Compassion

The Hebrew word for compassion, raḥamim, shares its root with reḥem, the word for womb. When the Lord passes before Moses on Sinai and declares his name, the first attribute he claims is raḥum: "The LORD, The LORD God, merciful and gracious" (Exodus 34:6). The language ties divine compassion to the bond between a mother and the child she carried.

New Testament Greek places the feeling elsewhere in the body. Splanchnizomai, the verb used when Jesus is "moved with compassion," derives from splanchna, the inward organs, which the King James translators rendered as "bowels." The Latin compati, the source of the English word, means to suffer with. All three languages locate compassion in the body. Restoration scripture keeps that idiom with unusual consistency, speaking of bowels filled with mercy and bowels that yearn. The usage suits a theology in which God is embodied and compassion can be learned through flesh.

The God Who Weeps

Classical Christian theology inherited from Greek philosophy the doctrine that God is impassible, unmoved by the suffering of creatures. The seventh chapter of Moses refutes that belief. Shown the wickedness of the residue of the people, Enoch sees "the God of heaven" weep and asks how a holy and eternal being could do so. God answers by describing what his children will suffer: "wherefore should not the heavens weep, seeing these shall suffer?" (Moses 7:28⁠–37).

Latter-day Saint scholars have read the passage alongside the laments of Jeremiah, where divine anger and divine grief speak together. They have also traced its parallels in ancient Jewish texts in which the earth itself mourns. Later in the chapter, the earth does mourn, calling herself "the mother of men," and Enoch pleads with the Lord to have compassion upon her. The passage extends compassion past human beings to the creation as a whole.

Learning to Feel

The vision changes Enoch. Having seen the scope of God's grief, he "wept and stretched forth his arms, and his heart swelled wide as eternity; and his bowels yearned" (Moses 7:41). One reading of the scene holds that the greater revelation lies in Enoch's response. Seeing God's vulnerability, he takes on the same vulnerability himself.

Alma makes a stronger claim about Christ. The Savior will take upon himself the pains, sicknesses, and infirmities of his people "that his bowels may be filled with mercy, according to the flesh, that he may know according to the flesh how to succor his people" (Alma 7:11⁠–12). The verse treats compassion as knowledge gained through embodied experience.

The covenant community takes up the same work. Those baptized at the waters of Mormon promise to "bear one another's burdens," to "mourn with those that mourn," and to "comfort those that stand in need of comfort" (Mosiah 18:8⁠–9). The covenant makes compassion a shared and standing obligation.

Widening the Circle

When a lawyer asks Jesus to define "neighbour," Jesus tells of a Samaritan who "had compassion" on a wounded stranger, bound his wounds, and paid for his care (Luke 10:33⁠–34). The parable moves the boundary of moral concern past the ethnic and religious lines its first hearers took for granted.

Contemporary moral psychology offers terms for that movement. Researchers separate empathy, the felt mirroring of another's distress, from compassion, a sensitivity to suffering joined to a commitment to relieve it. Empathy tends to favor the near and the familiar. Compassion better predicts a wide circle of moral concern, including concern for people we dislike, and studies find that brief, deliberate training can extend it.

Writers in the rationalist and AI-alignment communities have begun asking whether capacities like these can be cultivated in artificial minds. Their starting point, sometimes called the orthogonality thesis, holds that intelligence and goals vary independently. A system can grow far more capable without growing any more caring, and it will pursue whatever its makers actually instilled. Compassion in such systems would have to be built in from the start, through the training and through the priorities of those who do the training. For Mormon transhumanists, the lawyer's question now reaches to animals, to future generations, and possibly to minds we have yet to build.

Compassionate Creators

Mormon transhumanism describes its central aspiration as learning to become compassionate creators. The phrase joins two capacities that must grow together, and Lincoln Cannon has stated the reason formally in what he calls the Compassion Argument. Human civilization is probably increasing in decentralized destructive capacity: over time, more parties gain the means to cause catastrophe on a large scale. A civilization in that condition will stagnate or destroy itself unless it increases in cooperation to an extent practically indistinguishable from compassion. Concentrating power in a single controlling authority might suppress the threat, but it would replace one danger with a greater one. A humanity that survives its own technology will therefore probably have become more compassionate than it is now.

The argument carries a theological consequence. Anyone who trusts that humanity can reach superhuman capacity must also trust that superhuman civilizations would be more compassionate than our own. In Cannon's New God Argument, this premise joins a second contending that such civilizations probably created worlds like ours. Together they conclude that our creators are probably more compassionate than we are, compassionate creators of the kind scripture calls God.

The Book of Mormon shows what compassion looks like when it is joined to power. Among the Nephites, Christ says, "my bowels are filled with compassion towards you," and asks them to bring him their lame, blind, and afflicted to be healed (3 Nephi 17:6⁠–7). The healing follows his invitation and the people's own coming. That order matters for anyone hoping to extend healing through medicine and technology, since compassion that overrides another's agency departs from its scriptural pattern.

Compassion sustained over long and difficult work can also tire, or settle into sentiment. The weeping God of Moses 7 suggests how to keep it alive: continue to look at those who suffer, let their suffering register, and act on their behalf.