Yes, unlike you, who is showing great empathy and totally not relying on the concept of pain and punishment by posting a derisive response attacking my character without responding to any of the arguments I made.

Basically, all you have said is “you are bad, therefore you should feel bad.”

I’m sorry that my comment has made you upset, but you haven’t given any clear indication of what was wrong with it, so I’m afraid I can’t help you feel better about it, and instead I can only assume that your being upset has nothing to do with the comment you’re responding to, but is instead just a reactionary expression of your ongoing displeasure about a lengthy discussion we had the other day about a city in Tennessee explicitly mentioning homosexuality in their law about public decency.

Also, I’d like to point out that empathy isn’t the same as sympathy. Empathy is simply the capacity to understand another person’s point of view, it doesn’t require agreeing with it.