Galactic Scholar wrote:I think you are misunderstanding my and Razor's criticism, we're not just being contrarian and we're not just ragging on Christianity.
No, but you
are misunderstanding mine.
Galactic Scholar wrote:We are analyzing and dissecting the good, the bad and the "meh" of Jesus and saying that Jesus gave some terrible advice. For example slavery is always bad. It's bad for the slaves, the slavers and the slave nation as a whole. Telling slaves to obey their masters is therefore bad advice.
And telling them to rebel would have gotten them killed. Spartacus was famous, but also overrated: that gladiator rebellion did have the possibility of causing real harm to Rome, but
primarily it played into the Roman's fears of a slave rebellion (we know that Romans owned slaves, yes; not so often remembered is that slaves were never
common in Rome, because the Romans considered them inherently dangerous; this same concern was common within American slaveholders as well, and affected historical perspectives on the Haitian revolution). That is why it was put down so harshly. Furthermore, Christianity was often looked down on as being a foreign religion (because it was in most areas) already: directly opposing e.g. slavery
when you were the slave would have made it
much worse, especially since it isn't a religion precisely about being released from slavery.
There's also another problem with opposing slavery in that world: it wasn't quite what we're familiar with. As far as I recall slavery was in many ways at least as bad back then as it was during the worst of the US's slavery period, but it was also just the most extreme end of a roughly continuous social structure. We often think of the Roman Republic as a democracy, but in many ways it was more akin to England after the advent of the Magna Carta than to modern America or Britain. There was a sort of system of nobility worked into Roman society, and certain types of relationships literally placed legal obligations upon both benefactor and beneficiary: slavery was just an extreme case of this. And this rule extended beyond Roman society, to most of the ancient world (maybe all, haven't looked into that particular subject), up through every "developed" society between then and now (serfs usually had it better than slaves, but that seriously did vary over time and location; Communism is really fit only for ants and similar, yet the USSR really was an improvement over Tsarist Russia), and arguably even today on a world-wide scale (any time that an obligation such as "don't murder" is placed on someone, that moves you ever so minutely towards the "slavery" end of the spectrum; for every such obligation removed, you move towards the "anomie" end of the spectrum; there are no
inherent categories, and the optimum balance depends on what the beholder considers important).
At any rate, I challenge you to look at e.g. Enron, or the coal barons of the US, and
not see the same problems as slavery in a diluted form. Slavery lead to many social ills, but slavery didn't
produce them, it just
made them easier. The problems exist even today, and primarily in social form.
Galactic Scholar wrote:Giving no thought toward tomorrow is also terrible idea.
But in context it has a point: you can die unexpectedly, so don't leave important matters unfinished.
Galactic Scholar wrote:Whether people agree with us or not on those two topics is irrelevant. If they disagree they are simply wrong.
We are physical beings inhabiting a physical world which is governed by physical laws. There are right and wrong answers in how we conduct ourselves as a nation. Jesus, and by extension Christianity, has some wrong answers, some "meh" answers, and some right answers. Slavery is one of the big ones Christianity gets totally wrong.
Now here's what I want you to actually think about: how do we decide what the right and wrong answers are? Christianity follows some mix of the Bible and doctrine, varying between individual groups. American society has mostly been following individual perceptions of the most commonly accepted norm (I'm not certain about right now; I think we're in a transition period, and in the absence of any recognizable rules, I don't want to try predicting anything). If we try Darwinism then we probably need to reduce access to medical care for the sake of improving the quality of the human race (genetic pool or social pool, take your pick; "survival of the fittest" doesn't need to be picky), whereas Humanism would say the opposite, and some variants of Consequentialism that conditionally embrace various forms of slavery probably exist.
And which one you think is right depends on your starting perspective, and personal experiences. Do we optimize for right now, or the far future? Do we optimize for beneficiaries (Humans) or system (Environment)? Do we optimize for freedom (anarchism) or productivity (authoritarianism)? Do we trust the lower classes? Do we trust the middle classes? Do we trust the higher classes? Do we optimize for representative leadership (democracy) or focused leadership (monarchy)?
Some perspectives (e.g. "far future", "system", "productivity", "trustworthiness floats", "focused leadership") can potentially favor slavery (regardless of whether it's called that) whereas others (e.g. "right now", "beneficiaries", "freedom", "trustworthiness averages", "representative leadership") will almost always abhor slavery.
This may seem laughable (I don't think it's been mostly intentional recently), but Hollywood occasionally has a habit of producing scenarios where slavery-by-another-name might be useful to improve things. In Avatar, the Earth has been ruined by over-exploitation, but if the indulgence of the population is the problem, then forcing the population to both cut back and repair the environment is inherently a solution if you can implement it: and a civilian draft enforced by law or force (or both) inherently falls on the "slavery" side of the spectrum, and only grows closer if you throw in "the descendants of the most damaging actors have to work the hardest" and similar factors. Similarly, the scenario of declining fertility in e.g. "A Handmaid's Tale" can result in some form of sex slavery making sense if your priority is the survival of the human race, while the prioritization of human fairness and equality can result in the ultra-prescribed society of "The Giver". Bizarre extremes, yes, but extremes are useful for shedding light on differences.
tl;dr: Take multiple people with the same philosophy, and you'll get multiple answers to any question. Take the same number with different philosophies and you'll get even more answers. And many of those answers will seem incompatible with each other, or to some of the answerers completely illogical.
Edited in: Riddle me this - what is the definition of "slave"? The only
reliable answer I know of is "someone forced to take or not take actions regardless of their own choice".