What is your basis for morality? Part III
With thanks to scohen, we embark on another segment. His response to my second post are in italics and I respond back in normal print.
Given: All morality comes from God.
Given: God wrote the bible.
Given: The institution of slavery is immoral.
Yikes! We may have hit our first fallacy. Let's look at point one. All morality comes from God, followed by point two, that God wrote the Bible. So God determines what is moral or immoral. Where does scohen get that third statement? Is it from the Bible? Or has morality been snatched away from God as soon as it is ascribed to Him?
By what standard do you declare that slavery is immoral?
Follows: The bible would contain an unambiguous message detailing the immorality of the institution of slavery.
Again, by whose judgment is that statement true? You can easily find 100 verses in the Bible that relate to or directly speak to slavery. Funny thing about that. The Bible is a book written to apply to mankind during the time of wooden spears all the way to the times of atomic weaponry and apply to every age in between. I have covered this before, but in fact most "slaves" were the equivalent of what we would now term "employees" among the Jews. Some were born into slavery or servanthood, some by being captured in war, some by going into debt, some by volunteering to join themselves to a household.
Did you know that in Old Testament times slaves could own slaves to themselves? Ziba (II Samuel 9:10) had fifteen sons and 20 slaves and was the master of a large plot of land under his master Saul. This land was given to him to oversee, so he was the equivalent of a farmer who leased land and gave part of the earnings to the landowner. Ziba would be a middle class wage earner in our society, maybe upper middle class.
In the Laws as given in Exodus and Deuteronomy, slaves were to enjoy the same ability to worship as the master and were to be allowed to rest on the Sabbath with the master and his family. The women were sometimes the concubines of masters, sometimes they became wives. Often their sons would inherit from the master and become masters themselves.
Also, if a slave has escaped from a master, the children of Israel were ordered not to return him. Apparently if things were so bad for a servant that he would flee then God wanted that person to have a chance to get away and stay away (Deuteronomy 23:15 & 16).
In the time of Christ and thereafter, slaves were to be seen as equals by their brothers and sisters in Christ, mentioned several places in I Corinthians, Galatians, and Ephesians.
In the days before modern society, time cards, ready-made currency and all sorts of other modern developments, slavery was similar to having a job. Masters were the employers. Slaves, more properly called bond servants really, were provided with food and clothing and housing in exchange for their work. They were often compensated with additional wages in addition to food, clothing and shelter. This was the normal situation in the time of Abraham and Moses and on up to a millenium after the time of Christ.
Throughout most of mankind's history, most people have worked most of their lives simply to provide for themselves food, clothing and shelter. Slavery or servanthood within God's culture provided those things for them and enabled both them and their masters to have an opportunity to be enriched by the pooling of their resources towards common goals within this system. It worked.
Since: The bible does not contain an unambiguous message on the immorality of slavery,
Wrong. The Bible is quite clear. Slavery was employment. The conversion of society from dominance of master/servant relationships to employer/employee relationships is recent on the scale of the history of mankind. All during this time as well there have always been the individual workers or entrepreneurs who were neither servants nor masters. We still have all of this, only in differing forms.
If Rome, or Babylon or Egypt mistreated their slaves, that was cruelty and sin on their part. But that is covered by other areas of the Bible. You see, in the days of master and servant both parties were still under the Law in terms of how they were to treat each other. Masters were not allowed to mistreat servants.
either:
a. The bible is not the work of god
b. God isn't the source of all morality.
Nope.
c. God is the source of all morality. It is up to you to acknowledge the Bible and know the history and culture of God's people through the ages if you are going to intelligently speak to the subject of slavery.
You know this is all a broken record. Worldview schmorldview. You don't even *know* what my worldview is (and why is it that only fundamentalists use that word?), so how can you state that my logic is bound by it?
I don't know precisely what your worldview is, I am only extrapolating it from what you say. Everyone has a set of preconditions from which they make judgments about what goes on around them. My given set includes the idea that God is and that God made everything and that God is the giver of morality. I can at least say that your worldview tends to exclude God and you place your own moral code above God's as the example above illustrates. If you cannot even see that you have a point of view with preconceived notions, then you certainly have a blind spot. Surely you concede that you have a point of view from which you begin, assumptions you start with, as you consider life's problems and opportunities?
How can logic be bound by anything? It's *logic*.
Your logic above was bound by an assumption that your moral standards are greater than God's. You state that God is the giver of morality and then don't look to Him for the answer on slavery but rather illogically take that place away from Him and take it upon yourself. Logic bound ceases to be logic, but the phrase illustrates the problem. If you truly accepted givens 1 and 2, you would have then accessed the Bible to determine the truth of given number 3.
Is my math bound by my worldview as well? If I was a YEC, would that integral make sense? The fact remains that your reply has twisted Kant's universality into "if it feels good, do it" which is exactly the *opposite* of what Kant was saying.
There is a big difference between "if it feels good, do it" and "if you believe it is the best and right thing, do it." Kant, however, appeals to the individual to decide what that good is, no matter how many resources he brings to bear on the issue, rather than appealing to the morality given by God.
In fact, "if it feels good, do it" seems to be a strawman that you're fighting against, not Kant.
No, but you are fighting a strawman in saying that I take that position and then you will tear that strawman down. Here it comes...
Kant's philosophy makes for some extremely non-expedient decisions, but you wouldn't know that because you didn't bother to do any research.Look, if you want to actually learn about the other side, search for "all morality comes from god" and read some of the results. Read about Kant and then demonstrate a flaw with his system while at the same time showing that you understand it. That's debate.
Okay, I did. It appears to me that so far you have lost the debate.
Let me take this a step further. Whereas I have read Kant in school and am familiar with his philosophy, you are obviously not so familiar with the Bible and the culture of God's people throughout the centuries. But I am not castigating you for it, simply sharing information. Slavery as practiced by God's people was similar to what "having a job" is now. But cultures surrounding God's people tended to have a different form of slavery in which people were mistreated. God even had rules for treatment of animals. One of my favorites is this verse:
Deuteronomy 25:4 - "Thou shalt not muzzle the ox when he treadeth out the corn."
Paul mentions this and how that idea was inherent in the Law in treatment of servants and also paid laborers in I Corinthians 9:7-10
"Who serves as a soldier at his own expense? Who plants a vineyard and does not eat of its grapes? Who tends a flock and does not drink of the milk? Do I say this merely from a human point of view? Doesn't the Law say the same thing? For it is written in the Law of Moses: "Do not muzzle an ox while it is treading out the grain." Is it about oxen that God is concerned? Surely he says this for us, doesn't he? Yes, this was written for us, because when the plowman plows and the thresher threshes, they ought to do so in the hope of sharing in the harvest."
I Timothy 5:18 also says: For the Scripture says, “You shall not muzzle an ox while it treads out the grain,” and, “The laborer is worthy of his wages.”
I go on...Other cultures had a different idea of what slavery or servanthood was. Africans sold Africans to Europeans to be used as animals and treated as such, or worse. Again, history tells us that slaves were sold around the world but, here in the New World, they were often beaten and raped and killed and treated as less than animals. Many plantation owners valued their cattle and certainly their horses more than their slaves.
It was Christians who saw how wrong this was. God, who had given his people codes of conduct in the Bible, was speaking through them, for the abolitionist movement began in the church and was peopled largely by churchgoers. It didn't matter that some slave owners treated slaves as paid workers, and sometimes even as family. The majority of slaves were treated poorly and God worked through His people to bring about an end to the practice. The modern version of slavery was wrong because it violated God's principles concerning how mankind should treat mankind. I remind you of that passage I quoted previously from Luke 10:27 - “ ‘You shall love the LORD your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your strength, and with all your mind,’ and ‘your neighbor as yourself.’”
An "unambiguous message" concerning "slavery" is not possible for a moral code meant to apply to 1000 BC and 2000 AD. But a thorough knowledge of the Bible allows you to know precisely whether a form of slavery or servanthood is moral or immoral depending on what time in history it is, what form it takes, and how those involved in the system behave towards others.
This is just tedium and us doing your work for you (which seems to be a trend).
No, I was waiting for the point of view to be expressed so that I could expose it.
Oh, and if a state executes an innocent man, that's *murder*.
Really? Chapter and verse, please. Remember that God gives morality and the standard for morality is found in the Bible? If the state convicts a man of murder by mistake, that is an accidental death and that actually is covered in the Bible.
You can't have the death penalty without actual murder occurring on occasion.
I disagree. But it is possible that someone may have willfully lied or twisted the system to cause the system to execute an innocent man. God laid out a series of possibilities and punishments to go with those possibilities. He allowed for accidental death, careless death, conspiracy to commit murder, felonious murder and manslaughter in the Law. Exodus, Deuteronomy and Numbers all have long passages devoted to these things, as the judicial system of the children of Israel was a part of their compact with God. It is God's Law that is the basis for our judicial system now.
Look at the innocence project, these people --many on death row, were completely, 100% innocent of the crimes of which they had been convicted. If they had been put to death, how could anyone that claims any morality not see that as murder by the state (accidental or not). Where's that in the bible again?
That is why I am against the death penalty in all but the most grievous and obvious of cases. The possibility of putting an innocent to death needs to be avoided. Does it surprise you that I say that? Well, it is true that God states in the Law that a murderer should be put to death. But in context this was among a people who were one in culture and generally in agreement with the Law. Conviction demanded two or more witnesses asserting that a murder took place and no reliable dissenting witnesses, otherwise the death penalty would not be exacted.
Some Christians oppose the death penalty entirely. We don't all march in lockstep in every way. God gives us the Bible to understand His will and we do our best to live by it, if we are indeed Christians.
Given: All morality comes from God.
Given: God wrote the bible.
Given: The institution of slavery is immoral.
Yikes! We may have hit our first fallacy. Let's look at point one. All morality comes from God, followed by point two, that God wrote the Bible. So God determines what is moral or immoral. Where does scohen get that third statement? Is it from the Bible? Or has morality been snatched away from God as soon as it is ascribed to Him?
By what standard do you declare that slavery is immoral?
Follows: The bible would contain an unambiguous message detailing the immorality of the institution of slavery.
Again, by whose judgment is that statement true? You can easily find 100 verses in the Bible that relate to or directly speak to slavery. Funny thing about that. The Bible is a book written to apply to mankind during the time of wooden spears all the way to the times of atomic weaponry and apply to every age in between. I have covered this before, but in fact most "slaves" were the equivalent of what we would now term "employees" among the Jews. Some were born into slavery or servanthood, some by being captured in war, some by going into debt, some by volunteering to join themselves to a household.
Did you know that in Old Testament times slaves could own slaves to themselves? Ziba (II Samuel 9:10) had fifteen sons and 20 slaves and was the master of a large plot of land under his master Saul. This land was given to him to oversee, so he was the equivalent of a farmer who leased land and gave part of the earnings to the landowner. Ziba would be a middle class wage earner in our society, maybe upper middle class.
In the Laws as given in Exodus and Deuteronomy, slaves were to enjoy the same ability to worship as the master and were to be allowed to rest on the Sabbath with the master and his family. The women were sometimes the concubines of masters, sometimes they became wives. Often their sons would inherit from the master and become masters themselves.
Also, if a slave has escaped from a master, the children of Israel were ordered not to return him. Apparently if things were so bad for a servant that he would flee then God wanted that person to have a chance to get away and stay away (Deuteronomy 23:15 & 16).
In the time of Christ and thereafter, slaves were to be seen as equals by their brothers and sisters in Christ, mentioned several places in I Corinthians, Galatians, and Ephesians.
In the days before modern society, time cards, ready-made currency and all sorts of other modern developments, slavery was similar to having a job. Masters were the employers. Slaves, more properly called bond servants really, were provided with food and clothing and housing in exchange for their work. They were often compensated with additional wages in addition to food, clothing and shelter. This was the normal situation in the time of Abraham and Moses and on up to a millenium after the time of Christ.
Throughout most of mankind's history, most people have worked most of their lives simply to provide for themselves food, clothing and shelter. Slavery or servanthood within God's culture provided those things for them and enabled both them and their masters to have an opportunity to be enriched by the pooling of their resources towards common goals within this system. It worked.
Since: The bible does not contain an unambiguous message on the immorality of slavery,
Wrong. The Bible is quite clear. Slavery was employment. The conversion of society from dominance of master/servant relationships to employer/employee relationships is recent on the scale of the history of mankind. All during this time as well there have always been the individual workers or entrepreneurs who were neither servants nor masters. We still have all of this, only in differing forms.
If Rome, or Babylon or Egypt mistreated their slaves, that was cruelty and sin on their part. But that is covered by other areas of the Bible. You see, in the days of master and servant both parties were still under the Law in terms of how they were to treat each other. Masters were not allowed to mistreat servants.
either:
a. The bible is not the work of god
b. God isn't the source of all morality.
Nope.
c. God is the source of all morality. It is up to you to acknowledge the Bible and know the history and culture of God's people through the ages if you are going to intelligently speak to the subject of slavery.
You know this is all a broken record. Worldview schmorldview. You don't even *know* what my worldview is (and why is it that only fundamentalists use that word?), so how can you state that my logic is bound by it?
I don't know precisely what your worldview is, I am only extrapolating it from what you say. Everyone has a set of preconditions from which they make judgments about what goes on around them. My given set includes the idea that God is and that God made everything and that God is the giver of morality. I can at least say that your worldview tends to exclude God and you place your own moral code above God's as the example above illustrates. If you cannot even see that you have a point of view with preconceived notions, then you certainly have a blind spot. Surely you concede that you have a point of view from which you begin, assumptions you start with, as you consider life's problems and opportunities?
How can logic be bound by anything? It's *logic*.
Your logic above was bound by an assumption that your moral standards are greater than God's. You state that God is the giver of morality and then don't look to Him for the answer on slavery but rather illogically take that place away from Him and take it upon yourself. Logic bound ceases to be logic, but the phrase illustrates the problem. If you truly accepted givens 1 and 2, you would have then accessed the Bible to determine the truth of given number 3.
Is my math bound by my worldview as well? If I was a YEC, would that integral make sense? The fact remains that your reply has twisted Kant's universality into "if it feels good, do it" which is exactly the *opposite* of what Kant was saying.
There is a big difference between "if it feels good, do it" and "if you believe it is the best and right thing, do it." Kant, however, appeals to the individual to decide what that good is, no matter how many resources he brings to bear on the issue, rather than appealing to the morality given by God.
In fact, "if it feels good, do it" seems to be a strawman that you're fighting against, not Kant.
No, but you are fighting a strawman in saying that I take that position and then you will tear that strawman down. Here it comes...
Kant's philosophy makes for some extremely non-expedient decisions, but you wouldn't know that because you didn't bother to do any research.Look, if you want to actually learn about the other side, search for "all morality comes from god" and read some of the results. Read about Kant and then demonstrate a flaw with his system while at the same time showing that you understand it. That's debate.
Okay, I did. It appears to me that so far you have lost the debate.
Let me take this a step further. Whereas I have read Kant in school and am familiar with his philosophy, you are obviously not so familiar with the Bible and the culture of God's people throughout the centuries. But I am not castigating you for it, simply sharing information. Slavery as practiced by God's people was similar to what "having a job" is now. But cultures surrounding God's people tended to have a different form of slavery in which people were mistreated. God even had rules for treatment of animals. One of my favorites is this verse:
Deuteronomy 25:4 - "Thou shalt not muzzle the ox when he treadeth out the corn."
Paul mentions this and how that idea was inherent in the Law in treatment of servants and also paid laborers in I Corinthians 9:7-10
"Who serves as a soldier at his own expense? Who plants a vineyard and does not eat of its grapes? Who tends a flock and does not drink of the milk? Do I say this merely from a human point of view? Doesn't the Law say the same thing? For it is written in the Law of Moses: "Do not muzzle an ox while it is treading out the grain." Is it about oxen that God is concerned? Surely he says this for us, doesn't he? Yes, this was written for us, because when the plowman plows and the thresher threshes, they ought to do so in the hope of sharing in the harvest."
I Timothy 5:18 also says: For the Scripture says, “You shall not muzzle an ox while it treads out the grain,” and, “The laborer is worthy of his wages.”
I go on...Other cultures had a different idea of what slavery or servanthood was. Africans sold Africans to Europeans to be used as animals and treated as such, or worse. Again, history tells us that slaves were sold around the world but, here in the New World, they were often beaten and raped and killed and treated as less than animals. Many plantation owners valued their cattle and certainly their horses more than their slaves.
It was Christians who saw how wrong this was. God, who had given his people codes of conduct in the Bible, was speaking through them, for the abolitionist movement began in the church and was peopled largely by churchgoers. It didn't matter that some slave owners treated slaves as paid workers, and sometimes even as family. The majority of slaves were treated poorly and God worked through His people to bring about an end to the practice. The modern version of slavery was wrong because it violated God's principles concerning how mankind should treat mankind. I remind you of that passage I quoted previously from Luke 10:27 - “ ‘You shall love the LORD your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your strength, and with all your mind,’ and ‘your neighbor as yourself.’”
An "unambiguous message" concerning "slavery" is not possible for a moral code meant to apply to 1000 BC and 2000 AD. But a thorough knowledge of the Bible allows you to know precisely whether a form of slavery or servanthood is moral or immoral depending on what time in history it is, what form it takes, and how those involved in the system behave towards others.
This is just tedium and us doing your work for you (which seems to be a trend).
No, I was waiting for the point of view to be expressed so that I could expose it.
Oh, and if a state executes an innocent man, that's *murder*.
Really? Chapter and verse, please. Remember that God gives morality and the standard for morality is found in the Bible? If the state convicts a man of murder by mistake, that is an accidental death and that actually is covered in the Bible.
You can't have the death penalty without actual murder occurring on occasion.
I disagree. But it is possible that someone may have willfully lied or twisted the system to cause the system to execute an innocent man. God laid out a series of possibilities and punishments to go with those possibilities. He allowed for accidental death, careless death, conspiracy to commit murder, felonious murder and manslaughter in the Law. Exodus, Deuteronomy and Numbers all have long passages devoted to these things, as the judicial system of the children of Israel was a part of their compact with God. It is God's Law that is the basis for our judicial system now.
Look at the innocence project, these people --many on death row, were completely, 100% innocent of the crimes of which they had been convicted. If they had been put to death, how could anyone that claims any morality not see that as murder by the state (accidental or not). Where's that in the bible again?
That is why I am against the death penalty in all but the most grievous and obvious of cases. The possibility of putting an innocent to death needs to be avoided. Does it surprise you that I say that? Well, it is true that God states in the Law that a murderer should be put to death. But in context this was among a people who were one in culture and generally in agreement with the Law. Conviction demanded two or more witnesses asserting that a murder took place and no reliable dissenting witnesses, otherwise the death penalty would not be exacted.
Some Christians oppose the death penalty entirely. We don't all march in lockstep in every way. God gives us the Bible to understand His will and we do our best to live by it, if we are indeed Christians.