Why It Is Right To Do Good To Others

Just on a basic point, it can't be correct to sayBecause there's good in the world, God existsWhich seems to be GDR's argument. Butthere is also evil in the world, so then what?The ancients pushed that one onto a different supernatural entity(s) so as not to taint the benevolent god and more latterly onto man himself. But of course that can't work because the Abrahamic god rightly takes credit for both good and evil. To do otherwise would be to admit that he's not all powerful.It's all a very simplistic storytelling trick to fool the uneducated masses but it doesn't hold any water these days.And in any case we now know where 'good' comes from, it's routed in the emotion of empathy - a brain function like many others.

It's no such thing. You consistently randomly pluck goodness out of the pot of human emotions and label it supernatural.Why is anger not something that 'exists outside of human experience'? Maybe jealousy or greed? How about evil? After all, god himself says he made it.YOU may prefer to think that it's outside our understanding but that's because you put it there - outside The Barrier. We actually know quite a lot about it - it's a brain function. Just another part of us that makes us successful in our environment, able to live in groups and bring up dependant children. Uh? What's that got to do with anything? Yes we do. Why not read the science? Here's a taster.

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Research in the neurobiolgy of empathy has changed the perception of empathy from a soft skill to a neurobiologically based competency (9). The theory of inner imitation of the actions of others in the observer has been supported by brain research. Functional magnetic resonance imaging now demonstrates the existence of a neural relay mechanism that allows empathic individuals to exhibit unconscious mimicry of the postures, mannerisms, and facial expressions of others to a greater degree than individuals who are unempathic (10).

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Patients unconsciously mimic the actions and facial expressions of others through brain mechanisms that mirror the actions of others by stimulating the same motor and sensory areas in the observers’ brains as the person they are observing. This mirroring capacity has been demonstrated at the level of single muscle fibers. If a person’s hand muscle is pricked by a fine needle, for example, the same motor and sensory areas are activated in the brain of an observer (11).

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Studies also demonstrate that while patients are either imitating or simply observing emotional facial expressions, activation of a similar network of brain areas occurs in the observer. Within this network, there is activity during simple observation of emotional faces, and greater activity during imitation of emotions (12). In addition to inner representations of others’ facial displays, shared neural circuits have also been demonstrated for tone of voice, touch, disgust, and pain. Researchers conclude from these studies that observers feel what others feel to an attenuated degree. This is achieved through a mechanism of neural action representation that often modulates observers’ own emotional different individual capacities for empathy (13).

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A novel study showed that the expression, “I feel your pain,” is much more than just a figure of speech. Sixteen female volunteers had brain scans performed while they received painful electric shocks to their hands. While they received the shock, a well-defined “pain matrix” was activated in their brains. Afterward, they received a signal that their spouses were receiving similar shocks. This activated a similar (but not entire) pain matrix in the females’ brains.

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This is the first neuroimaging study to demonstrate that we actually do feel the pain of others, but only in an attenuated form (10). Attenuation makes it possible to empathize but not become overwhelmed with another’s personal distress. Our own distress would likely render us less helpful. Indeed, there is a balance between empathy leading to helping or distancing behaviors due to personal distress. An important balance must be struck by ensuring that health-care providers receive enough care, support, and empathy from their institutions in order to provide high-quality empathic care and to benefit from the positive side effects of empathy.

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It's an evolutionary evolved trait like all the others. Your attempt to make it magically different isn't working. Edited by Tangle, : No reason given.

And that's exactly what happens - we discriminate, we can't help it, it's designed into us. In order - family, friends, neighbours, tribe, race. It all derives from empathy and that's an evolved feature like everything else.This is from a tutorial for doctors who have to learn to deal with their empathetic instincts just to survive, but also be aware or losing or dulling the reaction because they see so much suffering.

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A cardinal feature of empathy is that it usually helps connect people to others. Because of the evolutionary development of this brain-based capacity, affective empathy, or emotional sharing, most easily occurs among members of the same “tribe”. Individuals tend to have the most empathy for others who look or act like them, for others who have suffered in a similar way, or for those who share a common goal.

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We see these biases play out repeatedly in communities, schools, sports teams, and religious communities. The truth of the matter is that empathy is not always an equal opportunity benefactor (15). People are evolutionarily wired to recognize and respond to differences and socially or culturally based perceptions can trigger subconscious fears that threaten emotional homeostasis.

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All perceptions in our environment are routed through the thalamus. From there, the amygdala, the threat sensor in the brain, reacts to threats, unfamiliar stimuli, conditioned fears, and perceived threats in as few as 50 milliseconds long before conscious thoughts come into play. When these threat signals reach the midbrain, (specifically in the area of the pons) automatic reactions such as the fight, flight or freeze response take place unless there is cognitive input from executive functions in the prefrontal cortex.

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Because of this evolutionary bias, cognitive empathy must play a role when a lack of emotional empathy exists because of racial, ethnic, religious, or physical differences. Health-care settings are no exception to conscious and unconscious biases,

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How and why evolution 'designed' us that way is easily explicable, but it seems that you believe your god designed us to discriminate against outsiders but wants us not too. That makes no sense to me. I don't understand what point you're making. I've explained why. We're a social species - without empathy we could not have learned how to work together. That's the whole story. I'm sorry but it does. It make that primitive superstitious idea redundant. We KNOW that empathy doesn't require a constant external influence; it's an inbuilt biological function - a brain function like all others. We know this because we know the parts of the brain involved and we can see what stimulates them. We also know that when the brain is damaged or lacking the function, people don't know how others feel and can't relate to them. In extreme examples we get psychopathy.How come your 'still small voice' can't be heard by those people? Is it a total fluke that the brain function is missing in people that do what we think are bad, antisocial things? Yes, it describes how empathy works and why we need to modify it. I can't see why this helps you. Oh good grief!There are two parts to this problem. The first is the primitively evolved reflex to mistrust strangers and see danger in outsiders. This is combined with the need to work in social groups - we trust our family, friends and tribe most. As we move away from that small centre we trust and care less.I don't care what your religion, that's how we're built - it's a reflex.The second part is our executive brain - the modern, conscious thinking part of our brain that is able to overcome - eventually - those reflexes. How we develop as a society influences how we treat others. Christians, like all other peoples, have been able to treat foreigners and outsiders either well or badly conditional only on their motivations. God loving Christians have murdered people of other religious beliefs without qualms of conscience and kept black slaves whilst attending church.It's society, law and our secular systems that moderate our primitively evolved traits. Religions have had a big part in that role in the past and some of it's better ideas have become incorporated our secular systems but religions rely on a fictitious entity and a pile of superstitious ancilliary garbage to keep people in order. Religions bring with them their unreformed dogma that is actually a danger - fear of women, homosexuals, social progress, non-believers.Religion is no longer necessary, it's holding us back and we do better without it. You're belifs are simply redundant.You can throw the beliefs away and still be kind to strangers - it would give you more time and resource to do it.Edited by Tangle, : No reason given.