pop morality

[TheRocketSurgeon]

For F*CK'S SAKE!!

I typed a huge, individually-detailed response, and before I could click "Post Reply", it discarded all my freakin' text!

I'm not typing that bullshit again.

TL;dr version:

1) You need to read the articles you cite more closely. The Inca did not have the type of slaves we're talking about, and the deaths to which you refer were the king's servants, along with a host of other people, who were sacrificed in his "honor". The article specifically states that their economic system was not a slave system:

"The economy of the Inca Empire has been characterized as involving a high degree of central planning. While evidence of trade between the Inca Empire and outside regions has been uncovered, there is no evidence that the Incas had a substantial internal market economy. While axe-monies were used along the northern coast, presumably by the provincial mindaláe trading class, most inhabitants of the empire would have lived in a traditional economy in which male heads of household were required to pay taxes both in kind (e.g., crops, textiles, etc.) and in the form of the mit'a corvée labor and military obligations, though barter (or trueque) was also present in some areas. In return, the state provided security, food in times of hardship through the supply of emergency resources, agricultural projects (e.g. aqueducts and terraces) to increase productivity, and occasional feasts. The economy rested on the material foundations of the vertical archipelago, a system of ecological complementarity in accessing resources, and the cultural foundation of ayni, or reciprocal exchange."

(Mit'a Corvée was a system of required public service to the state, and was not a system of individual slave ownership, but of an expectation of shared labor among all Inca.)

2) No matter how you bend it, economic exploitation is not the same as slavery. Slavery is easily defined as the ownership of a person as property by another person. The other situations are bad, exploitative, and worthy of discussion as potential "also morally wrong" issues, but they are not slavery.

3) No matter how much you try to manipulate our emotions or divert the subject, you will never get away from one basic fact:

Gawd Awl'maihty could have ordered the Israelites not to practice slavery, and being the Creator of the Universe™ instead of a lowly human priest/prophet, might have had better advice for how to conduct ourselves in the absence of exploitation than we humans could devise on our own... instead, Gawd Awl'maighty decided to worry about menstrual blood, foreskins, and sodomy. Since this conversation primarily revolves (when you're not trying to distract us from that fact) around whether your religion and its scriptures constitute a superior alternative to what you're choosing to label "pop" morality, the fact that your book endorses something we'd expect to see from Ancient Near East humanity but not from a being that surpasses all time and space In His Perfect Morality™ seems more than a little relevant.

Thus, as we keep pointing out to you and you keep ignoring, your tu quoque arguments are a win for our side, not for yours.