Those believers who do have empathy for certain outsiders must necessarily wonder how God will judge or else shelve out of view the contradictory precept. People who live by such a faith and who do recognize the contradictory reality around them necessarily are in a double-bind, believing contradictory things. (I am speaking from experience.)

I imagine those who lack genuine empathy are not bothered by contradictory inputs and can with the greater conviction embrace the Book’s judgements of the outsider.

While we humans do have the innate ability to empathize with others, we should note:

1. Some people are incapable of empathy. In the Time article you referred to, de Waal called these people psychopaths. However, more often than not they are not psychopaths, but sociopaths. Sometimes they’re quite capable of detecting emotions in others, but they lack the ability to identify with them. They may even take pleasure in others’ misfortune.

2. Just because you can empathize with another’s emotions doesn’t mean you will view them as valid. Instead of a shoulder to cry on our a helping hand, some people say, “Snap out of it!” This, I think, is evidence they they are imagining themselves in another’s situation, not viewing the matter from the other’s perspective.

3. Our society often teaches people to deny our own emotions as a sign of strength and to look down on others who do not react the way we think they should.

4. Many people can empathize emotionally, at least to a degree, but they ascribe the worst motivations possible. If this behavior is a result of projection, then it tells us more about the “empathizer” than the “empathizee.”

For these reasons and others, a mixture of cultivated innate empathy and conscious “perspective taking” is required before we truly understand other people. Beyond that, it’s important to accept the validity of others’ feelings and their reasons for feeling that way.

You’re thinking too much of imperatives, as in “you should feel,” or “try to feel,”. But that is not empathy, that is a moral imperative issued because of lack of natural, spontaneous emotional contagion.

This is what bugs me about phony Christianity, the feelings are not natural, real, they are dictated as precepts of morality. “Love your neighbor as thyself”? That is the antithesis of empathy. Empathy follows brain pathways that do not go through the frontal lobes.

See Frans B.M. de Waal “The Age of Empathy: Nature’s Lessons for a Kinder Society”,

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/31hWXoGryRL._SL500_AA300_.jpg

and his interview in Time Magazine of Sept. 25, 2009
http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1925566,00.html

When you hear somebody say, “Well, I don’t understand why she should be offended by that!” — it means they are imagining themselves in that situation. They aren’t trying to feel what it’s like to be the other person.

It’s the same thing when you hear people wonder aloud why people don’t “pick themselves up by their bootstraps.” Well, that’s because they aren’t you.

Empathy is about seeing things from another person’s perspective, not imagining yourself in somebody else’s situation. The former is the first step to understanding others; the latter is a kind of naive narcissism that does more harm than good.

Natalie Reed has a great column on “Hipster Mysogeny” at Freethought Blogs. Very apropos your empathy quote.

“The ancient believer is before everything else a man who goes to confession, goes frequently, and even the more often that he does not indulge in the actions considered sins by Catholic morality.
He’s a man who practices intellectual obedience, agreeing in principle to all the teaching of the Church, and accepting without examination every article he’s been taught; not discussing the meaning or the scope of his belief; thinking of himself within the Church as a disciple who learns from it all he must think about all the great subjects of life, what he has to do to be a good man, what he must practice to be a Christian.
This is a man whose all activity is regulated by an external authority, and who is not interested in thinking for himself, who would consider himself guilty of such temerity, who looks upon intellectual shyness as a virtue.
He forbids himself to think of religious questions, for fear of thinking wrong; he takes his religious instruction from the good books recommended by his director, and he has no other thoughts than those that are guaranteed very orthodox and very safe.
This model of Catholic exists, it cannot be denied. He is not frequent, at least those who embody it to perfection are not very many, whatever has been done to multiply their number. For this model can be realized only at the cost of an abdication of nature, which many instinctively resist, and others consciously reject as a violation of their personality.” (Things of the Past, 1912).