The early church was strongly against slavery, on the basis of the scriptures: given that every human is in the image of God, then claiming to own another person is blasphemous; and given that the blood of God Incarnate was shed for every person, claiming to own another person is even more blasphemous. With those conclusions, the claim that “the Bible condones chattel slavery” is erroneous – it rests on a “recipe book” approach to the scriptures rather than taking them as a whole.
The Bible is against slavery when you look at the principles instead of treating it as a menu book where you get to pick what you want.
Because opposition to religion is a pack of inconsistent self-serving falsehoods that has been consistently detrimental to those societies that most embrace it, and has been used throughout history to justify and cover up everything from racism to racketeering to slavery to child abuse to genocide.
Similar things can be said for so many things… fire, drugs, metal, science, books, logic, words, merchants, …
It is the problem inherent with everything with power – that power can be used for both good and evil.
Religion is dangerous. I say this a lot. But there are many things which are more dangerous. By all means avoid them if you cannot handle them or cannot control yourself. And one of the things which is far more dangerous are religions (and other things) which are unaware of the danger of religion (or those other things). And that is not true of Christianity. I who was raised from childhood with abundant criticism of Christianity was quite surprised to find those same criticisms right there in the Bible. This is a religion which is very aware of the dangers of religion.
Sorry. I don’t understand how what you wrote is represented by the Venn diagram showing a tiny overlap of science and religion.
I’m not sure what you sre getting at here, Merv. In the case of slavery, Christians who supported it threw out their moral compass and supported policies based on all kinds of immoral reasoning. The ability to separate one’s moral compass from one’s civic engagement seems schizophrenic to me.
Understanding exactly what one’s moral compass is and what it indicates may be another matter, though.
I disagree. You only have to look at which societies have been at the forefront of technical and social development throughout history and note that, whether ancient Greece and Rome, Arabia in the middle-ages or post Renaissance Europe, those tend to be the societies that are the least religious of their age.
Note the inverse correlation between religiosity in a country’s population vs societal happiness.
While correlation doesn’t necessarily imply causation, and it could be just the case that unhappy people seek out religion, you’d think that if religion was beneficial to society, the trend line would point upwards, not downwards.
No, it was the enlightenment. Racism, slavery and genocide not only flourished under Christianity for over a thousand years, but are approved by the Bible. Those Christians who campaigned against slavery did so against Christians who were implementing it based on the Bible. Compare US slave state law codes to Leviticus 25.
Today’s society largely holds to values they have forgotten don’t come from Christianity.
But maybe you know something I don’t. Feel free to quote any text from the Bible that says slavery is wrong.
Yet Paul sends a slave back to his master, and his letters tell slaves to obey their masters, and don’t tell masters to free their slaves, only to treat them kindly.
To be fare, happiness on this earth is not a part of Biblical Christianity/
I think there is a difference between being at peace and content and happiness. Christianity emphasises that there is much suffering in this world and our strength is to endure and conquer rather than be happy.
Christ also emphasised the division belief can cause, even within families/
I do not think there is a solution to this, it is more symptomatic of strong beliefs and certitude.
When fundamenalists insist on things like a special “creation science” in which science is taken to be the lackey of my particular inherited biases and understandings, then my embrace of that shows that I either have not understood modern scientific methodologies or else, understanding them, I have rejected them, letting my own ideological understandings be in the drivers seat for how I understand the workings of the physical cosmos. Or to put this in scriptural terms: I’ve trained myself to set aside God’s creation as an unreliable witness about who God is or how God works providentially in favor of some modern, pseudo-scriptural ideologies like YEC. We’ve seen that played out right here in this very forum as YEC advocates demonstrate their own blindness to most of reality (and therefore even blind to how to read scriptures too - since they’ve divorced them from reality). So while, yes, a modern evangelical easily accepts some science, like airplanes, computers, and electricity - what they need to get along in the moment (that’s the sliver of overlap) - they nonetheless have rejected the very heart of scientific thought (that the best and most robust understanding of reality constantly needs to be tested and skeptically examined to see if it really explains more than any other competing theories in a marketplace of ideas. Therefore, I put the bulk of science outside of their circle - if the only “science” they recognize as true science is “creation science” - then I think it might have been charitable to grant much overalap at all even. But - yes - overlap is there. There are claims they put into the marketplace of ideas after all: a global flood, a recent special creation of everything … those are falsifiable ideas, and they have been falsified. Their rejection of science is exposed for all to see when they show that they cannot accept all that evidence because their religious views cause them to start with the conclusion, and then only admit evidence if it supports that conclusion. That is not how science operates.
Absolutely, it is schizophrenic. It is definitely a bug, not a feature of any religion when it starts to operate that way. I thought that Rauch’s thesis was compelling that American evangelicalism has suffered with this bug for quite a while now - and it’s only become home to roost in the most onerous ways now when the “market” decided that fear and distrust of neightbor and immigrant are now the popular flavor of customer choice. (It was onerous back when it caused evangelicals to be in favor of slavery and segregation too - but we dismiss those as the peculiar problems of our grandparents’ times). During the relatively cozy cold-war times when the market had us all unifying around our fear of Godless communism, we at least still had a tent big enough for each other regardless of skin color or political differences, and it seemed like that “market-drivenness” was working for us (and had enough in common with true Christianity) that maybe this model of churching was okay. (spoiler: it wasn’t). And we can see that so easily now.
Turns out, the prophetic voice is always needed in every age, including ours now. And market-driven religions are extremely hostile to the Christ-anchored prophetic voice. Witness what modern evangelical organizations do to their prophetic voices: they drive them out. There is no room in current American evangelicalism for voices of integrity or honesty or anything that might show disloyalty toward whoever the popular person-of-the-hour is. To speak in those ways will get you promptly shown to the exit door. Just as with the sliver of acceptable ‘science’ - yes - there are grains of ‘truth’ to be found in the modern evangelical’s worldview. But I would put the set of “Truth” as being largely outside their province given that the heart of real truth is rejected if you only marry the spirit of your currently favored culture instead.
First, a comment about the graph: the relationship seems to be curved, rather than linear, suggesting that a group of countries with a high percentage of religious people and low happiness index has a strong effect on the slope of the regression line. Visiting the page you linked, a large proportion of these countries seem to be in Africa or Asia and have predominantly non-Christian population.
Second, I live in Finland that has been ranked on the top of the ‘happiness ranking’ for many years. We are not especially happy people, you would see here less smiling people than in most countries - not a culturally expected habit. One county boasts to be the worlds most pessimistic county, which resonates positively in the hearts of many Finns - some amount of pessimism is considered rational here. The ranking as no. 1 has been a source of jokes and wondering about how is it possible that we have ended on the top of the list. The answer is that the index does not really measure happiness, it measures something else. We just happen to have this ‘something else’ in a bit better shape than the other countries.
Finland is currently post-Christian but the culture is largely based on Christian values and traditions. Some decades ago, >90% of Finns were members in a Christian church, although many were cultural Christians rather than believers.
The principle I am seeing in Leviticus is that chattel slavery is allowed as long as it involves foreigners. There seems to be a contradiction between what early Christians believed and what is found in the Old Testament.
And that is just one of a great many such contradictions. Christianity doesn’t live by all the laws of the Old Testament. A lot of it is thought to apply only to Israel (and ancient times at that). And even those which are thought to apply to Christians changes and varies. Very clearly Christians have not always opposed slavery. And there are groups of Christians which have decided to follow other laws of the Old Testament, which most have long rejected.
This indeed should be considered one of the common dangers of religion. Its reverence for ancient texts means old ways of doing things can be resurrected. Here in Utah you see this with the LDS (Mormons). The mainline church has rejected the practice of polygamy, but its presence in scripture and justifications for the practice in their history causes members to be susceptible to cults reviving the practice. This happened to one of my sisters friends from school.
Racism was unknown in the early church; it also arose due to politics, not religion.
Slavery was opposed by the early church; it came back due to politics, not religion.
Genocide was never practiced by Christianity.
None of these are approved by the Bible – if you ignore the Bible as a whole and treat it as something you can mine for bits that support your ideas, you can dig out such “support”, but that is a fallacious approach.
So God created man in his own image,
in the image of God he created him;
male and female he created them.
He died for all
No, it doesn’t say it in grammar school style, it requires thinking, but the case is solid.
Because the Gospel was/is more important than violating laws to achieve a specific moral end piecemeal.
Not just early Christians; in second Temple Judaism there were rabbis who argued against slavery on the basis of the shared image of God.
But the OT regulations about slavery made it far different from what “chattel slavery” usually means – slaves, regardless of origin, were to be treated as well as family members. As one scholar has noted, what the OT instructions did was to turn slaves from being on the same level as cattle – the ANE standard – to making them into people.
And it’s always been due to politics (and economics); the ‘theology’ has always been just an excuse. Given that Christ died for all, the conclusion that slavery is blasphemy is unavoidable.
What gets me is that if you read Acts 15, the Holy Spirit rejected all those laws. They no longer govern, they’re there to learn from.
I actually met a Mormon guy who had a wife in Utah and a wife in Nevada. It was a violation even of the original Mormon practice because he was maintaining two households that didn’t know about each other.
Ah hang on…im not the one using science clams to interprete scripture…i dont use the literary, genre, tradition/culture arguments…thats the opposition to me.
I dont use ststements such as…
We dont know the origjnal langauge or culture, its been lost
Genesis is allegorical
St paul was wrong when he references to any ancient historical events
Christ was not referencing the flood as an historical event in mathew 24:37-39
God is lying if we read genesis as its written and believe it as such
Moses didnt really exist and there is no evidence to support the exodus…so this story is a myth used only to convey a moral principle to us
The bible does not promote polygammy…the old testament stories where it has been illustrated show quite clearly the inherant problems with the practise.
Which is just a way of saying that you don’t care what scripture actually says, you have your mind made up that it was written for a modern scientific worldview.
See, you can’t avoid genre – there’s no such thing as literature without genre. You’ve just decided that God didn’t use a genre that would have had meaning to His original audience but forced Moses to use one that you don’t have to do any homework in order to understand. That makes God disrespectful and is more than a little arrogant.
As for tradition, that’s what you excel in; you cling to human traditions about scripture instead of actually studying scripture.
And you do use culture: you treat scripture as though God was required to address your culture instead of the one of His original audience. That’s both arrogant and intellectually lazy.
You’re the only one I know here who has ever made those statements; you’re setting up strawman arguments when you make them, as opposed to having enough respect to actually listen to people.
Maybe He was, maybe He wasn’t; there’s no way to determine it from the text. But even if He was, that doesn’t make the Flood a global one (He knew Hebrew better than that!).
I keep waiting for you to read it as it was written! That requires applying the grammatical-historical method, which you reject.
That came about due to a shift in what it meant to be a saint. Originally they were examples of imitating Christ, their stories told as illustrations of being outstanding Christians. Praying to/through saints came later, and only then did the requirement for two miracles (after death, BTW) come into play – it demonstrates that they really do intercede with God.
So would the native Tasmanians, various native American tribes, the Herero and Nama tribes, the Libyans and others.
The Bible approves racism when it describes the Israelites as the “chosen race” and includes laws that are different for Israelites vs non-Israelites. The Bible approves slavery when it includes laws for obtaining and managing slaves. The Bible approves genocide when it describes the slaughter of entire populations, women and male children included, by the army of Moses under God’s command.
That doesn’t say anything about slavery. It definitely doesn’t overrule the sections which describe how to implement slavery.
You can claim my approach is fallacious, but at least the passages I’m quoting are actually about slavery. Your approach is just wishful thinking while ignoring the relevant text.
Asking a slave-owner to free his slaves would not have violated any laws. You are making excuses.
“Anyone who beats their male or female slave with a rod must be punished if the slave dies as a direct result, but they are not to be punished if the slave recovers after a day or two, since the slave is their property.”
