I couldn't have said it better.
This seems more like the old veiled attack on liberals and their supposed "bleeding hearts" leading the nation to ruin. It was tired then and it's tired now.
Like I said, disdain for empathy is the virtue only of an insecure bully. I can't square it with the ethics of Jesus of Nazareth.
Respectfully, the members who have spoken about empathy are not insecure bullies nor are they psychopaths. They are pointing out things I was unaware of, for example, that empathy is a neologism and that it doesn’t mean what we think it means; rather it is a word that was inserted into the English language and describes what is a passion, which is a sort of pity in which improper capitulations are made because we feel sorry for someone.
The passion they are talking about was described by St. John Chrysostom, whose personal holiness is beyond question, and whose homiletics are unsurpassed, and whose liturgical skills and theological knowledge represented the apex of Christian theology in Antioch, a high water mark that would never be surpassed, only equalled, by very underrated Syriac Orthodox saints from that city who are in some Chalcedonian churches falsely accused of monophysitism.
I would describe the passion, now that I understand the point my friends
@zippy2006 and
@jas3 were trying to make, using a real world case: at United Air Lines, second officers, that is to say, flight engineers, who failed to upgrade to copilot after two attempts were not allowed to make another but were kept in the third seat permanently. This is a policy I find a bit questionable, because the nature of being a pilot flying sideways as flight engineer can result in one losing one’s stick and rudder skills, which is why I have ultimately come to the conclusion that the move to a two man* flight deck was the right one to make. Also the system used by British Airways, and historically by some US airlines such as Western (until the 1960s) of having flight engineers with a background in aircraft maintenance would have avoided this.
At any rate, there was a DC-8 freighter which crashed in the early 1980s as a result of the captain feeling sorry for his second officer, who had failed twice to upgrade to first officer and thus was permanently stuck flying sideways at the flight engineer’s console as a second officer, and thus the captain decided to let the second officer land the aircraft, and the second officer made a disastrous mistake which killed all three pilots (I don’t think there were any casualties on the ground, and this was a freighter with no deadheads on board).
This kind of destructive pity, and I would argue that the ordination of women in denominations that ordain women is not an example of that, but if a schism were caused in a church that has a doctrinal objection to the ordination of women by changing the policy, on the basis of a misguided sense of pity, that would be an example of the above, because nothing is worth causing yet another schism. I myself am so frustrated by the endless schisms that I cannot endorse any action which could provoke another one (this is why
Fiducia Supplicans upsets me so much). Preserving unity in the church is becoming increasingly imperative due to an increase in schismatic activity primarily motivated by stupid issues of ecclesiastical politics, for example, petty rivalry between bishops, or factionalism in some churches. Indeed my beloved Park Street Church in Boston experienced, while the current pastor was recovering from a serious injury, a situation which appears to have come uncomfortably close to causing a schism (this appears to have been avoided, since once the pastor returned, he has put his all into restoring unity).
*I use the word man according to its traditional meaning, inclusive of female pilots, of whom there are many excellent examples. Indeed some have made interesting arguments that women are in principle slightly better qualified to be pilots than men, but I think the experience in the airline industry is that male and female pilots are equally qualified. What I resent is the recent political correctness in some aviation terminology, for example, in theory, a NOTAM (Notice To Air Men) now stands for “Notice To Air Missions” which I would argue is a terrible name, since it does not convey that NOTAMs are relevant to general aviation pilots, although NOTAM was also problematic since the USAF refers to enlisted personnel as airmen, even if they are not pilots or do not work in a part of the air force where they would have any need to read a NOTAM, but then again as anyone with any knowledge of aviation can tell you the entire system of NOTAMS has become notoriously broken; the number of NOTAMs presented to airline pilots has reached a level where many are irrelevant for their flight, and the formatting of the NOTAM messages makes them hard to read. Another even more unpleasant example of absurd political correctness has been having air traffic controllers no longer ask pilots for the number of souls on board, but rather the number of personnel on board, which is also misleading since it could give the impression of referring only to flight crew and cabin crew. Another example would be attempts at eliminating the term “deadheading” which is convenient as it refers both to non-revenue travel by pilots commuting to work, and also to travel by passholders; fortunately this has not entirely stuck and the term is also widely used on US railways to refer both to crew deadheading on passenger trains, and to trains deadheading, that is to say, making non-revenue movements, which airlines call repositioning or “repo” flights.
