You are misrepresenting the slavery discussion. "Ethical aspects" means "analyzing the ethics of slavery". It "slavery is ethical". And the diacus5 was about (awkwardly defined) theoretical models of voluntary lifelong servitude (but still called "slavery"), in explicit contrast to existing historical models of slavery.
But yes, Luke Jr's comment was a non sequitur for two reasons. (Any Catholic analysis of Jesus is necessarily a bit of a non sequitur, since Jesus and his disciples weren't... Catholic. )
The geocentrism discussion is interestingly similar: in the same thread he makes two claims, one saying that geocentrism is equivalent to heliocentrism (which is mathematically true, and which is better depends on what specific system you are modelling), but then also says that the Sun orbits the Earth is true and scientific consensus, contradicting himself.
There is a very easy rewrite of what he wrote that makes it totally fine, and probably what he "meant": models are broadly equivalent, choose one based on convenience for the problem at hand, and spirtual truth is independent of science. But since he appears to have strict religious beliefs in the infallibility of Scripture, he can't go all the way to commit to saying that the Scripture is scientifically wrong, though he did hint at it.
He's either a very poor communicator (like many forum posters are in forum posts) or his thought process is quite inconsistent and self-contradictory without him noticing.
What he's actually saying in the Reddit thread linked in the sibling comment is that the Catholic church condones slavery in some circumstances (I'd have to take his word about that, I don't know anything about church doctrine) and that insofar as the church is the expression of God's will, that makes it moral.
It's no crazier than any other religious belief if you're going to imagine some omnipotent deity just makes up whatever rules they want and they're beyond human reasoning.
I have no idea what the circumstances are in which the Church condones slavery, but it's not like the guy is arguing that we should reinstate plantations or that Epstein was a good guy who did nothing wrong or anything.
Jesus didn't teach anything directly against slavery, which is why Christianity took a long time to generally oppose slavery. Now, you can argue that's because Jesus generally wasn’t a political reformer and directed commentary to how to live in the world with its defects, leaving how to fix the defects implicit. And that may be true and a valid response to claims that Jesus was pro-slavery, but doesn't rescue your pointing to him as an anti-slavery advocate.
> 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]
> 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.
> Is that your point? — that because we had slavery, slavery is “entirely up for discussion”?
That discussion has been settled in the West, at least for now. In many places, the discussion is still ongoing, and in fact, they are an estimated 40 million slaves (or similarly bonded people) on Earth today, or about 10x as many as in the US South in 1860.
I find it a bit funny that in an increasingly atheistic society, some Christian values are held even more axiomatically than ever before, and racism is particular
Statues of American founders get torn down due to some link to it. Imagine if everything around the world with some link to forced labor would be given the same treatment. We would have to remove almost every ancient monument or statue from Italy, Greece, Egypt, the Middle East, India, China, former Aztec and Inka peoples, just to mention a few.
Also most ancient works of writing, from all over the globe would have to be given introduction with warning that the author may have owned slaves or benefitted from slave labor.
I'm not American. I did not grow up with the legacy of American slavery. By no means do I endorse slavery, but when reading about Aristotle's ideas about slavery, I'm able to imagine a world where slavery is seen as normal. In many cases, those who lost some war would end up as slaves. But typically, that would go both ways. Whichever side won would enslave the other.
I have trouble seeing almost every inhabitant of classical Europe, the Middle East or North Africa as evil just because they either did own slaves, or would have owned slaves had they been able to.
Just like I have trouble seeing a Lion or Hyena as evil for eating a Zebra. (Ok, maybe I can see the Hyena as evil, mainly because they're ugly ;)
> 1. Slavery
>
> First, I want to emphasize that freedom is a very strong theme in the Bible (a) (b). It's frankly not true that the Bible condones slavery. When certain portions of the Bible describe slavery, it was more of a form of indentured servitude than the abomination we tend to think of.
I know that you can justify just about anything with the bible. Figuring out a justification for a given conclusion is not a reliable path to truth.
> For various reasons, people would put themselves into lifelong work contracts.
Which isn't moral either, and which doesn't change that the bible also condones slavery.
> The Mosaic Law has very progressive laws (at the time) for how masters were to treat their servants.
Yeah, god was very progressive for the time he lives outside of ... or whatever it is that you believe. Seriously, I have heard it all, and I have heard other people justify the opposite using the same book and just as broken logic.
> In fact, the Mosaic Law specifically condemns forced slavery, under the penalty of death (c).
>
> The Bible does encourage the forgiveness of debts (d), and in this context, masters releasing their indentured servants from their contracts was considered a part of this. The entire book of Philemon was basically about this.
See above.
> Anyway, the American abolitionist movement absolutely had Christian underpinnings, as did the British equivalent (read up on Wilberforce).
As did the supporters of slavery.
> At a minimum, there are many modern and historical black ministers, like Theodore S. Wright and Dr. King, that would disagree with the idea that Bible says slavery is OK. That sort of thing clearly violates both the golden rule and the idea of imago dei.
Yeah, just as supporters of slavery would agree very much, because <other reason from the bible>.
> Finally, black-market slavery is still a concern, especially sexual slavery. I don't see much in the press about this sort of thing, but I haven't been to a church in the last ten years that didn't make fighting it a special focus in its ministry (e).
Yeah, and it's great when churches to good deeds. But that neither justifies any supernatural claims nor does it depend on holding beliefs without evidence. The same people could just forget about the god stuff and continue doing good deeds, and often better deeds, as evidenced by lots of non-religious charities.
> 2. Causing harm with the intention of doing good.
>
> I absolutely think Christians do this. When this happens, they need to listen and be humble enough to ask for forgiveness and change their ways. The greatest two commandments are to love God completely and to love others as we love ourselves (f). If we're not willing to stop harming and start helping people, we're breaking the second most important commandment directly and the first most important commandment through disobedience.
You avoided the question.
> You probably see people (in shallow understanding of scripture, IMO) justify themselves with Bible verses when people are hurt. This is not Biblical. In fact, the harshest things Jesus said were to religious hyprocrites (g). Jesus has been, and still is, extremely counter-cultural. And religion, in the Bible, is all about charity and doing the right thing (h).
Yes, I still know that you can justify just about anything using the bible. It's great if you justify good things using the bible. It's just risky to use the bible as a source of justification, given how many bad things people have justified using it without realizing how bad it was, so chances are it could happen to you as well.
> Anyway, I see many, many more Christians deciding to sacrifice their time, money, and energy to help people than I see harm. It's hard to put to fine a point on the hypothetical premise, though.
Yes, they decide to. But do they actually help, or do they just decide to help, and then end up causing harm?
And if they do actually help (and I agree, many certainly do), that's great, of course, but, see above, doesn't need the bible or belief without evidence.
> 3. ...if your religion keeps you from having real social contacts, I would urge you to change that, it's probably not good for you in the long run.
>
> Yes. I agree. The Bible is fundamentally about relationships, so a Christian faith with no relationships is incomplete at best.
>
> I actually have much better friendships and my relationships with my family are also better now that I take the teaching in the Bible seriously. With salvation and assurance of a meaningful future, I don't have to worry about myself (i) (j), so I can focus on others' needs, whether they're physical, emotional, spiritual, or relational.
Except this assurance is actually worthless, so it's risky if you stop worrying about yourself because of that worthless promise.
Nevertheless, great to hear you have great relationships with real people, those do actually provide a certain assurance of a meaningful future.
> I have never seen someone with worse relationships because of their obedience in the Bible. I have seen people oppressed, mocked, and attacked for their faith and insistence on doing what is right. That's what I was talking about. Sorry if that was not clear.
Well, you are aware that there are churches that isolate their members from outside society, right? And that they justify that using the bible (or whatever, possibly related, holy book they are using)? And not only small ones either.
> 4. ...unlike real people, god does not actually exist, and you cannot expect anything tangible from god if you need help.... Other people will largely honor your loyalty with their support for you, god won't.
>
> It shouldn't shock you that the Bible teaches the opposite.
Well, no, books teach lots of things. Doesn't mean it's true, though.
> And it probably won't impress you that I've found the opposite to be true. God has never let me down, but people let me down all the time. I don't hold that against them, though, since they're my brothers and sisters and they're not doing anything I haven't done before in some way. But God is always there. Often not in the way I want or expect, but God isn't a wingman or a genie that He's obligated to follow my mission and fulfill my wishes.
You do notice that you start with the conclusion that god exists and then go and find excuses for anything that with any other entity besides god you would count as evidence against their existence, right?
> I will say that you are very assured that God doesn't exist, and logically you shouldn't be. There is no way to prove that the God of the Bible does not exist. There is no scientific experiment you could whip up to use matter to prove the immaterial isn't there. I've wrestled with atheism or perhaps deism before, and I've found that it takes a lot of... well, faith... to assume a negative.
You are misunderstanding my position. "<x> does not exist" is just a colloquial formulation people use for what epistomologically correctly would be expressed as "I don't believe <x> exists because I have not seen any convincing evidence for its existence". When people say "santa clause doesn't exist", they usually don't mean that they have proved that santa clause doesn't exist either, after all. I don't affirm the negative, I simply withhold belief on your claim due to lack of evidence, just as with myriads of other baseless existence claims you could make and people have made, and withholding belief does not require faith.
Also, either "the immaterial" has some sort of predictable effects that we can observe, in which case that claim can be tested scientifically (not the immaterial cause, but the effect and the supposed rules according to which it happens), or it doesn't, in which case the existent immaterial is indistinguishable from the non-existent immaterial, and in particular you cannot make any claims about its supposed effects on us.
In any case, you don't get to shift your burden of proof onto me. You made the claim that some particular god exists, so you are responsible for providing the evidence, it's not my job to disprove any claim you throw at me and to believe it until I have done so.
If you want to understand the standpoint of a skeptical/scientific atheist and what you can expect people like myself to reply to your arguments, I guess I would recommend this playlist to you as well:
In particular the videos about specific topics. He is a former christian-nearly-became-minister, so I guess he might be better at putting things into words that make sense from your frame of reference? If you just repeat the same arguments that "we" have heard and refuted thousands of times, chances are pretty low you'll make much of an impression, so understanding those might help you have more productive conversations.
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).
> We are rightfully condemning chattel slavery. However we can't do that if we are not appealing to a universal moral standard. We have no right to claim that the Southern states were wrong, if slavery in the way existed back then wasn't universally wrong.
I really don't understand why you think there is a need for a universal moral truth in order to have a self-consistent moral code. We didn't believe that every human being has certain rights, which is why our ancestors did not perceive chattel slavery as immoral. We now do, and the actions of our ancestors are appalling to our modern perspective, but we cannot at all believe that this means we are "right" and they are "wrong" by appealing to a universal moral code. We can point out that certain moral codes lead to better outcomes (golden rule and all that), we can reason that society is better off enforcing stricter moral standards and we can build societies that enshrine some of these moral rules as laws, all without a universal morality existing at all.
The comparison to physics does not help here. Morality is entirely dependent on a set of subjective beliefs, such as the one I mentioned above about human rights. Physics is not. The world is either flat or it isn't, but two different groups of humans can have diametrically opposed beliefs about, say, veganism and neither of them is necessarily wrong.
> I think we’ve generally agreed that slavery is morally wrong and people should be paid for their work.
This is a non sequitur? Slaves are all, without exception, paid for their work. In most cases, though with some exceptions, they're paid at least partially in currency.
That's exactly what he's addressing, utilitarians with messed up definitions of utility. Your head needs to be awfully far up your ass to come to the conclusion that slavery is good without questioning the principles that lead to that conclusion.
You're right that I do reject your implication of extending the ethics of human slavery to non-human life and granting it shared tenant owner rights to the Earth. I find it surprising that you struggle to respond to this idea because it is not a fringe one. I don't think it is an exaggeration to say that it is the predominant View held by humans on this planet about their relation to the natural world.
As an aside, I also reject your claim that slaves were historically considered subhuman on factual grounds. For most of human history slaves were considered humans and subjugation was justified simply as a matter of having the might and means to do so. In a historical context, the idea of slaves as subhuman is primarily a New Philosophy developed in
the Antebellum South.
>I don't think that counts as "voluntarily becoming a slave". Obviously it is complicated (I like to call modern workers "wage slaves" occasionally - obviously they tend to work because they must eat, too). But for example where I live the law puts some limits to exploitation, a basic fairness built into contracts. It would be illegal to make somebody a lifelong slave in exchange for an apple, just because they were starving at some point and need the apple or die.
I think that misunderstands the nature of endogenous slavery at least in the Roman and Scandinavian models. People aren't selling themselves into slavery for an apple. They are selling themselves into slavery for long-term subsistence and possibly an opportunity to prove themselves worthy of being freed (and thus adopted into a more powerful family). It's not really that bad of a deal really, compared with little legal protection, no income, and food insecurity.
Additionally political power comes with both buying slaves and freeing them, so being an attractive "business partner" in this regard isn't so bad a thing.
But where do you draw the line? I think at some point you need to stand up for your values. If you are wrong and the others are right, but you are stronger, it is of course bad luck. But how do you prevent that? I guess one of the cornerstones of western societies is protecting children.
Two places.
I think that direct action is appropriate only when directed at one's own culture. I don't think I have a right to insist that Indonesia recognize Jewish weddings. I do think I have a right and an obligation to insist that US corporations in Indonesia act in accordance with my ethics, to the best of my ability.
On general advocacy though, I draw the line at specificity:
It's ok to critique a specific culture and practice, looking at specific harms and trying to bring awareness as to social costs and injustice.
It's not ok to simply say "you must do things the way my American group thinks would be pretty cool if it happened in America but we haven't got there yet."
Everyone focuses on something, if you want to extend your argument he should have also focused on diet, type of exercise, type of housing slaves are kept in, etc.
Focusing on every single factor that could possibly effect slavery would be an endeavor probably greater than the average lifetime.
Saying that some group of people or another would likely make better slaves than others is no different than saying that a certain group is more likely to be poor than another or be in jail than another. It may be considered in bad taste to discuss, but it isn't morally wrong to discuss.
It is simply remarking on what is, not what should be.
I didn't infer that he himself had something valuable to say on the subject, only that he suspects someone does, and laments their apparent reluctance to say it.
I think part of the source of this suspicion is that the abolition of slavery was a result of the Enlightenment and the rise of natural law as a source of ethics, and virtually every aspect of the West has abandoned natural law as a source of ethics or principle, leaving modern ethics in a drunkard's walk around the positions last reasoned to before that jettisoning.
But yes, Luke Jr's comment was a non sequitur for two reasons. (Any Catholic analysis of Jesus is necessarily a bit of a non sequitur, since Jesus and his disciples weren't... Catholic. )
The geocentrism discussion is interestingly similar: in the same thread he makes two claims, one saying that geocentrism is equivalent to heliocentrism (which is mathematically true, and which is better depends on what specific system you are modelling), but then also says that the Sun orbits the Earth is true and scientific consensus, contradicting himself.
There is a very easy rewrite of what he wrote that makes it totally fine, and probably what he "meant": models are broadly equivalent, choose one based on convenience for the problem at hand, and spirtual truth is independent of science. But since he appears to have strict religious beliefs in the infallibility of Scripture, he can't go all the way to commit to saying that the Scripture is scientifically wrong, though he did hint at it.
He's either a very poor communicator (like many forum posters are in forum posts) or his thought process is quite inconsistent and self-contradictory without him noticing.
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