But it's not as if I grew up with no religious convictions--while early and formally renouncing the Christian God--although, truthfully, I didn't know that religious convictions were what I was adhering to (I thought they were simply principles of Natural Philosophy):

I learned at an early age, because my parents and grandparents believed it--I absorbed from them and the community I grew up in, one might say rather--the conscious precepts: (1) that Conscience/Reason is at once the kernel of one's individual identity, and the Voice of God/Nature (the Universal Oversoul, if you will) within each of us, and (2) that Remorse (disobeying one's Conscience) is Hell.  I never doubted, and never had to learn, or unlearn, these precepts when I became, consciously, later, an American Transcendentalist and a Mahayana Buddhist, because, in simple fact, those are the basic tenets of both those philosophies.

What then of Compassion?  Compassion is the recognition that most individual sentient beings (men anyway) accord to the One Self (God/Nature/Sentience) in others.  It is, therefore, in men's natures, essentially benevolent or disinterestedly friendly.  But, as the philosopher Schopenhauer points out, in women's natures the same impulse, of the recognition of the Self in Others (towards other women), is often coldly indifferent, jealous and envious.  It need not always be: Think of the Empresses Elizabeth and Catherine II of Russia (who were friends and accomplices, not enemies). But, generally speaking, the Sex lacks just that generosity of spirit which can view a successor as anything but a rival.