An argument on faith between Sam Harris and Rick Warren. My favorite bit:
Well, I don't think that the religious books are the source. We go to the Bible and we are the judge of what is good. We see the golden rule as the great distillation of ethical impulses, but the golden rule is not unique to the Bible or to Jesus; you see it in many, many cultures—and you see some form of it among nonhuman primates. I'm not at all a moral relativist. I think it's quite common among religious people to believe that atheism entails moral relativism. I think there is an absolute right and wrong. I think honor killing, for example, is unambiguously wrong—you can use the word evil. A society that kills women and girls for sexual indiscretion, even the indiscretion of being raped, is a society that has killed compassion, that has failed to teach men to value women and has eradicated empathy. Empathy and compassion are our most basic moral impulses, and we can even teach the golden rule without lying to ourselves or our children about the origin of certain books or the virgin birth of certain people.
There is a lot of wisdom in that paragraph, some of which relates to politics. Empathy is the most important value anyone can have and on many levels the golden rule is a reflection of that value. We should all take the time to reflect on our actions as they measure up to these values. Similarly, other people can also be evaluated in this regard. People who have no empathy should be vilified and cast down.
In a way politics is how we try to work out our differences and live together. Policy and law are derived from those imperatives and therefore should be imbued with empathy. To do otherwise would be wrong.
A large part of my dislike for the Bush administration and its conservative cohorts in Congress is engendered by their lack of empathy, which harms many people. These people are psychopaths and must be stopped.
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