What is with refusing to admit slavery is wrong?

[CapnAwesome]

I don't think that morality has changed at all. Slavery was immoral in the past because it caused pain and suffering to people. Slavery is immoral today because it causes pain and suffering to people. It's just that our understanding of it has advanced.

I also think that if you are a moral relativist you have to admit that Christianity was morally advanced for the time.

Oh, please. Read Paul and what he had to say on slavery. That they should obey even a cruel master. Morally advanced, my ass.

And what's the point to judge the past by our moral standards? As a historian you virtually go blind if you do, since you fail to understand the motivations of certain societies. They lived by what they thought was the best for their particular society. By our standards it seems barbaric, but it's nothing but an emotional statement to apply our standards on people who lived and died more than a thousand years ago.

Morality is always changing. And it is and never was the same in every region of the world. By the standards of most Western countries the enforcement of capital punishment in the USA is barbaric. The whole punitive system is. So there aren't even the same standards within the Western world in our present day and age.

Well compare Paul (or Jesus) to Muhammad and they come out looking like roses. This is hundreds of years before him too. Actually this is my problem with the argument. While Christianity may have been morally advanced for the time, it totally fails when it we hold it up to our standards today.

Also I think when you and me say morality we are using the word in totally different ways. So when I say something is moral, it means that it causes the largest amount of good to the largest amount of people. That's the standard, not what people around subjectively say is moral. So what causes the most good to the most people hasn't changed at all in the last 10000 years. Slavery caused pain and suffering 1000 years ago and it causes the same pain and suffering today. It was always immoral it's just that people had a limited understanding of that. The same way people had a limited understanding of all kinds of things