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Re:Young adults are struggling with their mental health by williamtrask on Saturday December 31, 2022 @12:32AM (#34193904)
Hobbies and art don’t give me a reason to help the poor, to care for my neighbour, or give all my wealth away. Neither did they create modern western morality (murder being socially unacceptable is taken for granted, for example.).

Karma, Judaism, among many other religions, did and does make people do these things.

Re:Young adults are struggling with their mental health by xabotage on Saturday December 31, 2022 @12:45AM (#34193971)
I don't help the poor as a hobby or because I was told to. I help the poor because I have compassion and empathy. Animals also demonstrate these same pro-social behaviors, and I'm pretty sure none of them are Jewish or Hindu.
Re:Young adults are struggling with their mental health by williamtrask on Saturday December 31, 2022 @01:32AM (#34194213)
Animals don’t have the scientific method either. Far more likely they have inherited patterns of behaviour based on survival bias.

Do you feel we (both) have compassion and empathy because of scientific reason or a non-scientific method?

Re:Young adults are struggling with their mental health by williamtrask on Saturday December 31, 2022 @03:45AM (#34194747)
I think the big question here is “why do you and I have compassion and empathy when many (many!) in human history have not?”

Related: do animals act pro-socially because of rational scientific rigour or because they blindly inherit behaviours from their peers/ancestors?

Re:Young adults are struggling with their mental health by xabotage on Saturday December 31, 2022 @01:12PM (#34199016)
Empathy is a survival strategy that benefits society as a whole whereas sociopathy is a survival strategy that benefits the individual. Humans are complex and diverse enough to display both sets of behaviors within the population.

I thought it should be fairly obvious that social instincts are "blindly inherited," I can't imagine why you think that any institution, scientific or religious, would need to manufacture them.