(March 21, 2021 at 7:45 pm)Ferrocyanide Wrote: Did Augustine of Hippo read the tanakh? There is nothing wrong with slavery according to that book.

I think you may be glossing over the Jubilee and other dispensations afforded slaves in the tanakh.

(March 21, 2021 at 7:45 pm)Ferrocyanide Wrote: What’s the name of that Augustine of Hippo book?

On the Literal Interpretation of Genesis. The name kind of gives it away.

Quote:Apparently, according to
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Augustine_of_Hippo
“Augustine led many clergy under his authority at Hippo to free their slaves "as an act of piety".[197] He boldly wrote a letter urging the emperor to set up a new law against slave traders and was very much concerned about the sale of children.”

Did Augustine of Hippo read the tanakh? There is nothing wrong with slavery according to that book.

Wildly off topic.

Quote:==If you have harmed yourself, then you are in fact measuring something.

If you are saying that some is obese or anorexic, then you are measuring body type and body weight. You are aiming for a certain weight range.
So if Aristotle, George, Mario or Bobo is telling is not to eat too much, he needs to provide us with a chart. If he doesn’t provide his chart, that means that he didn’t complete his work and someone else has to pick up the slack.
Who is suppose to decide what their ideal body weight should be? Should the obese person decide for himself or should Dr Aristotle, Dr George, Dr Mario and Dr Bobo do it?

Yes, expert advice is welcome. Then for the other sins which consist of misdirected love, like envy, greed, pride, and sloth, you can make up quantifiable charts for those too. It would be interesting to see how we could quantify pride.

Quote:About getting angry at little things. We are going to need a list of these little things. Again, who should prepare the list? The doctors? Yes, probably the doctors, or a group of doctors.
It’s not an impossible task if they set their minds to it.

No book can list every instance in every life of what we should or shouldn't get angry at, and in what degree. The best we can do are general guidelines, and then using our own heads to do our best.

Quote:“We have no absolute way of knowing what's best in each case. You just have to work on it.”


==Those 2 sentences sounded lazy.

As soon as you work out the catalog of how we should behave in every possible instance, in every possible life, let me know. It's going to be a very thick book.

(March 21, 2021 at 9:38 pm)Belacqua Wrote:

(March 21, 2021 at 7:45 pm)Ferrocyanide Wrote: I would say that modern science has it’s roots somewhere in the 1700s.

Why is that? What changed?

Why would you discount the efforts of all the people before that who did successful and important science?

I had mentioned 1700 and onwards, however it is possible to push it further back to the 1600, but it looks like previous to that, science was in a sleepy state, that there wasn’t a scientific community, and the names of people we know that experimented, that tried to gather and organize data gets slim.
It looks like it is mostly in the 1700s and onwards that things started to pick up.

“When Aristotle went to do research at the Kolpos Kalloni on Lesbos?”

==According to
Source:
https://vallianatos.blogspot.com/2018/07...esbos.html
“Aristotle describes more than 500 animals, telling us something of their origins, behavior, anatomy and purpose. He urged humans to love animals  because they are beautiful and teach us truth. He taught that Nature does nothing in vain. Every living thing in the natural world has a purpose.”

What was the next step?
What work did he do with that? Who else worked with him? Who used his book about these 500 animals?

--Ferrocyanide

(March 21, 2021 at 10:26 pm)Angrboda Wrote:

(March 21, 2021 at 7:45 pm)Ferrocyanide Wrote: Did Augustine of Hippo read the tanakh? There is nothing wrong with slavery according to that book.

I think you may be glossing over the Jubilee and other dispensations afforded slaves in the tanakh.

Jubilee happened every 50 years. Life expectancy was 30 years and less for a slave. What sort of fucked up dispensation was that?

The same kind of dispensation that beating them as long as they didn't immediately die was. Every axial religion has posited that there's nothing wrong with slavery, the belief that there could be good or bad slave owners, and a system of laws to standardize that, is a comment on them as people, not on the institution.

There is absolutely no point in trying to sanitize our slaving gods history. Each and every tale served as a way to explain and justify and enshrine the current state of political affairs and authority, and insomuch as slavery was the norm in the axial shift, slavery is a norm to regulate in axial religions - not an evil to eliminate.

It would be a rookie mistake....or an apologists lifeline... to refer to what a culture believed about the appropriate treatment of their own ingroup (or buy-in group) as their position on the institution of slavery. Just as it would be a rookie mistake or an apologists lifeline to assume that a suggestion born out of virtue seeking establishes the evil of it's content. It's good to treat your slaves well and to free slaves not because slavery is bad, but because doing either of those things was perceived to be detrimental to the owner. The virtue is sacrifice and inconvenience, not kindness or freedom granting. The hilarity is compounded when we begin to consider a religion that made an appeal to slaves as a lever of social and political control over their betters.

(March 22, 2021 at 10:52 am)The Grand Nudger Wrote: The same kind of dispensation that beating them as long as they didn't immediately die was.  Every axial religion has posited that there's nothing wrong with slavery, the belief that there could be good or bad slave owners, and a system of laws to standardize that, is a comment on them as people, not on the institution.  

There is absolutely no point in trying to sanitize our slaving gods history.  Each and every tale served as a way to explain and justify and enshrine the current state of political affairs and authority, and insomuch as slavery was the norm in the axial shift, slavery is a norm to regulate in axial religions - not an evil to eliminate.

It would be a rookie mistake....or an apologists lifeline... to refer to what a culture believed about the appropriate treatment of their own ingroup (or buy-in group) as their position on the institution of slavery.  Just as it would be a rookie mistake or an apologists lifeline to assume that a suggestion born out of virtue seeking establishes the evil of it's content.  It's good to treat your slaves well and to free slaves not because slavery is bad, but because doing either of those things was perceived to be detrimental to the owner.  The virtue is sacrifice and inconvenience, not kindness or freedom granting.  The hilarity is compounded when we begin to consider a religion that made an appeal to slaves as a lever of social and political control over their betters.

Nonetheless, there's more nuance than he acknowledged, and even ingroup exception shows that they knew that being a slave was undesirable and were taking that into account.

Or it shows that they viewed themselves to be superior to the enslaveable classes, slavery being an a-okay norm - as it was in the case of axial slaveholders, axial religions, and even today, with contemporary white separatists.

There's a ton of nuance to any of this, for sure..but that nuance doesn't bare out the revisionist apologia we find ourselves being continually subjected to.

Pardon my ignorance, but what does 'axial' mean in this context?

Karen Armstrong has a book on the subject - The Great Transformation. Plenty of differences of opinion - but roughly it refers to those beliefs which have their origin between the 800ish-300ish bc.

Profound cultural and political shifts.

Quote:Axial Age (also Axis Age, from German: Achsenzeit) is a term coined by German philosopher Karl Jaspers in the sense of a "pivotal age", characterizing the period of ancient history from about the 8th to the 3rd century BCE.

During this period, according to Jaspers' concept, new ways of thinking appeared in Persia, India, China and the Greco-Roman world in religion and philosophy, in a striking parallel development, without any obvious direct cultural contact between all of the participating Eurasian cultures. Jaspers identified key thinkers from this age who had a profound influence on future philosophies and religions, and identified characteristics common to each area from which those thinkers emerged.

Many have questioned whether the 'axial age' is a legitimate category of history. Critics posit that there is no demonstrable common denominator between the intellectual developments alleged to have developed in unison across ancient Judah, Greece, India, and China. Despite positing this as the pertinent period of the ushering in of new forms of thought, critics say that pivotal figures from other areas are ignored including Jesus, Muhammad, Zarathustra, Akhenaten, and others. Even with the four aforementioned regions, significant continuity exists in the 'preaxial' and 'postaxial' periods, contra proponents of the axial age who posit that it represented a period of radial discontinuity. Finally, what represents 'axial' in contrast to what doesn't and how these ideas manifest across specific thinkers is far from clear.

Wikipedia || Axial Age