Not at all my intent to skirt the issue. Slavery is objectively wrong and has always been wrong. The entire Christian reason is human freedom and liberty to captives.
Christianity is what ended slavery and additionally, without it or apart from it, slavery would not be wrong (if you have reasoning otherwise, let's hear it).
Unless you're deliberately cherry picking, Christianity was the poster child of slavery both explicit and implicit. Of course, they are not any more wrong than all the others who utilized slavery.
Framing slavery as rooted in paganism isn't accurate, and more importantly isn't helpful in having a worthwhile conversation. All it does is paint Christianity as some moral paragon, which it is not.
By "the entirety of it wrong" do you mean how you said earlier "Louis X had already abolished slavery much much earlier in the 14th century", only the timeline you point to says "However some cases of slavery continued till the 17th century in some France's Mediterranean harbours, in the Provence"?
As you know from that very timeline, abolition is not a fundamentally Christian idea. The Qin Dynasty and the Xin Dynasty both abolished slavery in China before Jesus was an adult.
As you also know from that same timeline, while the Pope banned enslaving the indigenous peoples of the Americas, he did not ban the enslavement of black Africans. Why is that, do you think, if his decision was based on the Bible?
What I think is missing from your analysis is the step from the "no Christians should be enslaved" to "no one should be enslaved."
The Bible does not prohibit the enslavement of non-Christians. That's why the Pope could have Muslim captives operate galley ships. That's why the Europeans could operate a slave trade of black Africans. That's why the Spanish could enslave the non-Christian indigenous Guanches. (Also from that timeline link you just sent.) That's why Christian theologians for centuries could justify slavery.
What Enlightenment thought added to the mix was the idea of universal rights: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed".
The hypocrisy of slaveholders talking about universal rights of all men was obvious even when it was first written: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_men_are_created_equal#Slav... . (And no, "their Creator" here refers to the distant creator of Deism, not the Christian God.)
That philosophy changed the moral calculus. People should not be enslaved for the simple reason that they are people.
> An abolitionist movement only started in the late 18th century, however, when English and American Quakers began to question the morality of slavery. James Oglethorpe was among the first to articulate the Enlightenment case against slavery, banning it in the Province of Georgia on humanist grounds, arguing against it in Parliament, and eventually encouraging his friends Granville Sharp and Hannah More to vigorously pursue the cause.
The "humanist grounds" is the influence of the Enlightenment.
This is interesting as slavery is something that ostensibly has no room for shades of gray. So let's try it. Can you justify to me why you believe slavery is wrong? And to be clear, I am not suggesting that it is not - but rather I think you'll find that creating completely coherent arguments for why it is - without exception, is not as easy as you would think.
I can personally believe slavery is morally wrong but still accept that a different culture may universally consider that there is a right to own other humans as slaves.
Actually, I think that whether or not something can be called "slavery" is irrelevant to whether or not it is wrong. If it shares the same moral violations that our conventional idea of slavery does then it is wrong, but not because it is called slavery but because it violates the same moral or ethical precepts. If it could be called slavery but doesn't violate these precepts then it is not a moral wrong. This is actually slightly related to Socrates' question in Plato's Euthyphro.
> Could there be something else common among slave practitioners apart from religion
Cherry picking again, are we? So now we are looking for an alternative explanation - but only on the evil side. The existence of Christians who opposed slavery does not prove that it is in any way central to Christianity, or exclusive to Christianity. That's not how logic works.
On the other hand, the humanist Enlightenment in France led to the French revolution, led in turn to laicist France granting citizenship to former slaves in 1792 on non-religious grounds.
So yeah, there was something else among both abolitionists and slave holders, which is my whole point.
That there were slave holders who justified their view in science does not mean that it's central or exclusive to atheists (see citizenship rights for slaves in the laicist French revolution)
>Consider Thomas Jefferson,
I'll consider Thomas Jefferson who readily incorporated slavery in his business while formulating his Jefferson Bible.
>Or consider German Americans
Maybe recent immigrants were driven by a desire to contribute to their new home?
>Maybe there are other examples but I’m unaware of any.
Unclear how superficial or cynical this is meant. WWII could come to mind.
Really, yours is the first account I read of the Civil War as a religious crusade of the Christian North to finally bring god to the heretics of the South.
> You can try that argument but it's not very convincing. I think you could do equally well arguing that slavery is the fault of Christianity […]
You can also argue for a Flat Earth, but all the arguments given would be had: given that slavery existed before Christianity arrived on the scene, and early Christians (e.g., Gregory of Nyssa) argued against it, that would contain a bunch of bad arguments. The history of Western thought as outlined in Siedentop's Inventing the Individual shows how Christianity moved the needle from slaves to serfs to individual freedom:
This can further be expounded on Brundage's The Medieval Origins of the Legal Profession illustrating how everyone—pauper to Pope—was afforded a fair shake at justice (due process in law) going back to (at least) the Middle Ages:
> The ancient Greeks (so, significantly before Christianity and also influential for "Western civilization") have a whole bunch of goddesses representing the idea of specific kinds of being nice to others.
And how many orphanages did the Ancient Greeks and Ancient Romans have? (Versus leaving children outside to die from exposure.) Or hospitals:
> The declaration of Christianity as an accepted religion in the Roman Empire drove an expansion of the provision of care. Following First Council of Nicaea in 325 CE construction of a hospital in every cathedral town was begun. Among the earliest were those built by the physician Saint Sampson in Constantinople and by Basil of Caesarea in modern-day Turkey towards the end of the 4th century. By the beginning of the 5th century, the hospital had already become ubiquitous throughout the Christian east in the Byzantine world,[3] this being a dramatic shift from the pre-Christian era of the Roman Empire where no civilian hospitals existed.[1]
Well, I tried, as I said I'm not a scholar but a student.
> I've come to know both things are bad is not something I can conveniently answer, before you ask
Yet, you ask me the reason I use a text that is the basis of my church's beliefs that were taught to me to show those are bad.
I don't think its instinctive to know its bad or else it would have not been such an institution in the first place.
To be fair to the Bible, it doesn't advocate slavery, but it does have commands on how to treat slaves including freeing them. I guess there is a pragmatism in lessening the horror when its not ingrained to end it outright.
I believe having slaves is wrong, that doesn't make it a fact. I have no reason to believe there is any natural law dictating that, it's nothing but a social construct we have agreed to.
Christianity is what ended slavery and additionally, without it or apart from it, slavery would not be wrong (if you have reasoning otherwise, let's hear it).
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