Answers to revision questions on Beyond Religion, Part 1.


1) Empathy means we feel another’s pain, compassion involves doing something to relieve that pain. Meekness means allowing other people to cause pain without responding. It is bad because it undermines justice.

2) Wealth, health, friendship.

3) Cultivating compassion requires us to spread our sense of community to encompass the whole human race. So, biology means we have a bond with our family, but the danger is a close bond with our family can be based on opposition to other groups. Cultivating compassion means trying to spread the circle of our community, without uniting against some group.

4) The attempt to enforce a set of laws that impose some ideal of national unity, as for example in South Africa under the system of Apartheid.

5) Fairness for everyone based on an ideal of equality.

6) Inter-dependence.

7) The Emperor Ashoka.

8) Compassion is like  water , religion is like tea  .

9) Non-violence.

10) Ensure that your motives are pure, that you are thinking of everyone’s good, not just your own.

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