Empathy is a feeling of concern provoked by observing the suffering of another.
Compassion conflates this emotion with action (or beneficial inaction) appropriate to mitigating the perceived distress.
Pity may result from empathy and may resemble compassion, but it is absent of the requirement to acknowledge the sufferer as an equal.
Because of this, the works of pity are always sullied to some degree by its remote, subtly contemptuous nature. Whereas pity emphasises the distance between us, compassion dissolves it.
Category Archives: Life
Empathy, Compassion & Pity
Back From Whence I Went
Hi guys,
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Just got back from (you’ll never guess where) … the future.
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You may be shocked by this, but they don’t have a lot of nice things to say about us. First, though, I should tell you how this crazy cruise began…
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The following morning, I noticed an anomaly in one of the image pattern buffers. It was full. They should all have been nearly empty. After all, I’d only visited the future for about three minutes. All but one of the thirty-six buffers checked out fine. Number 17 appeared to be holding about four hours of video.
The idea of the experiment was to project myself forward in time, by a small but easily measurable amount: One single second.
I synched my personal timer with the master control clock and stepped into a Quantum state isolation chamber (Qsic) that was designed especially for this investigation. On the exterior of the Qsic containment shell was a third timer, which I had also pre-synched with the master clock. By opening a small window in my cramped cabin, I could view the time recorded there – without leaving the ‘vehicle’. This was necessary for two reasons: safety, of course; and to maintain the integrity of the quantum continuum initiated by the Qsic, which (as anyone from the future can tell you) is the only way to return to your space/time departure frame once you leave it. (Of course, you never really leave it unless you disrupt the quantum continuum by powering down or opening the hatch. And you won’t want to do that, unless you’re not planning to come back.)
A series of tiny windows (1 cm in diameter) are strategically positioned around the craft in order to optimise outside viewing upon ‘arrival’ at the destination frame. The mini-windows are precisely-ground polycarbonate lenses. Since it’s impossible to see through these dim, obtusely-focused portals with the human eye, CCD cameras are interfaced in a holographically-compatible array which provides excellent views of one’s future surroundings – but only though a 2D display monitor or virtual reality helmet.
So, I depressed the GO switch and it immediately popped up again, meaning one of two things: a) the circuit failed; or, b) the experiment was complete. All lights indicated System OK, so I flipped open the external timer window. Something strange there. I snapped it shut and then flipped it open again. Same result. And then I simply flipped.
Nine hundred and fifty years! It took me a few minutes to figure that out because the readout was hard calibrated only in seconds and miniscule fractions thereof. But nine hundred and fifty years! I was supposed to lose only one second – not the lifespan of Noah!
Apparently, one second at light-speed nets you one light-second of time travel; or, just under 30 billion seconds of geo-temporal fast forward at a ratio of one second to one centimetre.
I didn’t even bother to check the cameras to see what, if anything, was out there. I was more excited about building new theoretical models that would conform to what I had just learned. I hit the Safe Return button instinctively and it responded by popping immediately back out. All systems were running trim and error-free. I was home.
As the Qsic powered down, I checked my outside environment indicators (you want to try and avoid Morlocks at any cost, I think ~ [thx HG]) and stepped back into my lab. Once the communications harnesses were securely coupled to the hull access port, I started the Qsic’s digital debriefing and diagnostics (QD3) suite. Everything registered right down the middle. The experiment was an unqualified success.
But for the lame assumption I made in configuring my timecalc subroutines, I could find nothing out of the ordinary. Best of all, especially for me, the Qsic’s Safe Return system executed a flawless, automatic clawback from nearly a thousand years out!
Yeah, I’d say it was a good day.
The following morning, I noticed an anomaly in one of the image pattern buffers. It was full. They should all have been nearly empty. After all, I’d only visited the future for about three minutes. All but one of the thirty-six buffers checked out fine. Number 17 appeared to be holding about four hours of video.
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So I watched it..
Like I said earlier, the people of the future aren’t too crazy about us right now… er, right then? Nope, I was correct the first time. Right now. (It’s always now.)
Anyway, what I’ve got is one hour each of Oprah, Springer, Donahue and Griffin – complete with commercials. And a three minute segment of what appears to be a little girl, perhaps five or six years old, telling me off, in no uncertain terms, about our environmental mismanagement; our “lack of basic values and the virtue to apply them,” (she scolded); domestic violence; community violence; inter-community violence; and, of course, War. According to her, we were/are nothing short of “monstrous”.
It seems that when they rediscovered our “lost” civilisation, all they could find or successfully recover were television shows and some well-preserved DNA. The exact locations of the biological samples had been stored in a database that they were able to parse.
They apparently found nothing to redeem us in the millions of hours of television they resurrected. And worse, when they cloned a few dozen of us, all hell broke loose within twenty years. Their well-organised society nearly suffered a catastrophic collapse, partly owing to the fact that the DNA they found belonged to a group of violent, recidivist sex-offenders that were part of a gene therapy research program.
“Please… JUST STAY HOME!” she glowered into the camera, as the screen faded to black.
Smart kid.
© 2009
Sadducees, Pharisees & Essenes
The roles and significance of the Sadducees, Pharisees and Essenes in Jewish religious history has been much discussed and – more often than not – hotly debated. From whence did these three influential sects arise?
Here’s a brief article on the origin of their respective names.
The Sadducees were the Hasmonean priests of the Second Temple period (516 BCE to 70 CE) in Jerusalem. The name comes from the Hebrew name Tzadok, the high priest who anointed King Solomon and who was selected by the him to oversee the affairs of worship. The name in Hebrew (צדוק) means “righteous”. In the Greek histories, since there is no single Greek letter that makes the sound “tz” (the letter tzadi צ in Hebrew), the word gradually became more Hellenic.
That’s the easy one that everybody knows.
The Essenes, whose name we also obtain from the Greeks, is a case of language evolving in the opposite direction. The moniker began as the Greek term xénos (ξένος – stranger) and became incorporated into the local parlance between the time of Alexander’s Middle Eastern campaigns until the Roman occupation of the region. Koine Greek was widely spoken in the area, especially in commercial and cultural centres. Because there is no single letter in Hebrew to represent the sound “x“, a common “s” sound (samech: ס) was substituted with a placeholder vowel (aleph: א) standing at the head of the word – resulting in the Aramaic-Hebrew word Esseni (אסני). Transliterated back into Greek, this resulted in the word Εσσηνοι (Essenoi), as recorded in the histories of Josephus.
Neither Josephus, nor Philo, nor Pliny the Elder recognised how the term came into being; never suspecting that it originally came from Greek! The question would seem to be why the Essenes, a sect of religious ascetics who studied almost exclusively in Hebrew would choose to call themselves by a Greek word. And the short answer is that they didn’t; they were called that by the rest of the population. Often living and studying in caves or other rough shelters, they ventured out only to attend select discussions and ceremonies at the Temple in Jerusalem. No wonder everyone called them ‘strangers’. They lived most of their lives below the radar since the time when the armies of Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar II destroyed the Temple of Solomon in 586 BCE, when they fled to the desert regions with as many scrolls as they could carry and sought shelter in caves. Ironically, they also considered themselves Tzadokites (Sadducees) since they were largely descended from the line of Tzadok – unlike the Hasmonean high priests who later came to hold that name themselves.
The Pharisees were generally composed of those returning from the Babylonian exile after Cyrus the Great, King of Persia and Media, conqueror of Babylon, granted them leave to return to Jerusalem and rebuild their Temple – as prophesied by the prophets Jeremiah and Daniel. During the time that they were separated from the activities in Jerusalem and the Holy Land, they resurrected the oral traditions to a degree not seen among the Israelites since the time of Moses. They had little choice. They had but fragments of their sacred texts that they were able to smuggle with them into captivity; a situation that eventually led to the creation of the Babylonian Talmud and the development of the Rabbinic tradition. Without an acknowledged central authority, religious instruction quickly devolved into a new, more distributed format. The term Pharisee comes from the Hebrew word פרושים (perushim), meaning ‘separated ones’.
Upon their return to Jerusalem and environs (having lived for almost 50 years in exile under a combination of Babylonian, Median and Persian rulers) they found that they didn’t immediately fit in. The Sadducees initially rejected their new teaching methods and the mostly Aramaic-speaking population wasn’t quite sure what to do with so many now-Farsi-speaking immigrants. This makes a double entendre of the name, since it can refer to their time of ‘separation’ and to the language (Parsi/Pharsi/Farsi) that they predominantly spoke.
In the end, it would take the efforts of all three sects to keep their common faith alive through many years of repression and persecution by Rome; the period during which the Second Holy Temple would be defiled and destroyed.
© 2009
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