Not necessarily.
It usually means somewhat selflessly feeling or understanding how they might feel enough to care about their wellbeing & treat them compassionately.
If you’re selective about the recipients of your empathy (eg, only those you care about or near you), then you’re not really an empath or a good one.
Buddhists had empathy & compassion figured out.
Jesus stated it, too, with love your enemies.
I’ve frequently seen people try to wield empathy as a cudgel and miss the point.
There is a scriptural example of qualified empathy in Christ’s mission statement. When his followers mentioned the people that had been crushed by the tower of Siloam, and those whose blood Herod had used to mix in his wine, Jesus responded with a notable lack of concern. His answer more or less being “if you think such things are happening to those which don’t have it coming to them then your perception, and conceptions, of good and evil are not accurate” and to check their own behaviours to see if they themselves are even worthy of escaping such a fate or worse.
Paul as well describes “terrible times”(2 Tim 3)where many will have devolved to a level of degeneracy which even animals are unable to sink to, and not to have anything to do with such people personally even if one must encounter them on a daily basis. In another verse(1Cor 5 :10) he states that one would have to leave the world entirely to even avoid the moderately immoral people which are only greedy, cheats, or motivated by lust.
I guess the inference is that to have empathy and care for those which suffer for being truly innocent in a guilty world is a sign of love, but even love doesn’t empathize with the vicious(slaves of vice) or evil intentioned people that are merely homo sapiens but not humans. Because it takes a lot more to graduate to human-hood than just liking to say or believe one is a human. Whereas homo sapien-hood is the default animal state we all get born into from the start, due to the unchecked monkey-lust of every one of our ancestors that resulted in our being born in the first place. Being good is not so easy as some like to claim, for “the way is steep and narrow and few are they that find it”
Does understanding basic emotions make you an empath
Not necessarily. It usually means somewhat selflessly feeling or understanding how they might feel enough to care about their wellbeing & treat them compassionately.
If you’re selective about the recipients of your empathy (eg, only those you care about or near you), then you’re not really an empath or a good one. Buddhists had empathy & compassion figured out. Jesus stated it, too, with love your enemies. I’ve frequently seen people try to wield empathy as a cudgel and miss the point.
There is a scriptural example of qualified empathy in Christ’s mission statement. When his followers mentioned the people that had been crushed by the tower of Siloam, and those whose blood Herod had used to mix in his wine, Jesus responded with a notable lack of concern. His answer more or less being “if you think such things are happening to those which don’t have it coming to them then your perception, and conceptions, of good and evil are not accurate” and to check their own behaviours to see if they themselves are even worthy of escaping such a fate or worse.
Paul as well describes “terrible times”(2 Tim 3)where many will have devolved to a level of degeneracy which even animals are unable to sink to, and not to have anything to do with such people personally even if one must encounter them on a daily basis. In another verse(1Cor 5 :10) he states that one would have to leave the world entirely to even avoid the moderately immoral people which are only greedy, cheats, or motivated by lust.
I guess the inference is that to have empathy and care for those which suffer for being truly innocent in a guilty world is a sign of love, but even love doesn’t empathize with the vicious(slaves of vice) or evil intentioned people that are merely homo sapiens but not humans. Because it takes a lot more to graduate to human-hood than just liking to say or believe one is a human. Whereas homo sapien-hood is the default animal state we all get born into from the start, due to the unchecked monkey-lust of every one of our ancestors that resulted in our being born in the first place. Being good is not so easy as some like to claim, for “the way is steep and narrow and few are they that find it”