There is one thing that doesn't matter, and that is Jesus Christ

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Who What Now: Sep 10, 2006; by Azathoth

VitalSigns posted:

OK now find the craziest Muslim you can and use his words to prove all Muslims are death worshipping terrorists.

Who says we should ignore it? We should use the example of slaveowners ignoring the teachings of Christ and picking out a few passages in some dude's letters to justify owning people to hammer the current gently caress-the-poor prosperity Gospel Christianity that's in vogue nowadays in America.

Christ never forbade or even spoke against the owning of slaves nor implied anywhere that he was against it probably because he had no problem with it, being a Bronze Age Jewish scholar and all.

# ¿ Feb 6, 2015 16:34

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# ¿ Apr 29, 2024 04:52

Who What Now: Sep 10, 2006; by Azathoth

VitalSigns posted:

Plenty of Christ's moral teachings amounted to that though. It's really hard to reconcile slavery with the Sermon on the Mount, for example, where Christ says that everything we do to each other we're actually doing to God.

I'm sure Jesus supported treating slaves kindly and not being needlessly cruel but he absolutely had no problem with Jews owning slaves in general and if he did he seems to have forgotten to ever mention it. In retrospect we recognize that even the "kindest" form of slavery is grossly immoral and inhumane and so can apply Jesus' words to the practice, but that doesn't retroactively change the past.

# ¿ Feb 6, 2015 16:46

Who What Now: Sep 10, 2006; by Azathoth

VitalSigns posted:

It doesn't really make sense to claim that you know Jesus' true opinion on slavery just because he didn't mention it. Sure maybe he didn't care or he forgot to mention it, or maybe he consciously avoided saying anything that could be interpreted as treason against Rome (as the Pharisees were constantly trying to trick him into doing so he could be arrested) and instead said subversive things about how you should treat every human being the same way you would treat Him if He came to your house.

I don't really have any interest in trying to retroactively change the past, since that's impossible. But in the here and now we absolutely can use scripture to convince Christians to be consistent with the teachings of Jesus, rather than agreeing with Fred Phelps and telling Christians that if they want to follow Christ they should start being bigots.

I wouldn't say I know Jesus' true opinion, but it's a fact that slavery was a normal practice in his time. And despite the indisputable fact that his teachings were used by the abolitionist movement and Christians were the driving force behind ending slavery in America, to say that it clearly condemns slavery isn't the least bit accurate. Jesus' teachings were also undeniably used to make pro-slavery arguments as well, and even though I don't agree with them they wouldn't have been able to do that if he had ever outright said, "don't own people for any reason". And since getting caught and crucified was supposedly part of the plan there's no excuse for Jesus not to start explicitly saying so when he decided the time was right. The fact that he never does probably means that he likely didn't have much of a problem with it, just like the vast majority of his peers didn't, and that's not an outrageous claim to make. It also doesn't change how we can apply his teachings today.

# ¿ Feb 6, 2015 17:15

Who What Now: Sep 10, 2006; by Azathoth

VitalSigns posted:

Maybe he thought that "what you do to the least among you, you're doing to god" was explicit enough since obviously no one is going to say it'd be cool to whip god in the gold mines.

Your argument seems to assume that Jesus actually was supernatural and that he knew the future and how Southern gentlemen would twist his words 1800 years later and therefore should have known to be more explicit, which is a weird thing to do. You're adding in all kinds of assumptions to avoid taking his words at face value.

There's really no way to reconcile slavery with Jesus' teachings of charity and humanity and turning the other cheek and treating everyone like your family or like God. Obviously people are going to try because slavery is profitable, but those people are demonstrably wrong.

Sure there is, by not considering slaves to be real people to whom those teachings don't apply or by not seeing slavery as inherently wrong or immoral. Which is exactly what many Christians thought for a very long time, and while you and I understand this makes those people immoral assholes who have a warped interpretation of scripture, it doesn't make them not Christian. And I'm not saying Jesus should have seen American slavery coming and spoken out against it, I'm saying he more than likely had views more in line with the culture he grew up in, that slavery wasn't inherently wrong, and not our modern ones which is why he didn't explicitly speak out against slavery but did speak out against needless cruelty. We have progressed since his time and so we can apply his ideals in better ways than even he probably imagined and this included abolishing slavery.

# ¿ Feb 6, 2015 17:58

Who What Now: Sep 10, 2006; by Azathoth

Crowsbeak posted:

I worry mostly about people who deny history.

Such as?

# ¿ Feb 7, 2015 02:56

Who What Now: Sep 10, 2006; by Azathoth

Crowsbeak posted:

Gay Marriage. I believe man and women, but then its a minor issue compared to having children going without food, and medical care and a society turn away from helping the helpless.

Drug use, I think you shouldn't do drugs, but then I can see that people use drugs despite the insane war.

You believe man and women what? Are you saying you're a polygamist so long as it's one husband and multiple wives? Is this you trying to hint that you're a Mormon?

# ¿ Feb 7, 2015 22:33

Who What Now: Sep 10, 2006; by Azathoth

Crowsbeak posted:

I'll admit that you really made me laugh, with that one, it does sound like I am endorsing polygamy. Look I believe one man one women marriage.

Why?

# ¿ Feb 8, 2015 01:02

Who What Now: Sep 10, 2006; by Azathoth

Tao Jones posted:

Maybe Jesus was concerned with some kind of other world and wasn't attempting to solve political problems? That could be one reason why his words seem irrelevant to solving modern political problems.

No, I'm pretty sure he was very concerned about the political problems of Judea circa 0 BCE. Turns out a lot of those issues have changed over the last 2000 years. Imagine that.

# ¿ Feb 8, 2015 05:22

Who What Now: Sep 10, 2006; by Azathoth

Mornacale posted:

"People are cool things" contains a value judgement, and therefore comes from a place other than strict materialism.

There's a difference between methodological materialism and philosophical materialism. Most materialists are the former.

# ¿ Feb 9, 2015 20:40

Who What Now: Sep 10, 2006; by Azathoth

Crowsbeak posted:

Jesus being God kind of makes the whole idea of murdering your enemies a bad thing now. Now I know that didn't stop the Catholic church in the 1000s using that to justify the crusades.

You know what God never does? Say owning people as property is wrong. loving interesting, that.

# ¿ Feb 11, 2015 03:57

Who What Now: Sep 10, 2006; by Azathoth

Crowsbeak posted:

Yep thats why slave traders are personally called out.

In the bible? Because if so this never actually happens.

# ¿ Feb 11, 2015 05:38

Who What Now: Sep 10, 2006; by Azathoth

VitalSigns posted:

It's not about getting credit, it's about recognizing influences on abolitionist thought.

No, getting credit was the sole reason Milktank brought it up in the first place, so that Christianity would have more points in the "did good" column than the "did bad".

# ¿ Feb 11, 2015 16:29

Who What Now: Sep 10, 2006; by Azathoth

Mornacale posted:

Well, that depends. Certainly the kind of postmodern "there is no objective meaning" approach is a recent development, but only slightly more recent than the idea of literalism. I think there's a sort of popular bigotry that assumes that ancient people weren't as smart as us, and part of that is the idea that we can understand their literature on a "deeper" level than they could (see also: Ancient Aliens). I think this idea doesn't stand up to history; more than a few parts of the Bible are explicitly metaphorical, after all, and it would be a disservice to the writers/audience to suggest that they didn't recognize implicit symbolism also.

In fact, I would go so far as to say that the idea that "face value" and "literal" are equivalent is itself a modern invention.

Now, that's not to say that humans haven't anthropomorphized gods for our whole history. Certainly, if you asked a believer to think about god, I have no doubt they conceptualized them as vaguely human, just like we tend to think of them as an old white man today. But it's important not to confuse a popular conceptual model with the theoretical object: if I imagine a Hydrogen atom I think of a little ball with an electron orbiting it like a moon, and I might even use this model when writing about chemistry, but if you tell me that means I believe atoms are planets then of course you're missing the point.

Similarly, using the model of God-as-human is useful when discussing a personal conversation/revelation, but elsewhere in the same story it presents God as a bush and a tower of smoke/fire. Then also as an unseen force that can do all kinds of miracles without any apparent physical presence. I think the text is pretty clear that the God-as-human model is not accurate, or at least vastly incomplete.

e: The reason why this is important is that it helps us to criticize when and how these conceptual models go awry. Consider my chemistry example: if I lean too heavily on that model of the atom, I may end up with errors or limits in my thinking. But you can't address this by saying "um, atoms aren't moons, duh". Rather, you recognize what I am saying I actually believe, point out some issues that actually exist, and then propose a better model.

You're right to say that it's false to assume that ancient people weren't as smart as us and thus were all literalists, but it's also wrong to try and pretend that literalism just sprang out of thin air sometime around America's founding. While it's true that biblical literalism is probably at the height of it's popularity and before Evangelicals it wasn't quite so concentrated the belief did exist before those movements. Do you think that there weren't stupid people in the past along with very smart people? You'd have to have quite a romanticized view of 200 CE people to think that each and every person alive was some sort of enlightened thinker with greatly nuanced, modern even, views of biblical interpretation.

# ¿ Feb 14, 2015 21:36

Who What Now: Sep 10, 2006; by Azathoth

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