God's Helpline, Blazing Apostles and empathy failure

Thank you very much St Ignatius for the number.

So I 'phoned God today. Just curious, you understand. Just to see if anyone answered. Just applying a little Popperian philosophy. Try to test the hypothesis, try to prove it false. Guess what I got?

"Thank you for calling God's Heaven. If you know the extension of the soul, saint, angel or archangel you are calling please dial it now followed by star, otherwise please choose from one of the following options:
if you are calling to complain about an unanswered prayer, please key one; if you want to make supplication to the almighty, please key two; if you wish to speak to an archangel, angel or saint, please key 3; if you are enquiring about a recently elevated soul, please key 4; if you wish to speak to someone about a crisis of faith, please key 5; if you are enquiring about a plague of boils, of locusts, of Mormons or Jehovah's Witnesses on the doorstep or any other plague, please key 6; to speak to Reception, please key 7; to apply for a free 'all areas' pass, please key 8; for all other enquiries, please key 9 or hold to speak to an operator. To return to the list of options, please key hash at any time."

So I held. To the strains of Bach's St Matthew's Passion, the following was endlessly repeated:

"We are sorry but all of our angels and saints are busy dealing with clients at the moment. Please continue to hold, your call is very important to us and you will be answered shortly. Alternatively why not visit our website 'www.blazingapostles.com'. You can submit prayers through our online 'handyprayer' utility, use our very popular 'Ask an archangel' page, look up the 100 most frequently asked questions of God and read God's daily blog,'Omniprescence and where can you go to get away from it all?'. Or you can email your enquiry to: almightygod@blazingapostles.com. We will answer as soon as angelically possible."

Now I know they're probably very short staffed in Heaven, there not being that many souls up there, but I held for 30 minutes and still no-one answered. I wouldn't mind but it wasn't even a freephone number, premium rate, I dread to think what the station's phone bill is going to be like next month. Some newbie will probably get shouted out for dialling phone-sex lines.

Oh well, maybe God had taken a sneaky day off or a 'sicky' perhaps and Heaven was just playing 'While the cat's away........'

Empathy. One of evolution's great success stories. It's what makes social cohesion, co-operation so much more possible and humans are probably the most empathetic creatures on the planet. (I must confess it does stick in my craw sometimes - whenever I talk about evolution, you lot always come out as the most complex, evolved creatures. Still can't get things right, though, can you?:)

It's also a good illustration for the way in which evolution works. Once the animal has become a little sentient and social, you can see how even tiny improvements in how well they can put themselves inside some other animal's head and work out their motivations, strategies and emotions would offer quite a considerable advantage in how well they do within the social group. Once you start to be able to spot things like deception and manipulation you are well on your way to being a very successful member of your group indeed. Not only that, it benefits the group as a whole. They can resist invasion by deceivers or manipulators because they are able to spot them before they do damage. Without empathy, it's quite difficult to do that.

Now, interestingly humans on the whole don't 'use' the word empathy for all of that. They generally use it to describe and deal with emotional states rather than intellectual or motivational states. So it's unlikely that one would say "I empathise with Adolf Hitlet over the Sudetenland", meaning "I know bloody well what that bastard is up to because I'd do it in the same way", but they would use it when dealing with a friend's bereavment, "I empathise with them having recently lost my brother." Interesting for a word that was originally coined by the 'art critic world' at the turn of the last century.

So what causes empathy failure? I came across something the other day that seemed to me to so blatantly obvious, assuming you just imagined how you would feel if the same things happened to you, that I couldn't believe that others hadn't spotted it and seemed to be absolutely clueless. Is there a sliding scale of empathy? Some of you have loads of it and some of you have an awful lot less with a load in the middle, classic Bell Curve? Or perhaps empathy requires a bit more of an effort and if you're not willing to make the effort, you just never get there? I don't know. Mrs Doasyouwouldbedoneby has always stood me in good stead ever since I read the Water Babies, Satre just reinforces that, perhaps how empathetic you are relates to that? If you live your life as Mrs Doasyouwouldbedoneby would have you live it, it makes it easier to get inside someone elses head? You're already thinking kind of that way anyway?

Of course I could be completely wrong and what I see isn't there at all and I have no empathy, just an over active imagination (well, I have got one of those too but....). Ah well, all will become clear in the fullness of time, as Dai op Owen, my grandfather, used to say.

And a small thank you to Bill Nelson and Be Bop Deluxe for the inspiration for blazingapostles.com. (Blazing apostles, guardians of light. The phone number's on the wall. If you are needing a devil to fight, why don't you give us a call?)