"Laughing At Religion" Meme Thread

[TheWhiteMarten]

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.

What is the purpose in telling the slaves to obey their masters?

Okay.

Okay, although that's also incorrect in that the Church condemned slavery long before; Eugene IV (1435), Papal Bull Silcut Dudum... Paul III (1537), pontifical decree "The Sublime God," and several other Popes all explicitly and unequivocally called out and condemned slavery in their time; the Vatican is not just a religious but a political institution, and particularly following the Black Death the political games went wild.

Unfortunately, pagans and atheists managed to get back into control at Rome - doing some truly horrific damage in the 15 and 1600s.

If we recognize Peter as the first Pope, then we can see that the church has condemned the mistreatment of slaves - and to an extreme degree the entire institution of slavery - from the first century A.D.