| >>>>slavery is fine, rape is fine, beating your wife is fine >>Jesus in Matthew 5:21-22 explains that calling someone a 'fool' is equivalent to murder relative to the /actual standard/ so slavery, rape, beating, &c. are going to be hard to explain. For more on this type of perspective you can look into Anabaptist theology. This does nothing to resolve the simple questions: is slavery, rape, beating your wife wrong? It's a simple societal question these days, but when the bible was being written, the authors went to great lengths to describe the systems and rules around which all of those were indeed acceptable. To our eyes and ears that is ridiculous! There is no system or rules for owning people; it's just wrong. Doesn't matter if you marry the person you rape, it's still wrong. So, again, religion, in this particular case Christianity, regardless if we ever get to the question of objective v subjective morality, has a problem. It has clear and demonstrated instances where it is on the wrong side of the moral debate which inherently makes the religion objectively wrong. Any purported religion designed by a higher power whose purpose is to set guiding principles and rules by which our lives are to be lived, governed and judged has to be, by definition, never worse/lower than the society. It always has to outpace the moral landscape of society. By definition and, you know, common sense. >>>>Making a claim about what is good/bad is something we can judge, particularly as society advances. >>What is moral doesn't change, or you would have Relativism. So, stating it another way. Is slavery ok, objectively? You have a problem if it isn't. It means Christianity is wrong. If you say it is, you have an entirely different problem because we as a society have moved beyond this concept. >>>>Our modern moral code, subjective or objective, is "better" >>This society did not spring from a vacuum. Then Wesleyan theologians led Abolitionist efforts; now we "know" slavery is wrong. Like the Personalist Project puts it "Those who repudiate God cannot preserve the personalist affirmation of the incomparable worth of each person, though they may for a time live by the light of a setting sun." Skirts the issue entirely. Is slavery wrong? Has it always been wrong? >>>>We know this. It's undisputed fact that owning people is wrong. >>Indeed. This type of knowledge falls under self-evident truth, the same way we know that all men are created equal and are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights. That we universally, inherently are positive about these natural revelations either points to something or they are collective delusions. Again, skirts the issue. Is slavery wrong? Has it always been wrong? |
Christianity is what ended slavery and additionally, without it or apart from it, slavery would not be wrong (if you have reasoning otherwise, let's hear it).