I'm kind of late posting anything on this farce of a book.
But better late than never, right?
Especially since I've found the best little review on it.
Over on Facebook, I have gotten into several verbal disagreements with Doug Wilson and Joe Rigney fans over this accursed book. They keep saying something like, "You obviously haven't read the book because if you did, you would understand and wouldn't blindly and wildly criticize it."
In other words, they want me (and those like me) to buy the book. I let them know in no uncertain terms that Doug Wilson, Joe Rigney, and Canon Press will never get a single dime from me to fund their war on women.
"War on women?" you say?
Yes. War on women
Please read this review found here at Mere Orthodoxy to understand what I mean:
A Sham Trial: Reviewing 'The Sin of Empathy'
I'm glad Danielle Treweek read that infernal book so I don't have to
2 comments:
I have heard "about" this book but haven't seen much need to read it. Long ago I read a book by the social psychologist Roy Baumeister called Evil: Inside Human Violence and Cruelty and his definition of the distinction between empathy and sympathy seemed fairly straightforward. Empathy is the CAPACITY to understand what someone may be thinking or feeling. Sympathy is that you do, actually, CARE about the thoughts and feelings of the person. Baumeister pointed out that for sadists and psychopaths they can have very high levels of empathy (which is cultivated) and basically no sympathy, which is what enables them to be as cruel as they are.
Over at Phoenix Preacher I proposed that it "is" possible to have a high level of sympathy but lack empathy and that Job's friends most likely had this problem. They were very sympathetic to Job in his plight until he raised his lament and when they heard him they suddenly showed they couldn't empathize with him. So I think it "is" possible to have sympathy without empathy and be capable of empathy without sympathy (I cited Baumeister in a guest piece I wrote about Batman: the animated series long ago, somewhere).
What someone like Rigney has come across as doing is incompetently moving goalposts in ways that shows that he either doesn't know what he's talking about with empathy/sympathy distinctions or he's argument in bad faith (though it's surely possible to be both incompetent AND to argue in bad faith). :)
I like how you define sympathy and empathy a whole lot better than Rigney. Makes a lot of sense. And make the term "Dark Empath" have more meaning for me than before.
I also like what you say about Rigney moving goal posts. He has philosophies and prejudices that appears compelled to support by hook or by crook. And as Treweek says, his judge, jury, executioner rantings against empathy is just one big Alice in Wonderland farce.
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