I was asking that question about why revulsion from torture isn’t universal five years ago, too, almost to the day. I’ll just repost it.

Lynn Hunt asks a pertinent question in Inventing Human Rights:

Voltaire railed against the miscarriage of justice in the Calas case, but he did not originally object to the fact that the old man had been tortured or broken on the wheel. If natural compassion makes everyone detest the cruelty of judicial torture, as Voltaire said later, then why was this not obvious before the 1760s, even to him? Evidently some kind of blinders had operated to inhibit the operation of empathy before then.

The facts aren’t enough. Science isn’t enough. There has to … Read the rest

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Originally a comment by latsot on Torturing animals, for instance, was just good clean fun.

For some reason the area I live in is a national blackspot for animal cruelty. People around here keep amassing vast collections of animals they can’t look after and then causing them to suffer until someone calls the RSPCA.

It’s a strange kind of cruelty. These people want the animals and presumably care about them in some sense…. but somehow don’t recognise that they’re harming them. Making them miserable. Ruining their health.

There’s a riding school close to my house. The horses look like they’re in good condition but the owner was found to have a dozen dogs in a cage, some of which … Read the rest

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Guest post by Michael Šimková, originally a comment on the Facebook autopost of the Torturing animals, for instance, was just good clean fun post; published with permission.

Very interesting discussion. I am not sure what to think about it myself. It does worry me a lot. I believe we won’t survive if we don’t change ourselves to be non-violent, and probably this will require some genetic tinkering. Even if we could survive it is not very pleasant to live in this world of… er… angry chimps.

When I was younger I think in some sense I was more empathic than now, or applied it more universally. I fought my cousin because she cut up live earthworms to see if they … Read the rest

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One of the things religion does is create artificial misery. One of the ways religion does this is by making people feel agonizing terror about eternal torture for themselves or people they love or both, or by making them feel agonizing despair and grief at angering or alienating God. This is especially vile when the putative eternal torture or alienation from God is caused by actions or thoughts that are in no way bad. The misery is doubly artificial (and thus gratuitous and cruel) in these situations: there is no eternal punishment, and the putative Sin is not bad or wicked.

The entrenched belief that not being straight is Sin is a classic and still very active example. Consider Peterson … Read the rest

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What’s wrong with torturing animals for fun? Why not, after all?

Nothing should be off the table when skeptics get together for a chin-wag, right? So recreational animal torture should be on the table. It shouldn’t be a given that that’s not ok, just the way “treat people as equals” shouldn’t be a given, because skepticism. Right? We can’t just assume that torturing animals for shits&giggles is a crap idea; we have to demonstrate that it is, with evidence.

Why, for instance, is there anything wrong with the fact that someone encased a live kitten in concrete up to the front legs on the property of FLDS (Fundamentalist Latter Day Saints) patriarch Isaac Wyler? Why is it stomach-turning to … Read the rest

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The brains of children raised in violent families resemble the brains of soldiers exposed to combat, according to an article in Wired.

They’re primed to perceive threat and anticipate pain, adaptations that may be helpful in abusive environments but produce long-term problems with stress and anxiety.

“For them to detect early cues that might signal danger is adaptive. It allows them to react, to try and avoid the danger,” said psychologist Eamon McCrory of University College London. However, “a very similar neural signature characterizes quite a few anxiety disorders.”

Absolutely nothing surprising there. Bad things keep happening, so you develop a strong tendency to react quickly…and you’re stuck with it. A lifetime of feeling extra, exaggerated fear and dread. … Read the rest

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And then there’s Gulnare Freewill Baptist church, which told a parishioner - ever so politely, you understand – that her fiancé couldn’t come to the church again, on account of how he’s not a white person. Perfectly understandable. It’s because they (church members who voted on “the issue”) want to promote greater unity among the church body and the community. Obviously you can’t do that if there’s a not-white person at the church when all the other persons there are white. That would promote lesser unity. Everybody would look around uneasily and kind of split apart.

Melvin Thompson, former pastor of Gulnare Freewill Baptist church, proposed the ban after Stella Harville brought her fiance, Ticha Chikuni, to services in

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