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Miltank posted:Christians: ended slavery ...Shot the capitalists?
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Feb 6, 2015 15:16
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I don't know that the DPRK can really be considered atheist considering their whole Eternal President Born On A Mountain With Singing Animals state cult.
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Feb 6, 2015 15:21
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Slavery always contradicted the sayings of Jesus. But Paul said a lot of bullshit that was very favorable to the Roman state and encouraged people to accept authority so of course a guy who never even met Jesus and was just saying whatever got collected and put alongside the Gospels and the sayings of Christ and preached to the common people as equal in authority to the words of God Himself.
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Feb 6, 2015 15:31
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spoon0042 posted:anyone who did anything bad doesn't count as christian, that's awfully convenient Well converting people away from their religion is hard, so yeah it's probably better to convince people that Christianity teaches them not to do bad stuff than to de-convert them. Case in point: abolition, which fortunately did not require convincing a majority of Americans to stop being Christian. It's a bit weird when liberals seem to accept the arguments of tyrants and slave-drivers that Christianity teaches whipping blacks and bashing gays, and attempt to convince Christians that to be properly Christian they need to join the KKK or whatever.
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Feb 6, 2015 15:37
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Miltank posted:The USSR was honestly bad enough on its own. The people who committed the atrocities were bad people and therefore can't properly be considered atheists 
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Feb 6, 2015 15:54
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Angry Salami posted:Hey, I don't know, some of those slaveholders were pretty convincing. Here's Presbyterian Minister James Thornwell, from 1860: OK now find the craziest Muslim you can and use his words to prove all Muslims are death worshipping terrorists. Starving Autist posted:Hey all, ignore the fact that Christians kept slaves for the vast majority of their existence and justified it with scripture, but did you know the real Christians are the ones who opposed it? Gotta love how Christian apologists have to continuously revise the religion so it appears less monstrous. 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.
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Feb 6, 2015 15:58
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Starving Autist posted:You can think that a religion is full of poo poo and actively makes the world a worse place to live without necessarily thinking its followers are all moustache-twirling comic book villains. I mean all right, but "people who want to do lovely things are arguing the dominant ideology supports those things" isn't exactly a slam-dunk criticism. What religion or ideology hasn't been used as a shield by crooks and criminals and warlords to justify atrocities?
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Feb 6, 2015 16:12
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It's worth pointing out that the Pope banned slavery in 1537 and called slaveowners allies of the devil, and he was basically ignored by the Spanish who were profiting from it immensely. Apparently this means that the slavers were the true Catholics all along or something and not the Pope I guess?
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Feb 6, 2015 16:28
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CommieGIR posted:He banned it, but it wasn't enforced until the 1700s, by which time civilization as a whole was starting to realize that slavery was a monstrous and inhuman affair. Ah so the Papal Bull was No True Christianity because it only counts as Catholic teaching if he has the military might to enforce it on recalcitrant aristocrats? CommieGIR posted:Once again: So Abolitionists would've been okay with slavery had they not been Christian Why did this "natural human revulsion" of slavery you credit for abolition take some ten thousand years to get around to doing it?
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Feb 6, 2015 16:33
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Who What Now posted: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. 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.
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Feb 6, 2015 16:40
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Who What Now posted: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. 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.
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Feb 6, 2015 16:57
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CommieGIR posted:That has more roots in white supremacism white was ironically also religiously motivated. White supremacy arose as a justification for colonialism and slavery because Christians didn't want to admit that the people they were mistreating were proper humans and brothers in Christ. It was given religious trappings by aristocrats and plantation owners sure, but the Church rejected it right from the gate. One of the arguments the Spanish advanced for slavery was that the natives didn't have souls, to which the Pope, just 40 years after the discovery of America said "nope, that's dumb as poo poo, they have souls and if you enslave them you're doing the devil's work".
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Feb 6, 2015 17:11
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CommieGIR posted:I am actually not an anti-theist, shocking I know. But I'm also well aware there was more motivation behind the abolition movement then sudden appeals to religious ideals that previously were used to uphold slavery. You mean the pro-slavery religious ideals that the Pope had denounced as deceptions by the greedy and violent three centuries before abolitionists "suddenly" started agreeing? How can you credit the enlightenment with anti-slavery thought when it started a good 200 years after the Catholic Church had already come down unequivocally against slavery?
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Feb 6, 2015 17:15
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Who What Now posted: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". 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. E: And gently caress it, he explicitly said not to fight those who hurt you and to turn the other cheek but plenty of people still used the bible to justify warmongering. It's probably impossible to be so explicit that human beings won't rationalize your words away so they can feel good about doing what they want to do. VitalSigns fucked around with this message at 17:30 on Feb 6, 2015 |
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Feb 6, 2015 17:27
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CommieGIR posted:Man, if the Old Testament is not considered valid, we should really get an editor to hit that book. Jesus was born centuries after the Old Testament was written so when we're discussing the moral lessons that Jesus taught then no, I'd say that the Old Testament probably isn't going to contain any useful Jesus quotes about anything.
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Feb 6, 2015 17:34
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Kaal posted:Well obviously lots of Christians managed it throughout history, and instead used Jesus to justify slavery instead. Too bad the son of God didn't manage to mention "Slavery is bad" anywhere. Real oversight on his part, to be sure. Pretty sure Jesus was just some guy who, no matter how wise his sayings were, couldn't actually know the future and see how Jefferson Davis was going to rationalize away his teachings. Also once again, Jesus was completely explicitly anti-violence and that didn't stop Christians from managing to use Jesus to justify war, so what exactly do you propose the man could have said to make the Romans all give up their slaves? poo poo, real Catholics didn't give up their slaves even when the pope said slaver-owners are in league with satan, because turns out people like money.
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Feb 6, 2015 17:38
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CommieGIR posted:The Old Testament falls within the realm of the Christians, even if Christ wasn't in there. If you're going to take quotes from the Old Testament to prove that Christianity is evil, you would earn more as a fox news anchor pulling random Koran quotes to justify condemning Muslims.
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Feb 6, 2015 17:39
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Starving Autist posted:The Old Testament isn't "supposed" to matter for Christians, but that doesn't stop them from using it whenever it's convenient to justify their bigotry. In theory it's not supposed to matter; in practice it actually does. Yeah, then we should probably argue that Christians who do that are misinterpreting their faith rather than agreeing with Fred Phelps and trying to convince Christians that he's right and their faith calls them to be bigots.
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Feb 6, 2015 17:46
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CommieGIR posted:I accept that premise, yes. But my argument was that most of the historical impact that was created by his words and teachings can be traced to the efforts and political ideology of those that wielded it, not Jesus himself. Isn't this going to be true for any philosophy? It's not like Confucius lived for 8,000 years and become the Emperor of China and the ruler of all Buddhist states and personally did every important thing that his philosophy influenced. If that's your standard for historical impact then what would actually qualify?
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Feb 6, 2015 17:50
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Who What Now posted: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. Well of course Christians can do things that go against what Jesus taught without becoming "not Christian". Christianity was also used to justify the Iraq War, that doesn't make Jesus pro-war the way that some people here are saying the "warped interpretation" of slave owners means Jesus had to have been pro-slavery. Who What Now posted: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. Who What Now posted: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. Yeah.
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Feb 6, 2015 18:11
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LLJKSiLk posted:The idea that the Old Testament "doesn't matter" is a fairly modern interpretation which I believe is primarily based on the fact that the Old Testament is just so goddamned weird and indefensible with all the slavery, genocide, penises, and incest. If the Old Testament "doesn't matter" then neither do the ten commandments, or any of the other moral pronouncements made within. That's pretty obviously not a modern interpretation since like half of the New Testament after the Gospels was people arguing whether gentiles needed to follow the law in the old testament and hack their penises and give up bacon or not. Spoiler alert: the answer the the church settled on for "do you have to follow Leviticus" was "no, and also gently caress no"
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Feb 6, 2015 18:13
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Either way, it's not really a modern interpretation. That argument has been going back to the first century. And while it's true that Jesus said people should follow the law, he also had a very strong message of "don't be stupid about it and definitely don't be lovely to each other over it". Mark 3:1-5 posted:Another time Jesus went into the synagogue, and a man with a shriveled hand was there. Some of them were looking for a reason to accuse Jesus, so they watched him closely to see if he would heal him on the Sabbath. Jesus said to the man with the shriveled hand, “Stand up in front of everyone.” Pretty much every time this comes up, he's like "the Law is about honoring God, killing people over it doesn't honor God". John 8:2-11 posted:At dawn he appeared again in the temple courts, where all the people gathered around him, and he sat down to teach them. The teachers of the law and the Pharisees brought in a woman caught in adultery. They made her stand before the group and said to Jesus, “Teacher, this woman was caught in the act of adultery. 5In the Law Moses commanded us to stone such women.Now what do you say?” They were using this question as a trap,in order to have a basis for accusing him. Christians who say that the Old Testament Law gives them the right to boss people around and punish sex-havers are the kind of people Jesus was condemning here. He consistently holds that following the law is a matter between an individual and God, and he denounced those shaming others with legalism as hard-hearted hypocrites. VitalSigns fucked around with this message at 18:36 on Feb 6, 2015 |
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Feb 6, 2015 18:34
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E: gently caress, beaten by miles. I should read the whole thread before I post. Nothing to see here.
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Feb 8, 2015 06:21
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This is like that one Hitchhiker's Guide sequel where the scientists realized all they had to do to create a computer that knows everything and can detect all forms of energy is to remove all of the filters that people unwittingly build into all of our current instruments. Except that was a comedy book and not someone purporting to have a serious solution to all the world's problems.
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Feb 8, 2015 06:52
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We need to get rid of morality based in irrational religious beliefs or cultural programming and instead build a perfect robot with access to an ineffable superhuman moral knowledge to hand us an objective code of ethics.
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Feb 8, 2015 07:34
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Crowsbeak posted:Should we also require that the robot would need a nano augmented human fused into it to work? Only if we represent this moment of creation by a painting depicting the robot touching fingers with the perfect man.
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Feb 8, 2015 11:32
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Y'all know abolitionists and slaveowners were different people right? Abolitionists fought against slaveowners sometimes at great personal risk. It's not like all they had to do was let their slaves go and then ask for a medal.
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Feb 11, 2015 15:16
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It's not about getting credit, it's about recognizing influences on abolitionist thought.
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Feb 11, 2015 15:43
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Who What Now posted: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". Okay fine, but that doesn't obligate us to take the equal-and-opposite wrong position.
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Feb 11, 2015 17:01
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Mornacale posted:Given the overtly religious nature of the GOP voting base, I find it extremely hard to believe that they would turn out to vote for a non-Christian against a Christian. Except anyone crazy enough to give a poo poo that Romney is a Mormon also believes Obama is a Muslim Manchurian Candidate from darkest Africa who sneaked into the womb of a white woman...
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Feb 16, 2015 15:32
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I asssumed Mornacle was talking about the evangelicals on the right when he talked about people who would never vote for a Mormon over a Christian. Not the people who have some questions about Romney's faith and politics but are satisfied with "no if the church decided black people aren't people again tomorrow, I wouldn't agree".
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Feb 16, 2015 15:55
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Yeah but there's a difference between wanting him to say on the record that he doesn't think black people aren't people or whatever, and deciding that no matter what he says he must secretly believe it anyway. I don't really see much point in sperging out about how ridiculous it is to believe that an omnipotent God put the Garden of Eden in Missouri. I mean, really? The regular Garden of Eden has immortal people, a woman made from a rib, flash-memory fruit that dumps knowledge into your memory banks when you eat it, a dude who named every animal on earth in an afternoon, and a talking snake, and then you're like "whoa whoa and you're saying this happened in Missouri of all places? Nope, you're not getting anywhere near the nuke button, can we find someone who thinks there were talking snakes in Mesopotamia instead?"
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Feb 16, 2015 16:11
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Water can't turn into wine. Wine has organic compounds that aren't present in water, first law of thermodynamics. Checkmate, Obama, you're not fit for office
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Feb 16, 2015 16:23
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Disinterested posted:OK so by this logic it's not a problem that Sarah Palin believes the dinosaur bones are there just to test our faith? If you have quotes from Mitt Romney advocating requiring teaching that Roman Jews sailed to America in public school history classes, please share them
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Feb 16, 2015 16:30
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Violating free will is only fun if you're doing it to make Pharaoh reneg on his promise so you can punish him and a bunch of uninvolved Egyptian newborns.
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Feb 19, 2015 06:11
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