Is the level of empathy for others a good measurement?

Question

of growth of a soul?

Answer 1

It is my number 1 measurement of people.
Everything else that's good in people stems from that.

Vehement, don't play silly semantics here. so you don't
believe in a 'Soul' so what ?.
Replace it with a term you can live with ' spiritual enhancement ' for example and answer the question.

Answer 2

I don't think so. Some would say that dispassion is better growth. Empathy as often as not leads to depression while being objective and dispassionate can allow a person to think their way through to meaningful ways to help.

At the end of the day, empathy is a feeling, and doesn't do anything to help mankind. Actions are what counts and they can come from empathy or a more general dispassionate caring.

Empathy might allow someone to instinctively understand a person's problems, but more often than not problems aren't as deep as they appear and a dispassionate analysis will yield a solution that does not need such an investment of time and emotional energy from the person with the problem.

Answer 3

If you mean in your question by "soul" an educated ego or conscious mind linked to a healthy emotional-early-warning programmed system of positive and negantive, strong and weak responses, the answer is 'yes".

Empathy for another has nothing to do with any other or others. It is a measure of your ability as a separate entity to assert your responsible self-hood in the real space-time universe.
It is this fundamental ability that you bring to answering the questions, "What is the right way of defining reality through scientific prioritized internal-workings definitions?"
"Am I being honest about this, that or the other subject and what I really know about it? and "What is another person?"

And it is you as an honest person--or not--who separately learns to interact with other individuals in marketplaces of life, goods and services, jobs and ideal-level leadership attainments, election and appointment of governmental tribunes.

So obviously, your category-level picture of the normative self--how someone needs to act non-negligently toward every man and toward reality--is the key to how well you're going to be able to do that task. This understanding is a compound, I suggest, made of your ability to judge dispassionately, to suspend judgment while you find out the truth and to put yourself in some other person's shoes.

Without this quality--which postmodernist deniers of reality and of self responsibility must lack--a man becomes a savage; someone capable of doing collectivizing crimes to others and then excusing what he's done as a "necessity" of his own weakness, acting as if it had never happened.

That is not what responsible selves ever do, or would deseire to do nor go on doing. It is the opposite of the empathy you ask about and care about.
It is un-selfishness--actions not characteristic of nor proper to the normative human individual or 'self". It is god-playing, gangster and unrealistic behavior instead.

Answer 4

"Growth' I don't know, because it depends on where one started. Some people have a lot of empathy from an early age, and some people never really develop it. Maturity is how I'd put it. A mature soul is more empathic, because it is more aware of its connection with the world around it, and how it is affected.

Answer 5

~~~W S ,,,,, Absotively and Posilutely. However,,,, as a metaphor,,,,if you consider your soul to be an unrefined gem in the raw, then The Virtue of "Empathy" is only a Single Facet which is to be first cut then polished until it clear. The finished gem, now as An Enlightened Being, is then ready to get off The Wheel of Karma and break the Cycle of Birth/Rebirth,,,, Graduation from Earth School,,,, and now,,,,?

Answer 6

I would have to say: Almost. If they act upon their level of empathy, I'd say YES.


- 17 yo Pagan

Answer 7

Souls are imaginary. Try to use real words.

Answer 8

ABSOLUTELY!