521. The Difference Between Companionship And Commodification

521.  The Difference Between Companionship And Commodification

In the entries 519 and 520 I mentioned the objectification of women.  But after further pondering I got aware, that objectification in the literal sense is only a part of the bigger problem of the commodification of women.  Women are not only used as bodies, they are often also degraded to the function of rendering other services.  

Literally, objectification is degrading women to be used as passive objects, mainly by rape, prostitution and pornography.   

Commodification degrades women also to the role of objects.  But they are considered as more advanced objects, which are not just passive but have functions like appliances.   

An appliance like for example a toaster or a vacuum cleaner is perceived as an object to fulfill a specific function, whenever a button is pressed.   

1. Without functioning, the object has no value.   
2. The object is maintained according to a manual or common knowledge.  
3. The object is not an individual, but one specimen from mass production and thus interchangeable with any other object supplying the same function. 
4. Only the user decides, when and how to use the appliance.   
5. He expects to retrieve it from where and how he has left it, no matter for how long he stores it in a locker.   
6. The purpose of the existence of the appliance is serving the user by functioning at his convenience.    
7. Once he has gained control over an appliance, he considers it his property to be used at his convenience ever after.    
8. He feels entitled to benefit from the function as long as it pleases him and to discard of the appliance also at his convenience.

When a man commodifies women, he perceives and treats them as if women were appliances.   This is derived from an attitude of the asymmetrical entitlement to selfishly living his live entirely at his own convenience, no matter what this does to the women.

1. A woman is not appreciated or valued independently of the benefits, which the man subjectively derives from her according to his needs.    The man is maximizing the quality of life for himself by adding whatever benefits he can usurp by using a woman.   This is not limited to using her body, it includes also using her skills and knowledge, which are perceived as isolated benefits, not as indications of her having any other competence.   
2. The man decides to treat the woman according to what he considers as her due and expects her to respond by functioning and not failing.    His assumption as to what is her due comes from many sources, be it hearsay, prejudice, projection, previous experience, even trial and error.    This can be any source except asking her.    He does not consider to ask her as he does not consider to ask the vacuum cleaner how to be handled.
   When he believes to keep her under good maintenance, any dysfunction is believed to be her flaw.   
3. The woman is not perceived as an individual with a personality, but as one specimen from the multitude of standard women, easily interchangeable with any other woman to get the same benefits. 
4. The man makes solitary decisions the same way as a single man does, including the one when to demand and receive the benefits from the woman and the modalities of how.  
5. The man comes and goes at his convenience, he decides when to be together and when to be separated without her consent. But he expects the woman to always be there waiting and ready for him.  
6. The man believes the woman to exist for the purpose of serving his benefits at his convenience. He is oblivious of the commodified woman's own needs and personality.  
7. Once he has gained control over a woman, he considers her as his property to be used at his convenience ever after, no matter how he treats her.    
   His control causes her insecurity.  Being commodified by a man, whose decisions come for her out of the blue, while she is helpless to influence or prevent, what he does to her, means to have no security, no reliability, no predictability.   Anything can be done to her at any moment, she cannot even prepare herself for what she cannot foresee.    
8. The man feels entitled to dump a woman, when she does not function any more due to his expectations. 

Commoditification and domination are two sides of the same coin.   The attitude of commodifcation serves to justify domination, and only domination enables someone with an outrageous attitude like commodification to have an impact upon victims.   

The situation of asymmetrical distribution of power in a relationship facilitates the domination over an commodified woman. 

A man's superior power can be caused

• by his physical strength
• by his economic strength
• by the discrepancy between the biological differences.      A man, who is attracted to a body, which he perceives as easy to replace, is less attached than a woman attracted and attached to a man's unique and individual personality.   Attachment creates vulnerability, while lacking attachment gives power.

There is a vicious circle:   Commodification impedes emotional attachment.   Lacking emotional attachment adds to the power needed to maintain domination and commodification.    Thus, commodification tends to perpetuate itself, once it is established.   

Commodification precludes companionship, which is defined by sharing decisions, sharing resources, cooperation, the identity as a part of a couple being a team, a fair exchange of giving and receiving, communication, consideration, responsibility.   

Examples:

1.  By the traditional gender roles, a house wife is commodifed, if the man only wants her for the purpose to find dinner ready every evening, have a clean home and share the bed, while he is not interested in spending any leisure time or sharing any activity with her.   Spending his free time instead with his hobbies and his buddies denies her to be a companion.

2.  Commodification is not limited to manual services as a housekeeper.  It can be more subtle.  Even a woman's mental skills can be used as a mere commodity without appreciation for her person.    

When a couple travels in a country, where only the woman speaks the language, and the man has health problems, there are two scenarios:

2.1.  As companions, they discuss and decide together, how to handle the situation.   Then she communicates on his behalf with whoever is consulted.   They perceive themselves as a teamed couple and they trust each other as being able and motivated to act in the best interest of both.

2.2.  When the man considers the woman as a commodity, the situation is very different.   He decides alone and without consulting her, what he wants to do, and he demands her to execute his unquestioned decisions.  She is to him nothing better than a translation machine, who is not recognized as having any more competence except the isolated skill of translating.   He demands her to translate every word as authentically as possible. She is not considered as apt to interfere at all with any of his decisions.   

3.  A couple has unresolved conflicts and their time together is limited.  

3.1.  As companions, both suffer from unresolved issues and solving conflicts has priority in their shared decision, how to use their time.

3.2.  For a man, who has commodified a woman, there are no unresolved issues.   He considers it his task to handle the commodity for his benefits.   When he gets, what he wants, nothing is wrong, no matter, how the woman experiences the situation.  Whenever he does not get, what he wants, he considers it his right and his job alone to enforce his will and impose his decisions upon her.   Getting, what he wants, is success, again no matter what she experiences..    

When he prefers to spend the time without her, he just does it.   When he wants to leave, he just leaves.   Her needs do not matter and do not exist for him.    When her ignored and denied needs make her too dysfunctional to what he feels entitled to get from her, this justifies his dumping her.

My mindmate to be found is a man, whose innate intrinsic needs are to be a companion, and for whom commodification of a woman is alien to his personality.  

520. An Irrational, Unjustified And Outrageous Distinction

520.   An Irrational, Unjustified And Outrageous Distinction

Under German law, being caught having child pornography on his computer usually suffices to send a man to jail.    But any man is legally free to consume as much pornography as pleases him, as long as the abused objects in the pictures are above a minimal age.  

The prohibition of child pornography is justified by its goal to prevent abuse.   Pornography has been produced by the abuse of real life children and there is the probability that consuming pornography is the first step of lowering the threshold towards subsequent real life abuse.      

This makes perfect sense.   But it makes just as much sense concerning grown up women.    Restricting this form of prevention to the protection of children cannot be rationally justified.   It is an absurd outrage to deny to women the same entitlement to be spared abuse by all possible methods of prevention, which are recognized as necessary for children.    

1.  Abuse is as bad for women as it is for children.

Any man of average physical strength has sufficient physical power to force the same amount of harm upon a woman of average strength as he has to force it upon children.    Women have no better chances to defend themselves against physical violence than have children.   Women are as much at the mercy of men's civilized self-control as are children.       

Any variety of real life abuse, no matter if rape, manipulation, taking advantages of someone's helpless and dependent situation or apparent self-objectification, is enabled by the abuser's mental process towards replacing inhibitions, self-control and restrictions by subjective justifications and excuses.  

The first step in this mental process is objectification.   (More about the perceptive objectification in entry 519.)    Objectification is an attitude concerning the essence and quality of other humans, which usually follows desensitization until the abuser's perception is distorted.   The abuser is void of the ability to perceive other humans as persons with human dignity, instead they are only perceived as objects, utilities, commodities.  

While some people objectify others due to some mental defect in their brain, like psychopathy, objectification is also the unavoidable result of desensitization and habituation.  This can happen both by the passive observation of role models abusing other human beings and by actively participating in and practicing abuse.    When women and children are objectified as existing for the purpose to be used sexually, pornography is one major source of this effect.  

There is always the hazard of objectification, because a body is perceived as a visible object, while the personality, the qualities of the mind are not directly visible.  Their discovery is only accessible indirectly by communication.    Therefore there is an unfortunate vicious circle.   Any attempt to communicate requires at least a minimal expectation of the other's ability to communicate as a person.   Nobody expects to communicate with an object.   Objectification precludes communication, while communication can reduce objectification.   Thus, once there is objectification, it reinforces itself further by the loss of any chance to rediscover the person hidden inside of what is perceived as an object.   

2.  No differences justify abusing women more than children.

Objectification includes the general fallacy of believing in and accepting, that the alleged purpose of the objectified person's existence is being used.   Whenever abuse of women becomes normal, common and regular behavior, some men are not even aware of the alternative of appreciating, noticing and recognizing women's mind and personality.  

This fatal process, that pornography leads first to desensitization and objectification and then to lowering the threshold towards real life abuse is the same, no matter if the degraded human being is a woman or a child.   Any distinction cannot be rationally justified.   Whenever men justify such a distinction, it is based upon a fallacy.

Male fallacy 1:  

When the victim is a woman, biologically her body is apt for male homeostation, while a child's is not.  This difference leads to the fatal fallacy, that abusing a woman's body as an object for sexual homeostation is often considered as less evil, less harmful and less traumatizing.    

The implicit implication of this fallacy is an outrage.   Those men, who objectify women by perceiving and believing, that women's ultimate purpose is to serve men's needs for homeostation, often also see nothing as really wrong in getting the fulfillment of this purpose by hook or by crook from reluctant and resistant women.    It is a monstrous fallacy to believe, that forcing women into their alleged natural purpose is more acceptable than forcing something upon a child, who is not considered to exist for the same purpose.      

Male fallacy 2. 

There is one difference between children and women:  Only women can be made to appear preempting male objectification by self-objectification, while children are usually accepted as being too young for consent.

The general male fallacy, that women exist for their homeostation is reinforced by the subsequent fallacy of believing in some women's apparent free choice of self-objectification.   Men often succeed to usurp control over resources for survival and they use this control to coerce women by dire necessity into submission to the objectification.   When hopelessness and resignation cause women to refrain from resistance to their fate, this is often mistaken as agreement.   This alleged choice of self-objectification facilitates the abuse and it allows men to condone and justify the objectification of women.    Manipulating women to comply by self-objectification is in reality a part of men's strategy and method to succeed in achieving the benefits of objectification with the least effort.

Male fallacy 3.

Some women are as much the unhappy victims of their instincts as are men, they too are feeling the urges of dishomeostasis.  This female dishomeostasis is the unfulfilled breeding instinct.    These women only appear superficially to cooperate with men's objectification by self-objectification.   It is men's fallacy to misinterpreted it as women's acceptance of existing to serve men.  In reality, these women's self-objectification is their method to restore homeostasis by becoming pregnant.   

Once they have reached their breeder's homeostation, they have no longer any reason to continue the self-objectification to men.   These men are dissatisfied when the women's breeding homeostation ends the men's recurrent sexual homeostation.  The women continue the self-objectification, but they shift the target away from the men and towards the slavery of raising the children. 

Objectification of people is not restricted to sexual abuse.   Whenever someone reduces his evaluation of a human being to the benefits and advantages to be derived from a utility, this is a form of objectification.    Whenever self-objectification blurs the awareness of both the abusers and of the victims for the true outrage, this perpetuates the abuse.  

When a person is forced by slavery to labor for the owner's profit, the objectification of slaves cannot be denied.    Therefore when and where slavery was abolished, it was done based upon the acceptance of the principle, that no human being exists for the purpose to be used for another person's economic benefits.   

It is time to abolish all sexual abuse too by this principle:

No human being, no matter if child or grown up woman, exists for the purpose to be used for men's homeostation. 

Apparent self-objectification is no ethical justification for the objectification of human beings.

 

A man, whose self-worth and self-esteem depends on his own correct and decent behavior only, refuses to participate in any objectification of women, even in spite of alleged and apparent female self-objectification.    Unfortunately, such men are a minority of men, they are the ethical quality elite.  

The majority of men are gullible and self-deceiving by willingly mistaking any appearance of women's self-objectification as sufficient justification for abusing women.   As long as they can maintain their false belief in female self-objectification, they allow themselves to feel decent and no jerks.  

They are oblivious of being jerks and abusers, when they objectify women directly as users of prostitute's bodies or indirectly by consuming the actors' images in pornography.  They really believe the absurd myth, that women prefer this form of earning an income over a decent job, where they could use their brain instead of their body.   It needs a lot of moronity in men to really believe such a myth.       

519. The Effects Of Desensitization On Perception

519.   The Effects Of Desensitization On Perception

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/05/120515131719.htm

"everywhere you look, women's sexualized bodies are on display. A new study  [....] finds that both men and women see images of sexy women's bodies as objects, while they see sexy-looking men as people.

Psychological research has worked out that our brains see people and objects in different ways.

Pictures of people present a recognition problem when they're turned upside down, but pictures of objects don't have that problem.

People recognized right-side-up men better than upside-down men, suggesting that they were seeing the sexualized men as people. But the women in underwear weren't any harder to recognize when they were upside down -- which is consistent with the idea that people see sexy women as objects. There was no difference between male and female participants."

This study shows the real devastating harm caused by the social norm of the oversexation of society together with the media exposing everybody to its impact, even those, who do not wish to be desensitized.  

The results are scary.   Not only is the objectification limited to female bodies, but even worse, this perception is shared by the women.   

Taking into account men's physiological need for recurrent sexual homeostation as a biological reality supplies an explanation for the impact of the overwhelming influence of the ubiquitous desensitization by the media as far as it concerns men.   

Theoretically, men have different options of how to cope with this necessity.  There is the choice of either being a companion in committed monogamy or physical and virtual promiscuity.  This choice is determined by the emotional and intellectual influences of education and culture.  (In entry 101 -  Promiscuity is a Scourge of Humanity - I considered the existence of a promiscuity inhibition that predisposes people to pair bonding, until it is destroyed by desensitization.)   

But the desensitization by the oversexation of the media has deprived many men of a real choice, it leaves them only the two varieties of abuse by objectification of women's bodies, which is virtual promiscuity by the exposition to pornographic pictures and real promiscuity by copulating like dogs from the gutter.   They are desensitized to the state of complete oblivion of the fact, that women's objectified bodies contain a personality inside.    

Unfortunately for the women, the objectification of female bodies gives a huge benefit for their most primitive instincts to all those men, who are unaware of what they are losing by depriving themselves of the higher quality human benefits of emotional pair bonding.     

It is much more difficult to explain, why the women share the effect as is shown in the study.  Being degraded and abused as objects can certainly not be declared as beneficial to women by any person aware of the fact, that women have a personality, a mind, a cognition inside the body.    

Men's control over the media not only favors their own desensitization motivated by the urges of their instincts, obviously it also enables men to manipulate stupid and even average women into self-harming compliance with being used and degraded.   

It cannot rationally be denied, that many women today present their exterior in public in a way, that functions as a very strong appeal to elicit male instincts.  Many women are radiating the unequivocal message of being available as objects.   

This description of facts does not imply, that these women are consciously wanting, accepting or tolerating to be abused or to be the intended target of abuse.   They are the victims of the same devastating desensitization by the media as are the men.  But these women are double victims.  In addition to being the victims of male abuse, they are also the victims of themselves by enabling and contributing to the male abuse.  

The oversexation and objectification by the media has several effects upon women.  These effects are reinforcing each other:

Men have economic power and under extreme circumstances even physical power enabling them to supply for or withhold from women the means for survival and for a higher and more comfortable standard of life.  These men often use their power to coerce and manipulate women to serve their needs for homeostation.   

Whenever women subjectively experience the scarcity of men offering attractive resources,  they are prone to compete by deliberately sending triggers to men's instincts.  The strongest signals are considered as the best strategy to gain access to their resources.  It is a competition by self-objectification.    

People are at the risk of being oblivious of those effects, which never elicit any reactive behavior.   This is also the case for women, who do not usually experience male instinctive reactions to existing triggers, only because there is the contrast of other, even stronger triggers.    A woman in decent shorts and a t-shirt is the probable prey, when the alternative is a woman under a shador.   But the same woman has a good chance to be spared annoyance, when the alternative is a woman in a tiny bikini.  

Some women's competition for triggering men's instincts has led to a dangerous and dysfunctional extent of the self-sexualization of nearly all women, no matter if this helps or hinders their real intentions.  Fashion for average women has currently reached a generally accepted and tolerated amount of lascivity, that is biased to accommodate only the competition of the self-objectified women.  

For those other women, who do neither want to trigger instincts, nor to sell themselves nor to be abused, it hides men's true hazardous extent of susceptibility to triggers.  These women are only spared to experience themselves as triggering instincts as long as they are compared with those doing worse on purpose.  

Being a bit less lascivious does not protect them from being abused by desensitized men, whenever there is nobody else to serve as a stronger trigger.  By the general desensitization, these women are made unaware of how contra-productive this is to their real goals.     Being less lascivious than the extreme desensitized average is still too much, when a woman wants to attract a man with her brain and her personality. 

The more a woman is intelligent, educated and cultured, the more she is aware of the potential for the emotional benefits of a deep and dignified bonding with an intellectual companion and the more she suffers when degraded and objectified.   The ubiquitous oversexation is predominant in those media, which are catering mostly for the low and medium education level of the majority and not for the critical minority holding an elevated education.   
Thus the majority of women is encouraged to attempt selling their bodies as an acceptable way of getting advantages.   They are manipulated to not feel bad about selling themselves.  This attitude is enhanced in the media by omitting entirely the alternative of the true non-physical benefits of the monogamous companionship from women's awareness.   

The majority of women are not only kept ignorant and unaware, but they are manipulated to feel good about themselves as they are.   
They are the majority, and they have a detrimental impact on what is considered standard, normal and thus justifiable for all women.

I was wondering about the women participating in the study.  Do they really perceive all women as objects whenever presented visually as sexualized or do they distinguish between themselves as different from whom they would consider self-objectified and self-sexualized?  

Which led me to find the published original study, which suggests the female students could indeed be lacking to identify with the sexualized targets of the study:

https://dipot.ulb.ac.be/dspace/bitstream/2013/107553/1/Bernard%20et%20al.%20%282012%29.%20The%20sexualized%20body-inversion%20hypothesis.pdf

"Seventy-eight university students (41 men, 37 women; mean age = 20.5 years, SD = 2.7 years)

This suggests that, at a basic cognitive level, sexualized men were perceived as persons, whereas sexualized women were perceived as objects. Future research should examine why people perceive sexualized women as objects. One may expect that object-like recognition of women could be explained by a lack of identification with sexualized women among female participants and by sexual attraction among male participants

our findings showed no differences related to participant gender, which suggests that cultural beliefs that women are sex objects are shared by both men and women at a basic cognitive level."

518. Women May Be Getting Wiser By An Ongoing Evolution Of Their Cognition

518.   Women May Be Getting Wiser By An Ongoing Evolution Of Their Cognition

The following are speculations in continuation to entry 487 (Wide-Faced Or Narrow-Faced Men), where I quoted two sources:
http://www.world-science.net/othernews/120107_facialstructure
http://www.livescience.com/14909-wide-faces-predict-unethical-behavior.html

According to these sources, some studies allow the cautious conclusion, that narrow faced may be less of a risk to a woman's wish to be treated well, while wide faced men may be more of a hazard.  

The first of the two sources also mentions one plausible objection to this conclusion:

"A major objection to the idea that facial fea­tures could predict bad be­ha­vior, they said, has been that men with such fea­tures would swiftly drop out of the gene pool. Pre­sum­ably, no one would trust them so they would have trouble mat­ing. "

Today I found another source, which is highly interesting in this context.  It could indicate, that such men's traits and women's susceptibility to become the victims are indeed dwindling away from the gene pool: 

http://www.world-science.net/exclusives/120508_crania

"In a trend that can be iden­ti­fied go­ing back to the mid-1800s, U.S. skulls have got­ten big­ger, taller and nar­rower as seen from the front,"

"Over 1,500 skulls were in­clud­ed in the re­search"

"The av­er­age height from the base to the top of the skull in males has in­creased by 8 mil­lime­ters (0.3 inch­es), the Jantzes found; skull size has grown by 200 cu­bic mil­lime­ters, a space equiv­a­lent to a cou­ple of small peas. In fe­males, the cor­res­pond­ing increases are 7 mil­lime­ters and 180 cu­bic mil­lime­ters."

The authors are considering different possible reasons for this change without preferring one thereof.
 

  
I am wondering and speculating, if the reason could not be a real impact upon the gene pool of both genders, because of the combination of two factors upon women's procreative behavior:   

• Women's growing cognitive awareness and intelligence, enhanced by better education, enables them to make wiser choices. 
• The availability of appropriate methods enables them to successfully live in accordance with these choices.

1.  Wise choices.  
Women, who are less prone to blindly follow instinctive urges, but who are instead more careful in their rational and cognitive choice of a man, tend to prefer the caring and decent men over the physically powerful and ruthless studs.   If the most agreeable and least hazardous men happen to be predominantly narrow faced, then the measured changes of the skull proportions over the relatively short period of less than two centuries could indicate evolution by sexual selection.   It would be the evolution of a more cognitive and less instinctive control of the mating behavior.  
Under the presumption, that narrow faced men really are more agreeable and less detrimental to the emotional wellbeing of women, while the wide faced men are greedy and selfish by usurping resources as the better providers for their offspring, the shift in women's choice is a cognitive shift.    

It is their shift towards more awareness for being an individual person entitled to correct treatment, therefore refusing to be exposed to bad treatment.   

It is a shift away from the acceptance of and submission to being only a womb and to making sacrifices in the favor of procreation, as is the goal of the instincts.  

2.  Availability of methods.
As long as inconsiderate jerks were able to manipulate and coerce women to have offspring against their wish, they contributed more to the gene pool than did the more considerate men.      

The modern medical possibilities are allowing women the option to only have wanted children and only with the partner of their choice.   This has certainly an impact upon the gene pool.     It not only explains a shift in the gene pool of male traits, it also explains the shift in the inherited female trait of the mate preferences.    

A woman with the power to decide, with whom she has how many children, is only prone to have as many children as she wishes, when she is satisfied with how she is treated by her wisely chosen mate.   Unhappy women, whose instincts have caused their wrong choice of a jerk, are prone to restrict the number of children.    Therefore by having more children the women with the genetic predisposition to choose the caring and decent men contribute more daughters with this predisposition to the gene pool.

517. Realistic Expectations After Having Discarded The Myth Of The Free Will

517.   Realistic Expectations After Having Discarded The Myth Of The Free Will

This is the reply to a comment on entry 515.   

I am fully aware, that I can only expect good behavior from people, whose reasons for treating me well are beneficial for themselves according to any of the varieties described in entry 512.    As long as there is no such reason or as long as I am ignorant of them having such reasons, I consider people as a possible hazard for being hurt or harmed.   I am reluctant to trust and rely upon anybody, unless I know, what benefits they get or expect from me in return.

This is important for the choice of a mindmate, whom I need to be reliable and trustworthy enough to make a relationship a safe haven.    

I can realistically expect to be treated with behavior determined by care, consideration and responsibility only under at least the following conditions:
1.  The partner knows, what I subjectively experience as such behavior and what is required from him to provide me with this experience.   
2.  The partner derives benefits from being with me and is fully aware of them.  He appreciates the benefits without taking them for granted or feeling entitled to have them.

2.1.  He either evaluates the benefits as sufficient to justify to himself all the necessary disadvantages to earn them.  
2.2.  Or the benefits happen to be simultaneously beneficial for him and for me.  
3.  The partner bases his behavior consistently upon the expectation and anticipation of maintaining long term benefits and upon the realistic knowledge of the consequences for himself if behaving otherwise.

This of course has to be reciprocal.   I can only earn a safe haven for myself, if what I can offer is also perceived as sufficiently beneficial by the partner.  

I am realistic.   If someone is selfish, has entitlement delusions, takes one sided advantages for granted, then there is nothing to be done except to protect myself by keeping at a safe distance from such a jerk.     An entitlement delusion to perceive a woman as a utility is not a decision of a free will to change.  It is a predisposition of a jerk's brain, which makes being with him a hazard.   
As long as someone feels good about himself and about his own behavior, he will not change, no matter what I do or say.    Jerks cannot be changed, only avoided.

516. Apparent Altruism Without The Myth Of The Free Will

516.   Apparent Altruism Without The Myth Of The Free Will

When discarding the myth of the free will, I explained that all apparently moral behaviors is caused by some beneficial motivation, either by serving to reduce dishomeostasis or to stimulate the pleasure center of the brain, either immediately or by anticipation.   While I mainly focused on the motivation for the most basic moral behavior of avoiding to harm others, this does not exclude proactive altruistic behaviors like helping others.  

The following source compares the diifferent motivation to help of religious with that of non-religious people.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/04/120430140035.htm

"But new research from the University of California, Berkeley, suggests that the highly religious are less motivated by compassion when helping a stranger than are atheists, agnostics and less religious people.

For highly religious people, however, compassion was largely unrelated to how generous they were,
 

The results challenge a widespread assumption that acts of generosity and charity are largely driven by feelings of empathy and compassion, researchers said. In the study, the link between compassion and generosity was found to be stronger for those who identified as being non-religious or less religious."

Helping behavior is triggered, when the motivation is strong above a threshold.   The motivation of the same subjective strength can consist of very different reasons.   When there are two identical cases of a person in noticeable distress, and the religious and the non-religious person engage in the same helping behaviors, this can be both explained very differently, each without a free will.

1.  A religious person's motivation can be strongly influenced by religious rules and norms concerning whom to help and how. 
A religious person can feel compassion without helping, if the observed suffering is considered as the god's will not to be interfered with.    When the religious person helps, this can be caused by the anticipation of a reward after death and/or by feeling dishomeostasis due to the fear of hell in the case of not helping.     

2.  When another person's suffering triggers a non-religious person's mirror neurons, this causes the compassion by empathy.  This means, that the other's suffering is experienced as a state of dishomeostasis, which can be reduced by homeostation.