like "how many blades of grass make a lawn?", but I would like to know what a blade of grass is.

Pic is bait.

>>15326021
Sorry, I don't read fiction.

How did christianity and the corpus of christian literature go from being the most respected institution in Western civilization, to being the punchline for anyone intelligent enough to graduate high school?

Was it one big cataclysm, or a gradual process?