When aliens steal your empathy

I was watching Stargate the other day and was reminded of how the themes from the show align rather well with what I often talk about. The show is about aliens pretending to be gods who exploit and dehumanise humans and use them against each other.

Religion empowers tribalism by making us not feel the pain that we are naturally programmed to feel. The pain that comes with being an empathetic being. The pain that is essentially the foundation of human civilisation — our ability to feel someone else’s pain and relate to them.