pop morality

[Simon Moon]

I don't have that problem, Drich.  You seem to be afflicted, though...which is perplexing...since you "have god".  The two appear to be related in your case, to me.....I don't think we'd have ever had to watch you extoll the virtues of slavery, for example, had you not needed to account for it in your magic book.  You know better.  You know what popped out at me....bullshit, as predicted.

 Some of my very first memories are of my Grandfather working in another man's field. Him working the land to bring in a harvest of whatever, lining up buyers making a Larger Roll of cash, counting it all out into three stacks and giving the two big ones away to the land owner(s) (a guy who maybe once a year fired up a old tractor and cut in the garden rows my grand father worked.) while he kept the smaller one. When I first found out about slavery i asked my teacher what was the difference, and she like most of you said it was because G-pa got some money.. then I asked what was the threshold or what was the limit one could take and still be a slave? A penny, nickle Dime for every hour worked? what if he got a quarter per hour would he not then be a slave? No one could give me a good answer for a long time.

i later discovered that the answer is a livable wage. One had to make enough to live on, in relation to a resaonable work week.

So then the question has become, why don't we call slaves slaves any more if so many in this country work for less than what it takes to live on?

The bottom line is the whole economic structure we use is built like an inverted pyramid where those at the bottom (the majority of the people have little to no money) while the people on top retain most of it. If we flip the pyramid the money becomes worthless. it becomes liter. (there is a really good Duck tales episode that explains this with bottle caps and the people of Shangri-la)

Money only has value because it is hard to come by. If everyone has it then the value of it goes down, and one needs more to represent the same value.
For instance they say the value of Gold has remained static since it was used as the back bone of our economy. the reason the price changes is because when our money gains value the price goes down, or it is devalued when the price goes up. If you ever want to see how devalued our money has become, or if you ever want to truly measure a given president's economic impact look at the price of gold when he took office verse the price of gold when he left.

I say all of that to say, because our economic structure is dependent on having the majority of the money controlled by as few of the people as possible, or in the case of communism or socialism controlled or held by the government. the lower classes will have to be subsidized as their access to said money will be more limited.

What we have done in the west is to elevate the middle class, and further more have been successful at putting more people in the middle classes, by playing with the global markets rather than limiting ourselves to domestic ones. This means in those select countries, the majority of the population belongs to the middle class/A consumer class of people.

Which allows the global economy to tap 3rd world countries to become the bottom of that inverted pyramid. Which is not an all a bad thing. Because their cost of living is so much lower, we could potentially create a very beneficial symbiotic relationship, in that we get the very cheap hourly/subsidized labor needed for our economic systems to work, and we get to bring up the standard of living in our western countries as well as the third world nations, as they would only need to provide a fraction of the labor costs needed to produce any given product in their country verse this one.
allowing them a semi livable wage with subsidized living expenses and or housing. That's if and only if everyone stays on the up and up and everything gets properly regulated. (which by the way is still slavery).

However the opposite is true. We pretend slavery is all but gone, and we hide our eyes to all but the worst of the worst examples, allowing the companies that provide us with the things we buy the freedom to regulate themselves.

Bottom line we need slaves, and they need us so long as we both use money as some sort of our primary means to trade with. It provides us/west with the ability to expand humanity's horizons (Technology, Going to Mars, ect.. maybe even some day create cylons to be humanities slaves so all of humanity can live in the 'middle class.'/can't see a down side to that one.) And they right now need the jobs we create as consumers to live a better life than what was there before the big companies moved in. (to bring them into at least 20th century living)

None of this has anything to do with God. This is just how the world you/we live in works. God is only ever brought into the picture when one of you self righteous d-bags believes his own hype. In that you are a supremely 'moral' person and all slavery is wrong no matter what. Just because you are so sort sighted you can not see the very life you live has been provided by slaves.

From the first time i ever heard about slavery I knew it never went anywhere. I saw slavery daily and it took a long time for me to see how and why it must be. I personally saw that even though the division of money was not always fair, that our family needed what was grown in the field as much as the land owner needed that money to pay who he had to pay. that without each other both families/people suffered. then it stopped being about effort/work put in and came about responsibility. what each of us owes in relation to what we have been put in charge of. But that is a lesson for another time.

In the end, my view of slavery was not developed because i needed to reconcile God. My view of slavery was needed to keep me from blowing up at self righteous people who pretend that all slavery was bad all the time no matter what. Or it kept me in check when far flung descendants of slaves, talked about being owed something personally done to a relative they did not even know the name of. While the picture of the strips on my grandfathers back went through my head, or the stories my mother and grandmother told of my lost aunts and uncles who were smothered as babies when they cried as all the women and children had to hide from imperial soldiers.. And it was the baby had to die, or the whole group would suffer...

My view on slavery is much much older than my argument that supports what God says of it. I always held that we own slaves everything, and in this debt we should never minimize their contributions to all the great things society can in fact now do because of what slaves provide us with (economic stability) needed to presue things like Space travel, Technology, and robotics that otherwise would not be possible. To minimize this Modern contribution is beyond evil/Immoral just because a modern slave does not fit a old profile the self righteous use to hoist their worthless asses on their high moral horses!

All this to redefine slavery, so you can attempt to justify low income workers as slaves, so you can further justify your god condoning slavery in your magic book.

I believe deep down, when it comes the Biblical slavery issue, most Christians are more moral than the god that condones it. Which is the reason they have to twist themselves into knots trying to explain why a moral god would condone slavery.

You, I'm not so sure...