(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 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.