Does the positive side of tribalism/racism outshine the negative side?

[Silver]

Indeed, the logical conclusion upon reading the story where god hardened the heart of the pharaoh is that there was never any expectation of salvation. Rather, it’s just a story of a wrathful god taking extreme pleasure in unleashing plagues upon people, something Christian writers learned from the Greeks, no doubt.

[The Grand Nudger]

ISH - While christianity is highly syncretic, the greeks were informed of their opinion in this regard by the state of the world around them - as many others have been all on their own, and as the proto-jewish storytellers could have easily surmised without help.

A god like that, explains a world like this, or so they thought.

We don't need to dip into myths about things that never happened, though, to comment on the hardening of hearts. I am personally incapable of salvation, for example, because the christian god - through his salvific plan, has hardened my heart to it. Completely, utterly, irrevocably. I cannot be saved because I cannot help but reject the means through which it's said to be achieved. f gods plan was to save me, and if god hardens hearts so that a soul might be saved - the manner in which god decided to bo about acheiving this annihilates the possibility of salvation. Tack prefers to contextualize this as a character defect by any other name, an excess of pride, for example. That's an attempt to negotiate over his own rationalization - that his good god does a bad thing because I do a bad thing - a rationalization which we chastise human children for.

Truth is, I simply can't string the other guy up, or accept literal blood money from the same. God can do any shitty thing he wants, but if this is the shitty thing that he wants to do, it's not going to work. That exceeds my own threshold for what moral evil i'm willing to accept for an instrumental good..which would matter, if i desired the instrumental good in the first place - which I don't.

[Silver]

Well, that is how storytelling works, generally. It’s also best to not confuse fantasy with reality, as theists are wont to do with their religious beliefs.

[The Grand Nudger]

Fantasy can help us to contextualize our reality in meaningfully factually ways - and since we're on the subject (of fantasy, lol)... perhaps the reason that we haven't heard from the christian god in 2k years is that he learned his lesson in much the same way that we do - by fucking up.

He wanted something so bad that he botched it, and following his example, christians have been fucking up ever since in precisely the same way.

It's difficult to imagine the shame that a competent moral agent would feel at being the source of all that, though we can look at earthly (and far smaller) examples of the same type of decision - examples that this thread is full of, to get some idea.

[Silver]

Fantasy helps to cope, nothing more. Much in the same way that readers find an escape through reading. Not all escapes, or coping mechanisms, are healthy. Some people escape via over-eating, some people through alcohol, and some people through religion. I would not characterize those last three examples as healthy.

[The Grand Nudger]

I don't think that gives a fair shake to fantasy as a narrative vehicle for truth. Fantasy as instrumental good. We have a habit of telling a larger truth with a collection of small lies. We tell kids about talking rabbits and turtles getting into a footrace - this is blatant misinformation - but we do it so that they understand why slow and steady wins the race.

The underlying (true) message of christian superstition and fantasy is that there is some inextricable part of human being that causes meaningful evil to substantiate in the world. That we, as creatures, simply will find bad things compelling. Today, we call that a compromised agency dealing with exclusively suboptimal decision fields, and we don't need to refer to souls or curses or value setting gods to explain it...

...and if your eyes glassed over when you read "compromised agency dealing with exclusively suboptimal decision fields" - then you can probably see why we chose to couch that message in stories about a mud man and a rib woman and a dragon and a martyr.

[Silver]

Fantasy is not meant to be a narrative vehicle for truth, unless you misconstrued my earlier comment to mean that through the art of storytelling we implement certain truths of life in order to fantasize a way of reality that is more comforting for us.

You really are lost in your own universe, aren't you, Grand Nudger?

[Greatest I am]

In this regard there doesn't seem to be a difference between today and ancient history.  We routinely decide that an instrumental good outweighs a moral evil.  I'm wondering aloud about precisely that with Tack in two threads.  There's nothing particularly new or radical about it - but it's not an artifact relegated to museums, either.  It's only a question of how much we want the real or perceived deliverable, and what arguments or rationalizations we'll find compelling or serviceable to that end.

If I understand you correctly, you're insisting that we shouldn't do that, or should approach it with more caution than we do, at the least.   I think there's definitely an argument to be made there, and we won;t be hard pressed to find cautionary examples.

No argument on your last but slavery today is definitely not what it was in ancient days.

Many city states had more slaves than free and if the owners were not generous enough, they would not have survived. Slavery was welfare or dole and social safety net back then. It is not so today from what I can see of it.

Regards
DL

---

Hardening of the heart doesn't annihilate the possibility of salvation. Hardening of the heart produces the opportunity to be broken. The breaking of stubbornness for example. 

Pharaoh had a soft heart that was going to let Moses and the Jews leave. 
Yahweh hardened his heart, changing Pharaoh's good intention to evil.

All to show his power says scriptures.

Do you see that as Yahweh doing good, or was it evil?

Regards
DL

[The Grand Nudger]

Slavery today, different in it's characteristics from slavery then (when it is), is still precisely equivalent with respect to it's moral and practical negotiations.

It's an instrumental good - we do it because it can do things for us, it's good-for.....solving labor problems. I don't think that I can get onboard with the notion that any slaveholder has ever been generous, and I'll note that in any instance where you start to run out of slaves..because too many die, you just go get more. They're a renewable resource. Slavers aren't giving slaves anything that's not the purpose of that relationship, that's not how that works. Slavers take things from slaves.

Slavery is not now nor has it ever been welfare. It's the ownership of people as property. A moral evil, alleged to be an instrumental good. There's no need to spin around with these equivocations because they aren't necessary or even useful to the question you asked, or any argument for either side that could be proposed. You arent asking whether or not welfare, as an instrumental good, is worth whatever moral badness it might entail.

You're wondering about slavery - and on that count, you have to make the case (or destroy the case) that the instrumental good of slavery outweighs the moral bad..of slavery - just as a christian would have to do the same regarding the instrumental good of the salvific plan, against the moral evil of the same.

[Silver]

Slavery has only ever been one thing: owning another person as though s/he was property.

Nonsensical apologetic gibberish aside, christianity condoned slavery. As is the norm for christianity, it only ever grudgingly changes its mind on something when the majority decides against it.