Untitled topic

Frankly, when I see people use that phrase, I interpret it as a deliberate undercutting of the opposing viewpoint. For example, those against vaccines rarely say "get rid of all vaccines." They say, "we need more research to access the safety before we can make a decision." Even though the research is already there.

You say "I think a good starting point for research is ..." Assuredly so. That's why I gave links to Wikipedia pages about such topics. Earlier I pointed to a more academic approach, since that's what you asked for.

You mention now only the British movement to abolition. What of the French? In Wikipedia link to Abolitionism I gave earlier, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abolitionism points out that:

> During the Age of Enlightenment, many philosophers wrote pamphlets against slavery and its moral and economical justifications, including Montesquieu in The Spirit of the Laws (1748) or in the Encyclopédie. In 1788, Jacques Pierre Brissot founded the Society of the Friends of the Blacks (Société des Amis des Noirs) to work for abolition of slavery.

Revolutionary France, based on Enlightenment principles, abolished slavery in all French territories. Napoleon restore it.

Again, you refer to the Bible, as with "The Bible clearly states ..." and point out "There was always a Christian minority opposing it in every century". Which means the majority of devout Christians thought slavery was acceptable under the Bible, does it not? When you pick out only the small number of Christians who agree with you, it sounds very much like a post hoc argument. The question is, why was there slavery in Christian, European countries (eg, hereditary slavery in Scotland)? How could so many devout Christian theologians, like Aquinas, interpret the Bible as allowing slavery, when you think the Bible is so clearly against it?

You say "it is also the triumph of the Church". That sounds like you think there's single Church. Are the Quakers part of "the Church"? What of the Jehovah's Witnesses? The Mormons? Unitarians?

Is this the same Church which hides child molester priests from civil prosecution? If you mean the collective body of Christians, is this the same Church which kicked the Jews out of Spain and the Huguenots out of France?

You call it a "triumph"? It's an embarrassment that it took so long. Most churches had to be dragged into their current views. Your argument is sort of like how a death-bed confessional is supposed to absolve someone of all their earthly sins, no matter how malign they were.

I believe your view is that no matter what the Church does, so long as they eventually apologize for it and change their ways to conform with secular liberal beliefs, it will be a triumph?

> "Is it better to call you sister?"

The real question is not what I prefer to be called, but why you think someone's gender is so important in a conversation.

Based on your reading of the Bible, should women be allowed to be the head of a church?

This is strange considering all of the reworks that the bible went through even up until the 400's. It seems like if it were something widely accepted by scholars or even laymen that it would have been something to correct. You can see regional differences in the bible as it was being written and spread across the middle East, but the knowledge of the spherical Earth must not have spread quickly enough to this area in which copies of the bible were being made.

You pose an interesting question - one you'd think a god would be able to answer, especially if that god supposedly created us. In fact, if he can't answer it, I would question whether he is a god.

As you know from that very timeline, abolition is not a fundamentally Christian idea. The Qin Dynasty and the Xin Dynasty both abolished slavery in China before Jesus was an adult.

As you also know from that same timeline, while the Pope banned enslaving the indigenous peoples of the Americas, he did not ban the enslavement of black Africans. Why is that, do you think, if his decision was based on the Bible?

What I think is missing from your analysis is the step from the "no Christians should be enslaved" to "no one should be enslaved."

The Bible does not prohibit the enslavement of non-Christians. That's why the Pope could have Muslim captives operate galley ships. That's why the Europeans could operate a slave trade of black Africans. That's why the Spanish could enslave the non-Christian indigenous Guanches. (Also from that timeline link you just sent.) That's why Christian theologians for centuries could justify slavery.

What Enlightenment thought added to the mix was the idea of universal rights: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed".

The hypocrisy of slaveholders talking about universal rights of all men was obvious even when it was first written: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_men_are_created_equal#Slav... . (And no, "their Creator" here refers to the distant creator of Deism, not the Christian God.)

That philosophy changed the moral calculus. People should not be enslaved for the simple reason that they are people.

That's why, quoting again from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abolitionism :

> An abolitionist movement only started in the late 18th century, however, when English and American Quakers began to question the morality of slavery. James Oglethorpe was among the first to articulate the Enlightenment case against slavery, banning it in the Province of Georgia on humanist grounds, arguing against it in Parliament, and eventually encouraging his friends Granville Sharp and Hannah More to vigorously pursue the cause.

The "humanist grounds" is the influence of the Enlightenment.