lol.

But good impulses do not undermine our own survival most of the time. And even when it seems that they do, even if you use the example of sacrificing your life for others, it's really because your life is not in any way shape or form separate from the life of others or the "community" as you put it. So really by "compromising" ourselves we are doing no such thing: we are simply preserving the larger Life that we already were before we were born, and will continue to be after we die. It's not even so much that we are "connected" as that we are already completely the same thing, we just use the word connected because we seem separate for the time being.

Nothing makes us different from animals. They are the same larger community of our fellow beings towards which we direct our compassion, and their life is ours as well. When your life is already the life of the whole universe, you don't need any explanation as to why you would help preserve that larger life, without "compromising" anything at all.

haha, never been in an ongoing debate like this before, it's been a while since I've seen one on here.