I don’t think Paul was in a position to abolish slavery. He did what was practicable which was call for humane treatment of slaves and for them to get freedom if possible.
He didn’t call for any of that shit. he told slaves to obey their masters.
And I wasn’t just talking about Paul. The Bible unambiguously endorses slavery, says that killing a slave isn’t murder and even says that God sometimes ordered the Israelites to take slaves (sex slaves in particular - God orders Israelite men to rape non-Israelite women). That’s not even the worst of what’s in the Bible, though. I don’t remember Cato telling people to bash out babies’ brains on rocks.
The only reason Christians are not raping, mass killing and plundering everyone in existence in our times is because of the Renaissance idea of secular morality – that every person has a right of self determination.
Christianity is vehemently opposed to the idea of equal treatment.
That’s why it’s a mental disorder.
Oh noes, legalized prostitution! And drugs! That place must be like hell on earth, with a much greater violent crime rate per capita than the God-fearing U.S. Except none of that is the case.
What’s wrong with that?
The very fact that you say that with derision shows the horrible effect Christianity has had. The backwards delusion you’re living under is manifestly making your life worse and doing nothing whatsoever to improve it.
Well not nothing, I imagine the belief in an afterlife is comforting. Even if you have to go through the mental equivalent of foot-binding to get it.
Actually, prostitution is illegal here in all its forms, believe it or not. Not that it matters.
But far fom being hell on Earth, it’s a paradise if for no other reason than the wide Pacific Ocean separates me from those of the OP’s bent. I had to grow up around that nonsense.
The ancient Greeks and Romans were hardly gentle when it came to their slaves and in many ways were quite worse than Christian slave owners later on.
Anyway this is a really dumb argument.
The scriptures of all the Abrahamic religions and the major prophets of those religions all endorsed, or at least condoned slavery.
Slavery only became considered immoral once people came up with the concept of living in a society where everyone was equal.
That’s why opposition to slavery developed in the West while not in other parts of the world where people lived in hierarchical societies where slaves where simply the lowest rung.
In societies where everyone was supposed to be equal slavery looked hypocritical. In societies where there were various hierarchies(I.E. the Ottoman, Chinese, Roman, or Aztec Empire) slavery looked natural.
So what? The point is that the Abrahamic religions were no more enlightened than anybody else.
As a matter of fact, the American chattel slave system practiced by “Christians” was about the most brutal slave system of all.
Only if your Buddha is made of straw…:rolleyes:
I think they’re talking about Amsterdam
Anyway, to answer the OP - I think things would have been pretty much the same, with some religion winning out. The parts of the world that aren’t Christian are not that far removed from those that are, and always were. There were always wars, there was always invention, there was always slavery, etc . Christianity has had impacts both positive and negative in both regards there. It’s worse than some religions, better than others (Can you imagine a world where it was the Aztecs who invaded Europe?)
But it all comes out in the wash. It takes the aftermath of an Industrial Revolution, scientific discoveries like evolution and physics, and increased urbanisation for religion to become irrelevant. Before then, there was always a space for it.
Like Pratchett says, there’s a design flaw in humans. It’s our tendency to bend at the knees.
I’m going to tackle this one bit by bit. Lemur866 You seem to have a misunderstanding of certain important logical, and philosophical issues at play here.
It doesn’t matter what religion a person is; it is their accomplishments and the motivation behind them that is important. Newton is a product of the enlightenment and though highly religious, he was an unorthodox christian, rejected trinitarianism, and worked quite hard to dismantle traditional Christian dogma of heliocentrism.
Here we see two points at play. Access to advanced knowledge was still held tightly by the church- and Newton did not wish to place himself in conflict with his religious beliefs which he held separate from those of science. He was anything BUT a rank and file, average believer.
English Protestants were often just as intolerant as the Catholics, and their progeny are among the worst offenders today. If you are going to argue that relatively neutral influence of the church upon science in the last couple of hundred years is owed to anything but an acceptance of the changing times science and rational thought ushered in, you are going to need to show it somehow. Moreover, you need to show how merely stepping aside when the people simply grew wise enough to see what was going on, (and reluctantly at that; see the developing world), pays positive returns for over a thousand years of popular intellectual suppression.
My argument is not that Christianity is such a great religion. Obviously the Enlightenment happened in spite of Christianity, not because of it.
My argument is that if the native religion of a region is implacably hostile to science and reason, how did it come to be that that region developed science before all the other regions of the world that didn’t have such a horrible anti-science religion?
And yes, of course the “relatively neutral influence of the church upon science in the last couple of hundred years is owed to anything but an acceptance of the changing times science and rational thought ushered in”. That’s the whole point. Those Christian fanatics who hate science and rationality for some reason just gave up in the face of science and rationality. Why did they do that if Christianity is so implacably opposed to science?
As for slavery in the US… yes, Southerners used their brand of Christianity to condone it, but some of the most vocal and vehement abolitionists were devout Christians, and they used their brand of Christianity to condemn it.
Arguably, but don’t react like I’m just pulling the Christianity-weakened-the-Empire idea out of my ass – it goes back at least to Edward Gibbon. (In fact it goes back to St. Augustine, who felt obliged to answer it.)
How come the Islamic world never had a scientific or industrial revolution?
Glad we are on the same page, I wasn’t sure we were. Sorry If my last post came across as pedantic.
This is a complex question that has a lot of players at work including politics, wars, climate, and indidgenous practices, I’ll focus on religion here but understand a lot more went into it than just this one topic. The best guess that I could provide for you is that Christianity in that period Was a defacto government unto itself. Whatever it’s position, or motivations it provided a stable, organized class of privileged people. Like other regions, these elite were quite educated compared to the average peasant. However, a powerful an upwardly mobile merchant class placed higher demand on advanced skills and goods than before. These necessitated some education of the workers, which when combined with enough wealth and power to have leisure and influence naturally began to produce people who started questioning. Ironically, it could be argued that it was the greed and excess of the Church that led directly to the earlier creation of a moderately educated middle class. That certainly doesn’t mean however, that such a result was the goal of the church.
Adapt or perish. In the face of extinction you can either change your position a little to gather back the favorable fringe or you can become extinct. A good example is the Vatican summits of the Catholic Church and the Recent struggles of the Russian Orthodox with massive corruption. People expect a religion to serve their needs, not the other way around. Now we are far more likely to have watchdog groups and question unreasonable practices.
Your parody of Der Trihs can be amusing, at times, but when you start running off the rails with disinformation, I’m afraid that you start failing seriously.
The most raping, murdering, and plundering committed by Christians all occurred after the Renaissance–in fact, much of the worst of it occurred during the Renaissance. The notion that Christianity suddenly stopped being barbarous under the gentle tutelage of Renaissance scholars is without any basis in fact.
I am making no claims that Christianity is wonderful, but your blind hatred keeps leading you to make absurd claims.
This really only shows that people use religion to support whatever side they already want to support. They aren’t led to those positions (good or ill) by religion, people just always find a way to make their religion support their a priori opinions.
OK, I can go with that. The point still being that blaming slavery on Christianity doesn’t make sense. Especially since slavery was prevalent in pretty much every culture in the world.