Atonement

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I believe I provided a fair and generally accepted explanation of altruism which relates perfectly well to the act of atonement that exemplifies altruism as the key facet of Christianity.

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You're supposed to feel satisfaction at having done a good deed. IMO, as long as the benefits for one's self are not the primary motivation for the action, it is still altruism.

If we went with your definition, the word would fall out of use entirely.

@ghost-of-a-duke said
As a Christian, would you describe the death of Christ on the cross, for the sins of mankind, as the greatest ever act of altruism?

Hmm. If I were a Christ-ian . . .

I might question the premise that Jesus died on the cross as some kind of substitutionary atonement. That's a pretty sick idea. It implies that animal sacrifices were okay in the first place, and now human sacrifices would be quite all-right with the Almighty, including the killing of One's own Son [What the hell, Ancient Jews? What were you thinking?].

(hmm, on a side trip: "Why you kill me, Cosmic Intelligence Who allowed or made me to sprout?" )

Another way to look at the Passion and the life of Jesus could be as lessons from Christ Exemplar* to demonstrate how It would do things and how It would handle the sometimes cruelly unfair things that might happen during personal incarnation.

Before I address altruism, has it been established that Christ withdrew all of Itself from the rest of the Cosmos to be incarnate as Jesus, in contraparallel to G*d withdrawing all of Itself from some of the Cosmos to allow creation to occur?

As for altruism, maybe, scripted or not, Jesus went to his death knowing he had planted the right seeds and knew how to read the tides and the winds, and that if he, the leader of the pack and the instigator were to be killed, most of his living followers at the time would be left alone.

I think the salvation offered is not salvation from death, but salvation from separation or from imprisonment, including from mental prisons. What does emancipation mean to you? Even purportedly** free people can still be enslaved somehow or another.

The concept of altruism inescapably involves concepts of "self" and "other".

I'll leave it to the clever battlebots to work out any further implications. 😉
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*probably heresy for sure
**or should that be "ostensibly"?

@bigdoggproblem said
You're supposed to feel satisfaction at having done a good deed. IMO, as long as the benefits for one's self are not the primary motivation for the action, it is still altruism.

If we went with your definition, the word would fall out of use entirely.

We are on the same page here. Altruism does come down to primary motivation, to act in a way where our own needs are not the main focus and even put us at risk. I do actually understand where Dive is coming from but find his 'strict' element to altruism is unnecessary and not in the commonly understood definition. One could argue the same about 'love' and say love does not exist because strictly speaking there is always an element of doubt and not given unconditionally.