RE: "Laughing At Religion" Meme Thread
November 9, 2024 at 2:10 am
(This post was last modified: November 9, 2024 at 2:11 am by Fake Messiah.)
(November 9, 2024 at 1:58 am)TheWhiteMarten Wrote: In a select few instances slavery is condoned - instances where enemies of Israel, those tribes who sacrificed children and spent centuries raiding and killing the Hebrew people, were defeated in war.
There is nothing here to be ashamed of, most Western Christians simply are not aware of the historical contexts and thus cannot provide a satisfactory answer of the top of their head.
I would highly recommend reading Philemon - a letter written by a friend to another, on behalf of a slave - if you want to see how Christians view slavery.
I have seen Christians view slavery, like when Paul in the Bible says to slaves to obey their masters.
Or when Pope Nicholas V issued a bull in the 15th century in which he allowed Europeans to enslave and kidnap the pagan people of Africa as long as they baptized them first.
Popes and other fathers of the Catholic Church owned slaves as late as 1800. Jesuits in colonial Maryland and nuns in Europe and Latin America owned slaves. The Church did not condemn slavery until 1888 after every Western nation had abolished the practice. The church even had slaves in the 20th century, in those washeries where they kept unpaid labor as girls to wash clothes for money that the Church kept to itself.
teachings of the Bible are so muddled and self-contradictory that it was possible for Christians to happily burn heretics alive for five long centuries. It was even possible for the most venerated patriarchs of the Church, like St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, to conclude that heretics should be tortured (Augustine) or killed outright (Aquinas). Martin Luther and John Calvin advocated the wholesale murder of heretics, apostates, Jews, and witches. - Sam Harris, "Letter To A Christian Nation"