(July 31, 2023 at 8:55 pm)Neo-Scholastic Wrote: You're a thankless shithead to all the heros of the past who made incredibly difficult incremental progress towards the recognition of human rights that now, in retrospect, seem obvious. But they definitly were not obvious back then.
And the reason it wasn't obvious in the past was because people followed the Bible where god clearly expects from people to keep slaves; makes it clear that every man is free to sell his daughter into sexual slavery; Jesus did not object to the practice of keeping slaves, Paul even admonishes slaves to serve their masters well.
So while the abolitionists of the 19th century were morally right, they were on the losing side of a theological argument. As the Reverend Richard Fuller put it in 1845, "What God sanctioned in the Old Testament, and permitted in the New, cannot be a sin."
teachings of the Bible are so muddled and self-contradictory that it was possible for Christians to happily burn heretics alive for five long centuries. It was even possible for the most venerated patriarchs of the Church, like St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, to conclude that heretics should be tortured (Augustine) or killed outright (Aquinas). Martin Luther and John Calvin advocated the wholesale murder of heretics, apostates, Jews, and witches. - Sam Harris, "Letter To A Christian Nation"
