Which is more highly valued? Sympathy or Empathy? The average person today I would wager would answer "Empathy" at least that answer is indicative of societal and cultural trends and norms.
I believe we have all been hoodwinked into viewing Empathy as the more inclusive and loving of the two.
Doug Wilson presented a helpful visual tool when contrasting the two. He says something along the lines of the following: Imagine your friend is downing in a river. Sympathy would be you standing on the shore grabbing on to a nearby limb, maybe placing one leg in the river, but ultimately reaching out to him in order to save him. In order to pull him out. Empathy, however, is jumping into the river and drowning with him.
Empathy calls for the deepest sense of feeling in that it necessitates your agreement with the victim. Sympathy can invoke the same sense of understanding however with the actual intention to really help the victim. Therefore sympathy exemplifies a true loving nature as it is based on the premise that there is dry land, there is a shore to stand on from which to pull a victim back to, whereas empathy is based on subjective realism, that the shore no longer exists, there is no principal, no foundation and that we must all drown together.
A problem with Empathy at least in our current time is that only the group with the loudest cry is allowed to deem victimhood and therefore channel other's empathy. This could be for better or for worse, but a sympathetic outlook solves for this problem as it is based on objective truth, and does not call questioning or the search for truth blasphemy.
To Love someone is to Help them. If I were drowning in a river I would much prefer a hand to pull me back to shore than a friend to accompany me under the current. In order to Love we must know truth, and we must be able to pull people back to it.
you make a great point about the one crying the loudest. by that standard, if we were to play the game that way, we could merely raise our voices in lament saying, "just imagine how hard it is for me to stand here on the dry shore and watch you drown! try thinking about it from my perspective. why don't YOU empathize with ME?" of course, we would never play that game, but even if we did, and they bought into it, at least everyone would be on dry land and alive instead of dead at the bottom of the river :)
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