Why Do We Think Slavery is Evil?

[robvalue]

First of all, it is difficult to know without accurate information of what was really going on those millennia ago.

In those days, most of the 'slaves' may have been just as happy or happier as a 'slave' with room and board as long as they were treated well. Even if they were not 'slaves', and were working for someone, they may actually have been treated worse by an employer than a master and maybe not even have as good room and board as the slaves. They did not have unions in those days so, IMHO, six of one, half a dozen of the other.

Now days, how much better off is a minimum wage worker than a slave? Is slavery really gone?

The bible clearly states you can beat your slave as long as they don't die within a couple of days. (Slavery, not indentured servitude.) I think that alone seperates biblical slavery from any sort of current minimum wage work. Plus, someone can quit a minimum wage job and just walk away to do whatever else they want to do. So they're not anything like the same even if you're talking about some weird sort of "good" slavery which may or may not have ever existed. (Very unlikely in my opinion.)

I'm not suggesting they necessarily have any other great opportunities, but the point is they can walk away.

[Minimalist]

Why did Rhett Butler tell Scarlett O'Hara that he frankly, didn't give a damn?  Why does any fictional character do anything.

There is no attestation of any Solomon in the archaeological record nor the historical record.  He's a biblical creation.

Oddly, there may have been a model for him.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shalmaneser_V



Solomon?  Sulmanu??  You tell me.

Jerusalem...if it was even called that...in the 10th century was a miserable little hilltop village of a few hundred people.  After overrunning the northern kingdom the Assyrian empire made a vassal state of Judah in the 8th century and was, in fact, a great and rich empire.  It was exactly the kind of glorious capital which the later fiction writers of the OT used as a model for Jerusalem.  There was even a model for Solomon's so-called temple near Aleppo in Syria.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ain_Dara_%...al_site%29


Not only is the OT bullshit....it isn't even original bullshit.

So should I stop using Dark & Lovely shampoo?

No Solomon. That's deep. I'm going to study that.  Particularly if there are any extra-biblical writings about the queen of Sheba.

Our original discussion was about how the  Jews treated non Jewish slaves and whether the difference was due to racial or tribal differentiation. I don't even know how to begin to argue such a point here. What would race mean during that time?  Or even now. I knew a guy from Sri Lanka who had really straight hair but his skin was as black as the ace of spades. Yet. he did not think of himself as black in the same way that I am black. So what the fuck does it mean?

 I guess the first depends on how happy you are with your hair.  Long training has taught me to always say "that looks nice, dear."

There is the Kebra Nagast...but that is just Ethiopian bullshit.  There was a very valuable spice trade between Assyria and SW Yemeni kingdom of the Sabeans.  One would expect that this lucrative trade would result in extravagant wealth on both termini of the route and certainly Nineveh in Assyria qualified.  In the 8-7th centuries BC even the vassal states of Assyria along the route, Judah, Edom, Moab, prospered.  But Solomon and Sheba?  No. Just bible bullshit.  Perhaps the ruler of Sabea sent a couple of female slaves to Shalmaneser to give a proxy blowjob?  I could buy that.

Take a look at this wall painting from the tomb of Seti I.



Seti was pharaoh c 1300 BC.  Above are the various subject peoples of his empire.  Libyans, Nubians, Canaanites, Hurrians, and Egyptians....all under the watchful eye of Horus.
No one is depicted any differently.  All are Seti's loyal subjects.  Clearly the painter comprehended the difference in skin tone as well as costume but that's about the extent of it.  Egypt would have been one of the few places where different "races" came together.

Certainly people knew that there were black people in the world as in the early 7th century the 25th Dynasty (the Nubian Dynasty) pharaoh Taharqa campaigned against the Assyrians in the region.  I doubt that anyone would have regarded such a powerful king and his army as inferior to anything.

[Wyrd of Gawd]

I don't believe that anyone can really make a strong case as to why slavery in on its own is evil. You can make the emotional arguments. Like Matt D on the atheist experience will always ask, Do you want to be a slave? And of course no one in this day and age would say yes. But you can't really make a logical reasoned argument for why it is wrong or immoral without appealing to emotions. Its easy to say that its wrong to make another human your property but why isn't it the same as a sports league? I know that this will get quickly shot down because of reasons like the fact that Kobe Bryant can walk away from basketball at any moment and he is free to roam about as he wants. But we have to remember that until just a couple hundred years ago, humans in general worked 10-12 hours a day doing laborious jobs. Its not like they even had the free time to go anywhere, or even the ability to go more than a couple miles.

  But the problem is that we always think back to slavery in the south or have an imagined view of slavery where they're all chained up at night time. I don't know if thats how slavery in the bible worked. I believe that they did have certain freedoms but free or not you would be stuck doing labor 6 days a week. I know this isn't a popular view but I am curious if anyone has thoughts on slavery that don't appeal to emotions

Be my slave for a week and see if you will still compare it to a sports league.

[Wyrd of Gawd]

I would think that slavery would make it harder for poor, free people to climb out of poverty. How do you compete with free labor?

I was watching a documentary about the KKK in NC. Apparently, wealthy southerners looked down on poor, white 'trash' and poor whites comforted themselves by looking down on blacks. It made me wonder what would have happened if blacks and poor whites have joined together to change things. Slavery and racism, at least in the south, kept apart two groups that should have worked together. Does anyone think that it is reasonable to say that slavery hurts not just the enslaved but the free lower classes also? If so, it seems as if slavery only benefits a small group of wealthy people so it isn't good for most of society.

The only reason the Southern colonies joined the Northern colonies in the Revolutionary War was so that they could maintain slavery in America.

[Rhondazvous]

I have a simple moral rule of thumb.  I ask myself if I would think a thing fair or right if I were yet to be born and writing the rules before I knew who I would be.  Slavery would be right out by that standard.

That's an interesting way to look at things. That's what sets humans above other animals—imagination. To dismiss it or discount it is devolution.

[Tonus]

I don't know the answers to some of the questions you raise. My point is mainly that in those times, people weren't saving up for retirement. They weren't golfing on the weekends. And they were definitely not checking out the latest hot restaurant. However you put it, they needed food, shelter and clothing. Maybe there could have been a better system.

We have the ability to apply empathy, sympathy, and imagination to the situation.  If we're talking about an agricultural society using the technology of the times, I think it could function quite well without the concept of owning people.  Either via wages or barter, people could still provide for one another.  Slavery really doesn't seem necessary in a society where an able-bodied person can't really sponge off of the rest, where it seems clear that everyone benefits when he pitches in (including that person).  Where is the benefit in keeping your own tribesmen as property?

But regardless, gods purpose was to not make this system a perfect world but rather to go back to his original plan of having a peaceful world in paradise. So it wouldn't make logical sense for him to employ a system that was perfect because he knew it would require perfect humans to carry it out.

There are two problems with this idea.  For one, if the world with a god works no differently than the world without a god, then god is either nonexistent or superfluous.  If god's guidance were to make a people in a backwards time seem very forward-thinking, that might be a very convincing bit of evidence.

Second, this is a god who took a very direct and active role in human society at the time.  He had thrashed the Egyptians with plagues, then wiped out their army by dumping an entire sea on them.  He led his chosen people through the desert by making it rain food, and making the rocks gush water.  He eventually led them on a miracle-laden conquering of several other tribes, doing such things as making city walls crumble.  In later times he would send an angel to massacre 180,000 Assyrian soldiers in a single night, and make the sun stand still in the sky to allow for another victory in war.  He even cared about the little things, striking dead a man who tried to steady the ark of the covenant when it appeared as if it might fall.

Yet when it came to slavery and rape, he seems to have been constrained by their stubbornness?  Or their cultural mores?  He wrote a law that made it a sin to covet your neighbor's stuff, but owning other people and taking the virgin girls of conquered people as wives (or alternatively, kidnapping them) was a line he couldn't cross?  That doesn't make sense.  It's so inconsistent on his part as to be almost random.  And a god with the kind of power and temperament of the OT Yahweh is bad enough, but if we also make him unpredictable he's the most terrifying villain we can possibly imagine.

[Tonus]

Really, evolutionist why would you consider slavery bad (though I'm glad you do), in evolution the human life is no more important than the life of a dog or cow (I've heard that said right here many times by several people).

Evolution is just a process of change over time, so it should not inform an opinion in that way. At best, if we notice how many other species behave, we would place our own welfare as a species above that of any other. But since we have (mostly) risen above instinct, we can reason the matter out. I suppose a person can argue that every life has the same value, but barring mental or psychological issues no functioning human actually behaves that way.

[Rhondazvous]

I wasn't trying to answer your question. I addressed the part of your post that was relevant to the present discussion. If you want to start a thread about what constitutes slavery, you are welcome to do so.

Except, how is anyone to have a conversation with you about slavery if you don't tell them what constitutes it in your eyes?

That's a fair enough question

I can define two forms of slavery. And by the way, this isn't about what white people did to black people since there is no group of people on Earth that has not at some time in history been enslaved by some other group in one of these two ways. eg. North Africans enslaved European sailors who got lost in the Mediterranean sea, though I'm not sure if that slavery took the form of chattel slavery or mere peonage (the US Constitution makes a difference between slavery and involuntary servitude) .

1. Chattel slavery. When a human is reduced to property that can be bought, sold, inherited, used to pay debts

2. Wage slavery: When one class of people (capitalists) benefit from the labor of a larger group of people (laborers) and the group that does the work has no power to affect its working conditions or chance at a better life. This could be seen as a form of feudalism and probably doesn't fall under the Constitution without proactive advocacy.

[Drich]

You may recognize the following question as a spin-off from the thread by Catholic-Lady about how we determine that  some things are good and some things evil. This is a spin-off and not subject to her intentions, stated or denied. I have my own intentions and my hope is that this question will spark an interesting and thought provoking discussion.

Question. Let’s assume, for the sake of argument, that our sense of right and wrong comes from god. Now, since the Judeo/Christian holy books do not prohibit slavery, from where do we get the idea that slavery is evil?

Jewish Scriptures:
Leviticus 25:44-46
   However, you may purchase male or female slaves from among the foreigners who live among you.  You may also purchase the children of such resident foreigners, including those who have been born in your land.  You may treat them as your property, passing them on to your children as a permanent inheritance.  You may treat your slaves like this, but the people of Israel, your relatives, must never be treated this way.

Since god says they are not to treat other Jews this way, this is obviously slavery based on race.

Christian Scriptures
Ephesians 6:5
Slaves, obey your earthly masters with deep respect and fear.  Serve them sincerely as you would serve Christ.

When a man asked Jesus to heal his slave, Jesus did not rebuke him for having a slave in the first place, but declared that he had never seen such faith. (Luke 7:3-9)

Now fast forward to the 21st century. We have folks declaring that slavery is a great evil against men kind. This is not a question of why the Bible doesn’t speak against slavery. I’ve heard the explanations. But this question asks instead from where did we get the a priori idea to when god clearly had no problem with it.

Slavery is a non issue in Scripture because we are all slaves to something or someone. we in modern time simple relable our slavery into various sub catagories and then it becomes not only ok but expected in some instances. What we don't rename draws a picture of what slavery was in the 17th and 18th century on plantations in the US. Now the word 'slavery' only means a black man in a field being worked to death, but in the time of Christ slavery meant being poor, and making a living for yourself and your family. Got to remember the world did not have the same dependence on currency we do now, and a lot of what was done was on barter. 10 years of slvery= 10 years room board for you and your family. This is the biblical picture of slavery that many of you don't seem to get. not just a white man beating a black man in a cotton field.

[FatAndFaithless]

Ahh, there's the Drich 'slavery isn't wrong' apologetic that I've come to know and loathe