Someone really needs to ask Mr Haymes if he would be willing to BE a slave if the master followed biblical rules precisely. I would bet that the answer would be "no".
Yes, time for the old cut-the-cake game again. To anyone who wants to make it legal, we propose the following game: you outline the laws for it, I get to pick the slave(s). My, you look...strong. :)
We can also play the game in reverse, but that's a much shorter and less interesting game since my laws for it will be 'always illegal', thus you won't get much of a pick.
I wouldn't even bid $2 on Joshua Haymes. He looks like he's not capable of anything useful. Not capable of anything that would justify the table scraps I'd have to feed him. And Kegsbreath? Not worth a plug nickel. Dumb as a bag of hammers, and a complete asshole to boot.
I would add a condition to that proposal: that Haymes would never know when or IF his enslavement would ever be lifted. Thinking that, at some point or other, he would be able to get out, could afford him some psychological support. NOT KNOWING?
It's probably the only way to convince such a dumb ass like Haymes that being enslaved is a horrific ordeal. This enlightenment could come as soon as he receives his first whipping.
I come from a long line of dirt-poor dirt farmers (my grandparents couldn't afford indoor plumbing until 1970. They had an outhouse up until then), and I can guaran-goddam-tee you that pasty, privileged little asshole wouldn't last ten minutes. In my childhood, we stayed with my grandparents quite a bit, and during harvesting season, I helped pick beans, peas, cotton, corn, blueberries, figs, tomatoes, and more. I've even pulled and shaken peanuts and cut cane on occasion. You start just before or after sun-up so you can get used to the heat gradually. You wear a broad-brimmed hat so you don't get sunstroke, and long sleeved shirts so you don't blister yourself with third-degree burns in the sun (even so, an unusual percentage of older relatives have suffered various forms of skin cancer.). You carry a canteen of water with you at all times. You hope for a cloudy day with a breeze. During the hottest part of the day, you take a break, then back to the field. There was little in the way of farming equipment other than an old tractor for tilling and planting. The only fortunate part was back then, the summers didn't seem as goddamned hot and miserable as they did once I was an adult.
Of course, now there is quite a lot of automation for several of these tasks, but not all. Even so, there are some things that still require manual labor. I would pay good money to see Mr. Slavery-Ain't-So-Bad turn his lilly-white hands at anything more labor intensive than flapping his jaws and spewing bullshit He would fold like a house of cards.
I grew up on péniches, though not as gruesome as fieldwork, he wouldn't have stand the conditions either.
No bathroom, no hot water, no separate bedroom with a door. Very limited storage space*. Limited electricity*. Very bad insulation. If the temperature drop under 0°, the only way to scrap ice was a broom, you can't use chemical on metal painted with anti-rust. If the cargo is not well balanced, you have to shovel it yourself or risk a (capsize?). When in route, you have to stay concentrated for hours without breaks.
*The washing machine was stored in the engine room, it had to be bring out, plugged, used, unplugged and put back everytime it was needed, and only in summer. In winter, we had to haul our dirty laundry in a laundromat
He's fine with it if they do it the proper biblical way. Of course if he's enslaved, they aren't doing it right. If people he doesn't like are enslaved, they are.
Given they can defend attacking police officers and invading the Capitol to try to overthrow the government, blowing up defenceless people in small boats, attacking US citizens including children without cause, and in some cases deporting them “because they can”, slavery doesn’t seem such a massive step does it?
I was thinking the same thing. Someone should kidnap him from his home and make him a slave, indefinitely, under Biblical rules (whatever someone decides those are). See how long it takes him to change his mind.
My most important takeaway: “ It takes religion to convince people that something so obviously evil is both God-sanctioned and wonderful when done properly”
Maybe. There's still that experiment someone ran, that one with the electric shocks. It has a formal name, and I suppose I could Google it, but there it is. Granted that slavery is several steps worse, and in the experiment, no one was actually getting shocked, but ... well, there you are.
I would not be so sure: the robber baron attitude of Trump, DeSantis, etc. seems to be driving us towards serfdom, and while they get the support of religious conservativism, they would probably drive society that way without it.
It's the Broligarchy driving us towards serfdom--the anarcho-capitalists in Silicon Valley who envision their own Ancap White ethnostate. American Christianity provides the brainwashed masses. I think they're envious of Warren Jeffs. From prison, Jeffs's cult wins construction contracts by employing 12 year old boys full-time as indentured labor and uses 12 year old girls as sex slaves and breeding stock. Calling something "Christian" gives them a cover for the sex abuse and an IRS tax break for real estate speculation. They also teach their cult members that fossil fuels are God's gifts to humans.
Considering the whole Mormon religion was started by a conman, who thought it up while he was in jail, and had a predilection for molesting young girls, it is not surprising Jeffs followed in the original's footsteps.
You'll never hear Kegseth condemn his p-𝘢𝘴𝘴-tor, because he agrees with his p-𝘢𝘴𝘴-tor. He wishes he could own some slaves himself... and he would 𝘯𝘰𝘵 be a "gentle, loving master." In fact, he'd be among the worst of the worst, and his religion would only drive him to abuse his chattel more. What evidence do I have to back up this assertion?
Why, the words of 𝗙𝗿𝗲𝗱𝗲𝗿𝗶𝗰𝗸 𝗗𝗼𝘂𝗴𝗹𝗮𝘀𝘀, of course- who actually 𝘸𝘢𝘴 a slave:
Kegseth would beat his slaves until they were reduced to bloody tatters. He would rape them; he would starve them; he would work them until they fell over dead in his fields. He would tear children, likely those he sired himself by brute force, from the arms of their mothers, and sell them to others just as malevolent as he to visit the same abuse on another generation, and another. He would do all of this with a wicked smile on his face, and he would still walk out of church every Sunday utterly convinced of his own righteousness, because the bastard standing behind the pulpit would be a participant in the same evil institution.
It could not be otherwise. Absolute power corrupts absolutely, and there is no Earthly power more absolute than that of a master over a slave.
The only people with valid opinions on the legitimacy of human slavery are . . . slaves. I'm pretty sure this idiot cannot imagine himself as anything other than a slave owner. If you can defend slavery, then you are beyond morally bankrupt. Attempting to rationalize a justification for slavery is sickening.
[Quoting C.S. Lewis, Haymes said that faulting the Founders for practicing slavery is “chronological snobbery.”]
Except there were people of that time who recognized that slavery was wrong. Fuck, there was a Catholic priest who condemned Columbus' treatment and enslavement of Native Americans in the 15th/16th century.
There were people who looked beyond the narrow fundamentalist bullshit interpretation of the Bible and sided with "love your neighbor as yourself" throughout history.
Slavery was wrong. Slavery was always wrong. Slavery in the Bible was wrong. If everything in the Bible were truly written by an omniscient, benevolent God, then God could have created a just and moral system that included a prohibition against slavery. Instead, the Hebrew authors of Leviticus and Deuteronomy adopted from the laws of Mesopotamia. Leviticus includes sex slavery, race based perpetual slavery, and debt slavery. You could beat your slave and as long as he died after a day or two, you were okay. If he died, you paid a fine, not with your life. That is not respecting "the image of God" in another human being. That's treating them like a farm animal.
There is no defense of slavery in the Bible. Christians have to deal with it.
But I suspect this has less to do with this fucker's sick and twisted version of Christianity and more to do with his power fantasies, his misogyny, and his racism and his vision of imposing a white, Christian male hierarchy on America again where minorities are consigned to servitude and expected to smile and be grateful to him for it.
Oh that "they were a product of their times" bullshit is nothing more than a red flag for racists. You can find tons of 18th century cartoons poking fun at the American Revolutionaries' laments about "freedom" while keeping part of the population enslaved.
And to answer their claim that slavery was somehow not so bad in the ancient world, one has only to mention Spartacus and his army of slaves, some 70,000 strong, from all sorts of masters in all sorts of conditions and all sorts of trades, who were so fed up with their lot that they freed themselves, then fought and died for that hard-won freedom, more than two millennia ago.
To some extent I agree with a product of their times. People were trapped. In a sense, slaves were the machines of the economy. They did work that is done by machines today. Most free people wouldn't work for someone else, they'd move to the west and get their own farm. If you had a medium sized farm, you had to have slaves to run it because that's the way the system was set up.
Many people knew that slavery was wrong but the alternative was selling the land they inherited and starting from scratch. People didn't want to put themselves into poverty.
A rather crude analogy. When global warming really hits and the economy collapses and millions die, people who live at that time will look back and wonder why people didn't give up their personal cars and use public transportation. Why did people do something which was clearly wrong? The answer is that in many cases, there was no good alternative and changing things would have a major hit to people's standards of living. The same thing was true when slavery was around. If you wanted to run a farm bigger then a few acres, you had to own slaves because there was no alternative.
"If everything in the Bible were truly written by an omniscient, benevolent God, then God could have created a just and moral system"
Assume that this god of theirs exists and is the source of morality.
Then take a moral dilemma (say, the trolley problem - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trolley_problem). Now, being omniscient, this god would have foreseen this difficulty, and the moral system it produced would take account of it. This system would therefore contain the correct solution to the dilemma.
Looks around, nope, nothing about this kind of dilemma and how to solve it in the bible.
I wish I could like this comment 100x times... Just because people in the past did good things but also owned slaves doesn't mean that slavery was okay. They frankly like class and social hierarchy and want some version of that to come back where they are the top of it. However they have to back into that, they will.
You are applying the current view to ancient societies. This only works if objective moral values exist, something that many ethicists would deny (Try something like J.L. Mackie's "Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong", which starts, "There are no objective values").
One can argue against slavery using the majority of systems of normative ethics (I can certainly see this could be done in consequentialist, deontological or contractualist ethics), but one has to accept that these are social constructs, and not like, say, the laws of physics.
I'm going to keep this as simple as possible. Those who defend slavery HAVE NEVER THEMSELVES BEEN ENSLAVED. They have never had their rights, their freedom or their agency taken away without so much as a by-your-leave. They have never had their lives so redirected that any concept of autonomy becomes foreign to their everyday existence. Yet these people want to defend the practice as though it were benign when properly applied.
Let them try it out for themselves, and THEN let's hear what they have to say.
I have been slapped in my face once in my soon 62 years on Tellus' surface. By my mother when I was app 12 yo. My mother was more shocked than I was. She never forgot it.
About Gone with the Wind. Back when the film was first released, my grandfather was a firefighter in Alabama. The theaters were so packed for every showing, he and his coworkers were required to be there in case of a fire. Granddaddy hated that movie, said something about being sick of that woman falling down the stairs.
Consider how the local culture must have regarded the Confederacy if that overblown romance novel was that popular in the area. I suspect those attitudes are a good slice of the reason for where we are as a country these days.
Very much the case. I was just writing something a few minutes ago about the difficulties of being raised in a racist society, and not realizing how often racism raises it’s not above the swamp. It takes extra vigilance to make sure that what I’m thinking is in accord with my values.
Well, I would say that Christianity is. I can't speak for the others. In anthropology, we say that religion is a means of social control. It depends on the structure of the society whether that control is benign, for group cohesion, or malignant, to establish dominance of those who control the surplus over those who produce it. We don't know the religion of the Harappan Civilization, for example, and their technology was pretty advanced without excessive distribution of wealth. As an atheist, of course, I would argue that the data clearly show that secular societies are more egalitarian and stable than religious ones. I would also argue that the Libertarian/ Anarcho-capitalist/ sociopathic intelligentsia of the Far Right know this and are fomenting the rise of religious extremism precisely because social upheaval and chaos are profitable to them. They love their 48 Laws of Power and their "evolutionary" psychology pseudoscience. It should be no surprise that it is psychologists (eg Steven Pinker and Charles Murray) who are trying to revive "race science" and who are allying with that Christian Nationalist publisher to produce their stupid War on Science book.
I'm thinking mainly Christianity, but I'm also recalling ritual human sacrfice to appease the gods and to keep the Sun rising every morning, This long predates the Abrahamic monogod.
Yes. And those were highly stratified societies. I just don't want to make too many claims about religions that I have no lived experience with. People with Christian upbringings like myself tend to impose Christian interpretations or black-and-white thinking onto other religions. I have been told by Jews, for instance, that their religion makes no claims of no other gods existing, they only claim that they have a covenant with this particular god. They also see their god as fallible and imperfect and are allowed to argue with him. This is one of the reasons they consider Christianity to be cultural appropriation--Christians retconned the interpretation of what they labeled the "Old Testament." Since I will use every opportunity to attack rightwing Christianity, I love telling them that their religion is nothing more than cultural appropriation with good marketing.
Oh, it absolutely is, they should divorce the Old Testament as it contradicts the "Christ's" tale message, which is supposedly the point of christianity.
Let’s see him experience being a slave. Let’s see how he likes being owned by someone and dependent on their morality for his life.
He is looking at it as someone who, historically and probably personally in some small ways, who only ever owned slaves and never as someone who was owned. A wealthy white male born of privilege and a sense of superiority. He will never understand the immorality of slavery, only its personal benefits for his pocketbook, or even the benefits to the wealthy of society.
So, is that an excuse? Absolutely not. It’s barely an explanation as there are plenty of wealthy white men who have always, throughout history, sought the abolition of slavery and knew it’s evil. So he doesn’t get a pass for not understanding. He chooses not to understand, he chooses to be cruel and evil.
Instead of rewarding these villains, we need to expose them to that which they so gleefully wish to dump on others. So, I say again.
Nothing wrong with being repetitively redundant ... or saying the same thing, over and over again, sure as hell not when slavery is the topic and some IDIOT wants to insist that slavery is okay. As I said elsewhere, to them, it's all just an intellectual exercise.
Let it become REAL to them – VERY DAMNED REAL – then listen to the tune they sing.
What bullflop. The best of all possible worlds is when said 'masters' share social resources so that 'many people, poor people' etc. can get an education and are given opportunities.
His point is like saying that a 6-year-old working in a sweatshop is better than that 6-year-old starving to death. And the answer is: a moral, functional, modern society reallocates excess wealth to (try and) prevent BOTH child labor sweatshops AND starvation. Or to his point: a moral etc. society should reallocate excess wealth to try and prevent BOTH lack of education AND lack of opportunity.
Theological hair-splitting. Note his use of the word 'grave' as a way to make his argument somewhat immune to critique - to anyone who cites the golden rule or love your neighbor as showing yes this is a sin, he can respond "yes, but it's not a grave one."
Any protestant believing in sola fides is going to accept that slavers can get into heaven. That's different from claiming it's morally okay.
Largely irrelevant. Yes there may be complexities in blaming past generations for not having modern ethics and morals, but YOU ARE NOT A HISTORICAL FIGURE. You are alive today, now. Defending slavery today, now. And that's horrendous and despicable. Reasonable people can disagree about whether Thomas Jefferson's goods outweigh his evils, or if there's a significant moral difference between Spartan vs. Athenian slavery in classical Greece. Reasonable people ought not disagree about whether slavery is moral in 2025 U.S.A.
Oh dear, you sound like a godless communist! Of course, White Supremacists speak in code, and "godless communist" actually means "Jews ("globalists") who manipulate "Black and Coloured people" to rise up against White people," to paraphrase Elon Musk's grandfather. To White Supremacists, the word "Christian" itself is code for White Supremacy. As are the words "civilization" and "Western" and the Crusader tattoos found on Pete Hegseth and the GHF "aid workers." So every time you hear a Republican complain about "cultural Marxism," substitute "I'm a racist."
It infects a lot more than supremacists. The reason conservatives constantly claim teachers and civil servants are lazy/overpaid is because those positions contain a much higher rate of women and minorities. Teaching because it was seen as women's work, the civil service because they instituted merit-based job screening decades earlier than the private sector, meaning many more women and blacks could get those jobs compared to trying to get through the private sector's good 'ol boy network.
I suggest kicking Haymes in the genitals with steel toe boots repeatedly, until the pain causing him to pass out! Keep telling Haymes if he screams that proves he is not a real man (according to the MAGAS mindset), for “real men” (MAGAS mindset) should be able to take it. So you are physically hurting him and hurting him psychologically as well, a double dose for a douchebag scum ball like him!
While my moral character tells me slavery is wrong, I would be willing to own Joshua Haymes. He should be prepared to sleep outside at night, chained to the ground in my wood shed. His days will be filled with joyful tasks like mowing my entire lawn with a pair of scissors. The workday shall consist of dawn to dusk chores of my choosing. His accommodations will include gourmet fare like chicken bones, peelings from vegetables or anything else I deem to provide for him. He can also eat insects that I give approval for. He will not be allowed to breed so neutering will be provided for him.
I know, given his love of slavery, that he will be eternally grateful for my kind treatment.
Conscripting a human being to a life of poverty and forced labor is awful. That so many on the authoritarian, patriarchal right think this is acceptable is telling. I still think these personality traits are underlain by their genetic endowment. They make a civil society difficult to hold - just witness their current attempt to impose their will on everyone who disagrees with them. We fought the Civil War to try to impose a liberal democracy on these people... now they want to return the favor with Gilead. I hope I'm wrong, but I don't see anything knitting us back together.
" I don't see anything knitting us back together."
Neither do I.
Even if there is a sweeping blue tsunami in the midterms -- IF we're allowed to have midterms at all -- hate and cruelty won't just go away. Attitudes won't change overnight.
I have had a horrible feeling for a while now, that this is what ICE's sudden gargantuan budget is for. If they can't come up with a reasonable excuse to cancel elections and/or the elections don't go their way, they will have a standing army of mercenaries to swoop in and declare martial law/absolute rule/what the fuck ever.
Somebody, please, PLEASE convince me I'm wrong about this.
Well but I think there's a social equivalent of Planck's principle* that could save the country. None of these slavery-endorsing dominionist adults will ever change their minds. Doesn't mean their kids will agree with them.
*"A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents... but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it."
That's why they are defunded schools, and stripping actual history out of them, lest their kids realize empathy, and not be cruel, and hateful, like them.
Anybody wanna help me go abduct one of these “Slavery was okay, actually!” types? I’m guessing it would take less than a week as my slave - less than 24 hours for all but the hardest cases - to change their minds.
I mean, that’s consent, right? They DID say it was okay. Can anyone from the BDSM community weigh in?
Consent isn't just important- it's the basis for 𝘦𝘷𝘦𝘳𝘺𝘵𝘩𝘪𝘯𝘨 else. If you can't grok the concept that the submissive is the one with the ultimate veto over everything that happens in a scene, no matter how tame or how extreme, you're going to have a 𝘷𝘦𝘳𝘺 short and 𝘷𝘦𝘳𝘺 unpleasant experience in the BDSM community. Abusers are, unequivocally, 𝘯𝘰𝘵 welcome.
There is also an expectation that anyone who wants to play the Dominant role should first have experience as a submissive, and if you aren't willing to do that... well, word gets around. 𝘘𝘶𝘪𝘤𝘬𝘭𝘺.
There is a novel where your last point is emphasized. Dom(me)s in training have to follow a lesson about spanking or anal play, and they nearly pissed themselves when they learned it wouldn't be X teaching them but his wife and sub.
Safe, sane and consensual is the motto. I say go for it, it is obviously their fantasy, and a responsible practitioner always tries any act on themself first. How can they train others if they don't know what being a good master entails?
Someone really needs to ask Mr Haymes if he would be willing to BE a slave if the master followed biblical rules precisely. I would bet that the answer would be "no".
Slavery will always be for the people he considers inferior: minorities and women. Never for him.
Yes, time for the old cut-the-cake game again. To anyone who wants to make it legal, we propose the following game: you outline the laws for it, I get to pick the slave(s). My, you look...strong. :)
We can also play the game in reverse, but that's a much shorter and less interesting game since my laws for it will be 'always illegal', thus you won't get much of a pick.
I wouldn't even bid $2 on Joshua Haymes. He looks like he's not capable of anything useful. Not capable of anything that would justify the table scraps I'd have to feed him. And Kegsbreath? Not worth a plug nickel. Dumb as a bag of hammers, and a complete asshole to boot.
Ancient Romans had a solution for good for nothing slaves ---> mines.
He should pay us to own him.
I would add a condition to that proposal: that Haymes would never know when or IF his enslavement would ever be lifted. Thinking that, at some point or other, he would be able to get out, could afford him some psychological support. NOT KNOWING?
'Nother matter.
Beat me to it as I was typing it.
GMTA. Most of us here were probably thinking the same thing.
It's probably the only way to convince such a dumb ass like Haymes that being enslaved is a horrific ordeal. This enlightenment could come as soon as he receives his first whipping.
I can guarantee you that he wouldn't last that long. One hour picking cotton in the fields and he would cave.
15 minutes. Picking cotton is hard work, and the thorns from the plant are painful on the fingers.
I used to try wearing gloves with the fingers cut off at the ends. I would still end up with bloody fingertips most of the time.
I guess that's why I worked so hard in school, so I could get away from farming for good. I was not cut out to be a farmer.
I come from a long line of dirt-poor dirt farmers (my grandparents couldn't afford indoor plumbing until 1970. They had an outhouse up until then), and I can guaran-goddam-tee you that pasty, privileged little asshole wouldn't last ten minutes. In my childhood, we stayed with my grandparents quite a bit, and during harvesting season, I helped pick beans, peas, cotton, corn, blueberries, figs, tomatoes, and more. I've even pulled and shaken peanuts and cut cane on occasion. You start just before or after sun-up so you can get used to the heat gradually. You wear a broad-brimmed hat so you don't get sunstroke, and long sleeved shirts so you don't blister yourself with third-degree burns in the sun (even so, an unusual percentage of older relatives have suffered various forms of skin cancer.). You carry a canteen of water with you at all times. You hope for a cloudy day with a breeze. During the hottest part of the day, you take a break, then back to the field. There was little in the way of farming equipment other than an old tractor for tilling and planting. The only fortunate part was back then, the summers didn't seem as goddamned hot and miserable as they did once I was an adult.
Of course, now there is quite a lot of automation for several of these tasks, but not all. Even so, there are some things that still require manual labor. I would pay good money to see Mr. Slavery-Ain't-So-Bad turn his lilly-white hands at anything more labor intensive than flapping his jaws and spewing bullshit He would fold like a house of cards.
I grew up on péniches, though not as gruesome as fieldwork, he wouldn't have stand the conditions either.
No bathroom, no hot water, no separate bedroom with a door. Very limited storage space*. Limited electricity*. Very bad insulation. If the temperature drop under 0°, the only way to scrap ice was a broom, you can't use chemical on metal painted with anti-rust. If the cargo is not well balanced, you have to shovel it yourself or risk a (capsize?). When in route, you have to stay concentrated for hours without breaks.
*The washing machine was stored in the engine room, it had to be bring out, plugged, used, unplugged and put back everytime it was needed, and only in summer. In winter, we had to haul our dirty laundry in a laundromat
White Christian menfolk are exempt from slavery. God said so
LOL…
That Haymes dude looks like a molester.
But that does not really tell you anything.
I mean, HE wouldn't be a slave, because he is qwhite sure he is superior.
from "Paper Moon"
Imogene: You know the little white speck on top of chicken shit?
Addie: Yeah?
Imogene: Well, that's the kind of white she is. She's just like that little white speck on top of old chicken shit.
He's fine with it if they do it the proper biblical way. Of course if he's enslaved, they aren't doing it right. If people he doesn't like are enslaved, they are.
Given they can defend attacking police officers and invading the Capitol to try to overthrow the government, blowing up defenceless people in small boats, attacking US citizens including children without cause, and in some cases deporting them “because they can”, slavery doesn’t seem such a massive step does it?
I was thinking the same thing. Someone should kidnap him from his home and make him a slave, indefinitely, under Biblical rules (whatever someone decides those are). See how long it takes him to change his mind.
Your rights and freedoms wouldn't last fifteen minutes in the hands of a religious nut case.
My most important takeaway: “ It takes religion to convince people that something so obviously evil is both God-sanctioned and wonderful when done properly”
𝑊𝑖𝑡ℎ 𝑜𝑟 𝑤𝑖𝑡ℎ𝑜𝑢𝑡 𝑟𝑒𝑙𝑖𝑔𝑖𝑜𝑛, 𝑔𝑜𝑜𝑑 𝑝𝑒𝑜𝑝𝑙𝑒 𝑐𝑎𝑛 𝑏𝑒ℎ𝑎𝑣𝑒 𝑤𝑒𝑙𝑙 𝑎𝑛𝑑 𝑏𝑎𝑑 𝑝𝑒𝑜𝑝𝑙𝑒 𝑐𝑎𝑛 𝑑𝑜 𝑒𝑣𝑖𝑙; 𝑏𝑢𝑡 𝑓𝑜𝑟 𝑔𝑜𝑜𝑑 𝑝𝑒𝑜𝑝𝑙𝑒 𝑡𝑜 𝑑𝑜 𝑒𝑣𝑖𝑙 — 𝑡ℎ𝑎𝑡 𝑡𝑎𝑘𝑒𝑠 𝑟𝑒𝑙𝑖𝑔𝑖𝑜𝑛.
-- Steven Weinberg
I guess, but is there really a difference? Evil is as evil does right?
Maybe. There's still that experiment someone ran, that one with the electric shocks. It has a formal name, and I suppose I could Google it, but there it is. Granted that slavery is several steps worse, and in the experiment, no one was actually getting shocked, but ... well, there you are.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgram_experiment
Thanks a lot, Joe.
I've read about this before, but somehow "forgot" about it. Thank you for pointing me to it again.
I think there was a movie about it as well. I remember watching it. Creepy.
The Stanford prison experiment, I think it was called! Please don’t quote me on that!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_prison_experiment
I would not be so sure: the robber baron attitude of Trump, DeSantis, etc. seems to be driving us towards serfdom, and while they get the support of religious conservativism, they would probably drive society that way without it.
It's the Broligarchy driving us towards serfdom--the anarcho-capitalists in Silicon Valley who envision their own Ancap White ethnostate. American Christianity provides the brainwashed masses. I think they're envious of Warren Jeffs. From prison, Jeffs's cult wins construction contracts by employing 12 year old boys full-time as indentured labor and uses 12 year old girls as sex slaves and breeding stock. Calling something "Christian" gives them a cover for the sex abuse and an IRS tax break for real estate speculation. They also teach their cult members that fossil fuels are God's gifts to humans.
Considering the whole Mormon religion was started by a conman, who thought it up while he was in jail, and had a predilection for molesting young girls, it is not surprising Jeffs followed in the original's footsteps.
The creation of a permanent American underclass is an age-old Republican dream. They never gave up on feudalism.
👆🎯
You'll never hear Kegseth condemn his p-𝘢𝘴𝘴-tor, because he agrees with his p-𝘢𝘴𝘴-tor. He wishes he could own some slaves himself... and he would 𝘯𝘰𝘵 be a "gentle, loving master." In fact, he'd be among the worst of the worst, and his religion would only drive him to abuse his chattel more. What evidence do I have to back up this assertion?
Why, the words of 𝗙𝗿𝗲𝗱𝗲𝗿𝗶𝗰𝗸 𝗗𝗼𝘂𝗴𝗹𝗮𝘀𝘀, of course- who actually 𝘸𝘢𝘴 a slave:
"𝘐 𝘢𝘮 𝘧𝘪𝘭𝘭𝘦𝘥 𝘸𝘪𝘵𝘩 𝘶𝘯𝘶𝘵𝘵𝘦𝘳𝘢𝘣𝘭𝘦 𝘭𝘰𝘢𝘵𝘩𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘸𝘩𝘦𝘯 𝘐 𝘤𝘰𝘯𝘵𝘦𝘮𝘱𝘭𝘢𝘵𝘦 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘳𝘦𝘭𝘪𝘨𝘪𝘰𝘶𝘴 𝘱𝘰𝘮𝘱 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘴𝘩𝘰𝘸, 𝘵𝘰𝘨𝘦𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘳 𝘸𝘪𝘵𝘩 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘩𝘰𝘳𝘳𝘪𝘣𝘭𝘦 𝘪𝘯𝘤𝘰𝘯𝘴𝘪𝘴𝘵𝘦𝘯𝘤𝘪𝘦𝘴, 𝘸𝘩𝘪𝘤𝘩 𝘦𝘷𝘦𝘳𝘺 𝘸𝘩𝘦𝘳𝘦 𝘴𝘶𝘳𝘳𝘰𝘶𝘯𝘥 𝘮𝘦. 𝘞𝘦 𝘩𝘢𝘷𝘦 𝘮𝘦𝘯-𝘴𝘵𝘦𝘢𝘭𝘦𝘳𝘴 𝘧𝘰𝘳 𝘮𝘪𝘯𝘪𝘴𝘵𝘦𝘳𝘴, 𝘸𝘰𝘮𝘦𝘯-𝘸𝘩𝘪𝘱𝘱𝘦𝘳𝘴 𝘧𝘰𝘳 𝘮𝘪𝘴𝘴𝘪𝘰𝘯𝘢𝘳𝘪𝘦𝘴, 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘤𝘳𝘢𝘥𝘭𝘦-𝘱𝘭𝘶𝘯𝘥𝘦𝘳𝘦𝘳𝘴 𝘧𝘰𝘳 𝘤𝘩𝘶𝘳𝘤𝘩 𝘮𝘦𝘮𝘣𝘦𝘳𝘴."
Wait, here's another:
"𝘛𝘩𝘦 𝘴𝘭𝘢𝘷𝘦 𝘢𝘶𝘤𝘵𝘪𝘰𝘯𝘦𝘦𝘳’𝘴 𝘣𝘦𝘭𝘭 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘤𝘩𝘶𝘳𝘤𝘩-𝘨𝘰𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘣𝘦𝘭𝘭 𝘤𝘩𝘪𝘮𝘦 𝘪𝘯 𝘸𝘪𝘵𝘩 𝘦𝘢𝘤𝘩 𝘰𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘳, 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘣𝘪𝘵𝘵𝘦𝘳 𝘤𝘳𝘪𝘦𝘴 𝘰𝘧 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘩𝘦𝘢𝘳𝘵-𝘣𝘳𝘰𝘬𝘦𝘯 𝘴𝘭𝘢𝘷𝘦 𝘢𝘳𝘦 𝘥𝘳𝘰𝘸𝘯𝘦𝘥 𝘪𝘯 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘳𝘦𝘭𝘪𝘨𝘪𝘰𝘶𝘴 𝘴𝘩𝘰𝘶𝘵𝘴 𝘰𝘧 𝘩𝘪𝘴 𝘱𝘪𝘰𝘶𝘴 𝘮𝘢𝘴𝘵𝘦𝘳. 𝘙𝘦𝘷𝘪𝘷𝘢𝘭𝘴 𝘰𝘧 𝘳𝘦𝘭𝘪𝘨𝘪𝘰𝘯 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘳𝘦𝘷𝘪𝘷𝘢𝘭𝘴 𝘪𝘯 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘴𝘭𝘢𝘷𝘦-𝘵𝘳𝘢𝘥𝘦 𝘨𝘰 𝘩𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘪𝘯 𝘩𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘵𝘰𝘨𝘦𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘳. 𝘛𝘩𝘦 𝘴𝘭𝘢𝘷𝘦 𝘱𝘳𝘪𝘴𝘰𝘯 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘤𝘩𝘶𝘳𝘤𝘩 𝘴𝘵𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘯𝘦𝘢𝘳 𝘦𝘢𝘤𝘩 𝘰𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘳. 𝘛𝘩𝘦 𝘤𝘭𝘢𝘯𝘬𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘰𝘧 𝘧𝘦𝘵𝘵𝘦𝘳𝘴 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘳𝘢𝘵𝘵𝘭𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘰𝘧 𝘤𝘩𝘢𝘪𝘯𝘴 𝘪𝘯 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘱𝘳𝘪𝘴𝘰𝘯, 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘱𝘪𝘰𝘶𝘴 𝘱𝘴𝘢𝘭𝘮 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘴𝘰𝘭𝘦𝘮𝘯 𝘱𝘳𝘢𝘺𝘦𝘳 𝘪𝘯 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘤𝘩𝘶𝘳𝘤𝘩, 𝘮𝘢𝘺 𝘣𝘦 𝘩𝘦𝘢𝘳𝘥 𝘢𝘵 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘴𝘢𝘮𝘦 𝘵𝘪𝘮𝘦."
...and another:
"𝘞𝘦𝘳𝘦 𝘐 𝘵𝘰 𝘣𝘦 𝘢𝘨𝘢𝘪𝘯 𝘳𝘦𝘥𝘶𝘤𝘦𝘥 𝘵𝘰 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘤𝘩𝘢𝘪𝘯𝘴 𝘰𝘧 𝘴𝘭𝘢𝘷𝘦𝘳𝘺, 𝘯𝘦𝘹𝘵 𝘵𝘰 𝘦𝘯𝘴𝘭𝘢𝘷𝘦𝘮𝘦𝘯𝘵, 𝘐 𝘴𝘩𝘰𝘶𝘭𝘥 𝘳𝘦𝘨𝘢𝘳𝘥 𝘣𝘦𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘴𝘭𝘢𝘷𝘦 𝘰𝘧 𝘢 𝘳𝘦𝘭𝘪𝘨𝘪𝘰𝘶𝘴 𝘮𝘢𝘴𝘵𝘦𝘳 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘨𝘳𝘦𝘢𝘵𝘦𝘴𝘵 𝘤𝘢𝘭𝘢𝘮𝘪𝘵𝘺 𝘵𝘩𝘢𝘵 𝘤𝘰𝘶𝘭𝘥 𝘣𝘦𝘧𝘢𝘭𝘭 𝘮𝘦. 𝘍𝘰𝘳 𝘰𝘧 𝘢𝘭𝘭 𝘴𝘭𝘢𝘷𝘦𝘩𝘰𝘭𝘥𝘦𝘳𝘴 𝘸𝘪𝘵𝘩 𝘸𝘩𝘰𝘮 𝘐 𝘩𝘢𝘷𝘦 𝘦𝘷𝘦𝘳 𝘮𝘦𝘵, 𝘳𝘦𝘭𝘪𝘨𝘪𝘰𝘶𝘴 𝘴𝘭𝘢𝘷𝘦𝘩𝘰𝘭𝘥𝘦𝘳𝘴 𝘢𝘳𝘦 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘸𝘰𝘳𝘴𝘵. 𝘐 𝘩𝘢𝘷𝘦 𝘦𝘷𝘦𝘳 𝘧𝘰𝘶𝘯𝘥 𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘮 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘮𝘦𝘢𝘯𝘦𝘴𝘵 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘣𝘢𝘴𝘦𝘴𝘵, 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘮𝘰𝘴𝘵 𝘤𝘳𝘶𝘦𝘭 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘤𝘰𝘸𝘢𝘳𝘥𝘭𝘺, 𝘰𝘧 𝘢𝘭𝘭 𝘰𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘳𝘴."
--------
Kegseth would beat his slaves until they were reduced to bloody tatters. He would rape them; he would starve them; he would work them until they fell over dead in his fields. He would tear children, likely those he sired himself by brute force, from the arms of their mothers, and sell them to others just as malevolent as he to visit the same abuse on another generation, and another. He would do all of this with a wicked smile on his face, and he would still walk out of church every Sunday utterly convinced of his own righteousness, because the bastard standing behind the pulpit would be a participant in the same evil institution.
It could not be otherwise. Absolute power corrupts absolutely, and there is no Earthly power more absolute than that of a master over a slave.
Bang on target!
And congress gave him millions of slaves by putting him in his position as defense secretary.
The only people with valid opinions on the legitimacy of human slavery are . . . slaves. I'm pretty sure this idiot cannot imagine himself as anything other than a slave owner. If you can defend slavery, then you are beyond morally bankrupt. Attempting to rationalize a justification for slavery is sickening.
[Quoting C.S. Lewis, Haymes said that faulting the Founders for practicing slavery is “chronological snobbery.”]
Except there were people of that time who recognized that slavery was wrong. Fuck, there was a Catholic priest who condemned Columbus' treatment and enslavement of Native Americans in the 15th/16th century.
There were people who looked beyond the narrow fundamentalist bullshit interpretation of the Bible and sided with "love your neighbor as yourself" throughout history.
Slavery was wrong. Slavery was always wrong. Slavery in the Bible was wrong. If everything in the Bible were truly written by an omniscient, benevolent God, then God could have created a just and moral system that included a prohibition against slavery. Instead, the Hebrew authors of Leviticus and Deuteronomy adopted from the laws of Mesopotamia. Leviticus includes sex slavery, race based perpetual slavery, and debt slavery. You could beat your slave and as long as he died after a day or two, you were okay. If he died, you paid a fine, not with your life. That is not respecting "the image of God" in another human being. That's treating them like a farm animal.
There is no defense of slavery in the Bible. Christians have to deal with it.
But I suspect this has less to do with this fucker's sick and twisted version of Christianity and more to do with his power fantasies, his misogyny, and his racism and his vision of imposing a white, Christian male hierarchy on America again where minorities are consigned to servitude and expected to smile and be grateful to him for it.
Evil motherfucker.
Oh that "they were a product of their times" bullshit is nothing more than a red flag for racists. You can find tons of 18th century cartoons poking fun at the American Revolutionaries' laments about "freedom" while keeping part of the population enslaved.
And to answer their claim that slavery was somehow not so bad in the ancient world, one has only to mention Spartacus and his army of slaves, some 70,000 strong, from all sorts of masters in all sorts of conditions and all sorts of trades, who were so fed up with their lot that they freed themselves, then fought and died for that hard-won freedom, more than two millennia ago.
To some extent I agree with a product of their times. People were trapped. In a sense, slaves were the machines of the economy. They did work that is done by machines today. Most free people wouldn't work for someone else, they'd move to the west and get their own farm. If you had a medium sized farm, you had to have slaves to run it because that's the way the system was set up.
Many people knew that slavery was wrong but the alternative was selling the land they inherited and starting from scratch. People didn't want to put themselves into poverty.
A rather crude analogy. When global warming really hits and the economy collapses and millions die, people who live at that time will look back and wonder why people didn't give up their personal cars and use public transportation. Why did people do something which was clearly wrong? The answer is that in many cases, there was no good alternative and changing things would have a major hit to people's standards of living. The same thing was true when slavery was around. If you wanted to run a farm bigger then a few acres, you had to own slaves because there was no alternative.
"If everything in the Bible were truly written by an omniscient, benevolent God, then God could have created a just and moral system"
Assume that this god of theirs exists and is the source of morality.
Then take a moral dilemma (say, the trolley problem - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trolley_problem). Now, being omniscient, this god would have foreseen this difficulty, and the moral system it produced would take account of it. This system would therefore contain the correct solution to the dilemma.
Looks around, nope, nothing about this kind of dilemma and how to solve it in the bible.
I wish I could like this comment 100x times... Just because people in the past did good things but also owned slaves doesn't mean that slavery was okay. They frankly like class and social hierarchy and want some version of that to come back where they are the top of it. However they have to back into that, they will.
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"Slavery was wrong. Slavery was always wrong."
You are applying the current view to ancient societies. This only works if objective moral values exist, something that many ethicists would deny (Try something like J.L. Mackie's "Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong", which starts, "There are no objective values").
One can argue against slavery using the majority of systems of normative ethics (I can certainly see this could be done in consequentialist, deontological or contractualist ethics), but one has to accept that these are social constructs, and not like, say, the laws of physics.
Further Thought:
𝐴𝑠 𝐼 𝑤𝑜𝑢𝑙𝑑 𝑛𝑜𝑡 𝑏𝑒 𝑎 𝑠𝑙𝑎𝑣𝑒, 𝑠𝑜 𝐼 𝑤𝑜𝑢𝑙𝑑 𝑛𝑜𝑡 𝑏𝑒 𝑎 𝑚𝑎𝑠𝑡𝑒𝑟. 𝑇ℎ𝑖𝑠 𝑒𝑥𝑝𝑟𝑒𝑠𝑠𝑒𝑠 𝑚𝑦 𝑖𝑑𝑒𝑎 𝑜𝑓 𝑑𝑒𝑚𝑜𝑐𝑟𝑎𝑐𝑦. 𝑊ℎ𝑎𝑡𝑒𝑣𝑒𝑟 𝑑𝑖𝑓𝑓𝑒𝑟𝑠 𝑓𝑟𝑜𝑚 𝑡ℎ𝑖𝑠, 𝑡𝑜 𝑡ℎ𝑒 𝑒𝑥𝑡𝑒𝑛𝑡 𝑜𝑓 𝑡ℎ𝑒 𝑑𝑖𝑓𝑓𝑒𝑟𝑒𝑛𝑐𝑒, 𝒊𝒔 𝒏𝒐 𝒅𝒆𝒎𝒐𝒄𝒓𝒂𝒄𝒚. [emphasis mine]
-- Abraham Lincoln
I'm going to keep this as simple as possible. Those who defend slavery HAVE NEVER THEMSELVES BEEN ENSLAVED. They have never had their rights, their freedom or their agency taken away without so much as a by-your-leave. They have never had their lives so redirected that any concept of autonomy becomes foreign to their everyday existence. Yet these people want to defend the practice as though it were benign when properly applied.
Let them try it out for themselves, and THEN let's hear what they have to say.
And yet they are somewhat enslaved to the cult leaders they serve, they just can't see it. Ironic.
Slave morality
You’re not being fair here. They can imagine what it’s like. They’ve watched the song of the South and gone with the wind.
Uh-huh. They've heard TALK about being slapped in the face. Let them get slapped once, then see what they think.
I have been slapped in my face once in my soon 62 years on Tellus' surface. By my mother when I was app 12 yo. My mother was more shocked than I was. She never forgot it.
About Gone with the Wind. Back when the film was first released, my grandfather was a firefighter in Alabama. The theaters were so packed for every showing, he and his coworkers were required to be there in case of a fire. Granddaddy hated that movie, said something about being sick of that woman falling down the stairs.
Consider how the local culture must have regarded the Confederacy if that overblown romance novel was that popular in the area. I suspect those attitudes are a good slice of the reason for where we are as a country these days.
Very much the case. I was just writing something a few minutes ago about the difficulties of being raised in a racist society, and not realizing how often racism raises it’s not above the swamp. It takes extra vigilance to make sure that what I’m thinking is in accord with my values.
Seems it's religion that is inherently evil. Its practitioners keep proving it.
Well, I would say that Christianity is. I can't speak for the others. In anthropology, we say that religion is a means of social control. It depends on the structure of the society whether that control is benign, for group cohesion, or malignant, to establish dominance of those who control the surplus over those who produce it. We don't know the religion of the Harappan Civilization, for example, and their technology was pretty advanced without excessive distribution of wealth. As an atheist, of course, I would argue that the data clearly show that secular societies are more egalitarian and stable than religious ones. I would also argue that the Libertarian/ Anarcho-capitalist/ sociopathic intelligentsia of the Far Right know this and are fomenting the rise of religious extremism precisely because social upheaval and chaos are profitable to them. They love their 48 Laws of Power and their "evolutionary" psychology pseudoscience. It should be no surprise that it is psychologists (eg Steven Pinker and Charles Murray) who are trying to revive "race science" and who are allying with that Christian Nationalist publisher to produce their stupid War on Science book.
I'm thinking mainly Christianity, but I'm also recalling ritual human sacrfice to appease the gods and to keep the Sun rising every morning, This long predates the Abrahamic monogod.
Yes. And those were highly stratified societies. I just don't want to make too many claims about religions that I have no lived experience with. People with Christian upbringings like myself tend to impose Christian interpretations or black-and-white thinking onto other religions. I have been told by Jews, for instance, that their religion makes no claims of no other gods existing, they only claim that they have a covenant with this particular god. They also see their god as fallible and imperfect and are allowed to argue with him. This is one of the reasons they consider Christianity to be cultural appropriation--Christians retconned the interpretation of what they labeled the "Old Testament." Since I will use every opportunity to attack rightwing Christianity, I love telling them that their religion is nothing more than cultural appropriation with good marketing.
Oh, it absolutely is, they should divorce the Old Testament as it contradicts the "Christ's" tale message, which is supposedly the point of christianity.
This is interresting. If you could recommend some books, papers or articles about it, I would really appreciate it.
Yes, organized religion perpetuates man's inhumanity to man.
Saying slavery is ok if done right is like saying murder is ok if done right, if you have a fair executioner.
It basically IS saying that.
What is your “it”?
Your entire statement.
At the risk of being redundant in the thread.
Let’s see him experience being a slave. Let’s see how he likes being owned by someone and dependent on their morality for his life.
He is looking at it as someone who, historically and probably personally in some small ways, who only ever owned slaves and never as someone who was owned. A wealthy white male born of privilege and a sense of superiority. He will never understand the immorality of slavery, only its personal benefits for his pocketbook, or even the benefits to the wealthy of society.
So, is that an excuse? Absolutely not. It’s barely an explanation as there are plenty of wealthy white men who have always, throughout history, sought the abolition of slavery and knew it’s evil. So he doesn’t get a pass for not understanding. He chooses not to understand, he chooses to be cruel and evil.
Instead of rewarding these villains, we need to expose them to that which they so gleefully wish to dump on others. So, I say again.
Let’s see him be a slave.
Nothing wrong with being repetitively redundant ... or saying the same thing, over and over again, sure as hell not when slavery is the topic and some IDIOT wants to insist that slavery is okay. As I said elsewhere, to them, it's all just an intellectual exercise.
Let it become REAL to them – VERY DAMNED REAL – then listen to the tune they sing.
𝐹𝑜𝑟 𝑚𝑎𝑛𝑦 𝑝𝑒𝑜𝑝𝑙𝑒, 𝑝𝑜𝑜𝑟 𝑝𝑒𝑜𝑝𝑙𝑒, 𝑝𝑒𝑟ℎ𝑎𝑝𝑠 𝑝𝑒𝑜𝑝𝑙𝑒 𝑤ℎ𝑜 𝑤𝑒𝑟𝑒𝑛’𝑡 𝑒𝑑𝑢𝑐𝑎𝑡𝑒𝑑, 𝑝𝑒𝑟ℎ𝑎𝑝𝑠 𝑝𝑒𝑜𝑝𝑙𝑒 𝑤ℎ𝑜 ℎ𝑎𝑑 𝑛𝑜 𝑜𝑡ℎ𝑒𝑟 𝑜𝑝𝑝𝑜𝑟𝑡𝑢𝑛𝑖𝑡𝑦, 𝑤𝑜𝑟𝑘𝑖𝑛𝑔 𝑓𝑜𝑟 𝑎 𝑔𝑒𝑛𝑡𝑙𝑒, 𝑐𝑎𝑟𝑖𝑛𝑔, 𝑙𝑜𝑣𝑖𝑛𝑔 𝑚𝑎𝑠𝑡𝑒𝑟 𝑤𝑎𝑠 𝑡ℎ𝑒 𝑏𝑒𝑠𝑡 𝑜𝑓 𝑎𝑙𝑙 𝑝𝑜𝑠𝑠𝑖𝑏𝑙𝑒 𝑤𝑜𝑟𝑙𝑑𝑠.
What bullflop. The best of all possible worlds is when said 'masters' share social resources so that 'many people, poor people' etc. can get an education and are given opportunities.
His point is like saying that a 6-year-old working in a sweatshop is better than that 6-year-old starving to death. And the answer is: a moral, functional, modern society reallocates excess wealth to (try and) prevent BOTH child labor sweatshops AND starvation. Or to his point: a moral etc. society should reallocate excess wealth to try and prevent BOTH lack of education AND lack of opportunity.
𝑚𝑒𝑛 𝑙𝑖𝑘𝑒 𝐽𝑜𝑛𝑎𝑡ℎ𝑎𝑛 𝐸𝑑𝑤𝑎𝑟𝑑𝑠, 𝑤ℎ𝑜 𝑜𝑤𝑛𝑒𝑑 𝑠𝑙𝑎𝑣𝑒𝑠, 𝑐𝑜𝑢𝑙𝑑 𝑖𝑛 𝑓𝑎𝑐𝑡 𝑡𝑟𝑒𝑎𝑡 𝑡ℎ𝑒𝑖𝑟 𝑠𝑙𝑎𝑣𝑒𝑠 𝑡ℎ𝑒 𝑤𝑎𝑦 𝑡ℎ𝑒 𝐵𝑖𝑏𝑙𝑒 𝑡𝑒𝑙𝑙𝑠 𝑡ℎ𝑒𝑚 𝑡𝑜 𝑡𝑟𝑒𝑎𝑡 𝑡ℎ𝑒𝑖𝑟 𝑠𝑙𝑎𝑣𝑒𝑠 𝑎𝑛𝑑 𝑡ℎ𝑎𝑡 𝑡ℎ𝑒𝑦 𝑤𝑒𝑟𝑒𝑛’𝑡 𝑙𝑖𝑣𝑖𝑛𝑔 𝑖𝑛 𝑔𝑟𝑎𝑣𝑒 𝑠𝑖𝑛
Theological hair-splitting. Note his use of the word 'grave' as a way to make his argument somewhat immune to critique - to anyone who cites the golden rule or love your neighbor as showing yes this is a sin, he can respond "yes, but it's not a grave one."
Any protestant believing in sola fides is going to accept that slavers can get into heaven. That's different from claiming it's morally okay.
𝐻𝑎𝑦𝑚𝑒𝑠 𝑠𝑎𝑖𝑑 𝑡ℎ𝑎𝑡 𝑓𝑎𝑢𝑙𝑡𝑖𝑛𝑔 𝑡ℎ𝑒 𝐹𝑜𝑢𝑛𝑑𝑒𝑟𝑠 𝑓𝑜𝑟 𝑝𝑟𝑎𝑐𝑡𝑖𝑐𝑖𝑛𝑔 𝑠𝑙𝑎𝑣𝑒𝑟𝑦 𝑖𝑠 “𝑐ℎ𝑟𝑜𝑛𝑜𝑙𝑜𝑔𝑖𝑐𝑎𝑙 𝑠𝑛𝑜𝑏𝑏𝑒𝑟𝑦.”
Largely irrelevant. Yes there may be complexities in blaming past generations for not having modern ethics and morals, but YOU ARE NOT A HISTORICAL FIGURE. You are alive today, now. Defending slavery today, now. And that's horrendous and despicable. Reasonable people can disagree about whether Thomas Jefferson's goods outweigh his evils, or if there's a significant moral difference between Spartan vs. Athenian slavery in classical Greece. Reasonable people ought not disagree about whether slavery is moral in 2025 U.S.A.
Oh dear, you sound like a godless communist! Of course, White Supremacists speak in code, and "godless communist" actually means "Jews ("globalists") who manipulate "Black and Coloured people" to rise up against White people," to paraphrase Elon Musk's grandfather. To White Supremacists, the word "Christian" itself is code for White Supremacy. As are the words "civilization" and "Western" and the Crusader tattoos found on Pete Hegseth and the GHF "aid workers." So every time you hear a Republican complain about "cultural Marxism," substitute "I'm a racist."
It infects a lot more than supremacists. The reason conservatives constantly claim teachers and civil servants are lazy/overpaid is because those positions contain a much higher rate of women and minorities. Teaching because it was seen as women's work, the civil service because they instituted merit-based job screening decades earlier than the private sector, meaning many more women and blacks could get those jobs compared to trying to get through the private sector's good 'ol boy network.
Women created civil servants and were the first workers to perform those jobs. It grew out of the charity performed by women.
At this point, any time I hear a Republican complain I hear them admitting they are racist.
Insert the "accurate" meme.
Hey, Haymes...
"Whenever I hear anyone arguing for slavery, I feel a strong impulse to see it tried on him personally."
-- Abraham Lincoln, in a speech to the 140th Indiana Regiment in Washington DC on March 17th 1865
Gonna let yourself be put in chains and beaten? Yeah, I didn't think so.
"B-b-b-but, I'm a white male Christian. I am SUPPOSED to be the master, you godless heathen! I now smite you in the name of the Lord!"
I'm a white male non-Christian and I'd like to punch Haymes in the face. Repeatedly. Until he can't stand up any longer.
For a better effect, it's better to punch a more fleshy part.
Thanks for the advice. I hope I never need it.
I suggest kicking Haymes in the genitals with steel toe boots repeatedly, until the pain causing him to pass out! Keep telling Haymes if he screams that proves he is not a real man (according to the MAGAS mindset), for “real men” (MAGAS mindset) should be able to take it. So you are physically hurting him and hurting him psychologically as well, a double dose for a douchebag scum ball like him!
While my moral character tells me slavery is wrong, I would be willing to own Joshua Haymes. He should be prepared to sleep outside at night, chained to the ground in my wood shed. His days will be filled with joyful tasks like mowing my entire lawn with a pair of scissors. The workday shall consist of dawn to dusk chores of my choosing. His accommodations will include gourmet fare like chicken bones, peelings from vegetables or anything else I deem to provide for him. He can also eat insects that I give approval for. He will not be allowed to breed so neutering will be provided for him.
I know, given his love of slavery, that he will be eternally grateful for my kind treatment.
This time of year, dusk is too early.
Agreed. Hate turning on lights so early.
Dammit, you just reminded me have to mow the lawns today. At least I managed to get the blades on the mower sharpened yesterday.
Conscripting a human being to a life of poverty and forced labor is awful. That so many on the authoritarian, patriarchal right think this is acceptable is telling. I still think these personality traits are underlain by their genetic endowment. They make a civil society difficult to hold - just witness their current attempt to impose their will on everyone who disagrees with them. We fought the Civil War to try to impose a liberal democracy on these people... now they want to return the favor with Gilead. I hope I'm wrong, but I don't see anything knitting us back together.
" I don't see anything knitting us back together."
Neither do I.
Even if there is a sweeping blue tsunami in the midterms -- IF we're allowed to have midterms at all -- hate and cruelty won't just go away. Attitudes won't change overnight.
I have had a horrible feeling for a while now, that this is what ICE's sudden gargantuan budget is for. If they can't come up with a reasonable excuse to cancel elections and/or the elections don't go their way, they will have a standing army of mercenaries to swoop in and declare martial law/absolute rule/what the fuck ever.
Somebody, please, PLEASE convince me I'm wrong about this.
Many of us feel the same way. I’m in the camp who think a negotiated, well-structured national divorce is the answer.
Well but I think there's a social equivalent of Planck's principle* that could save the country. None of these slavery-endorsing dominionist adults will ever change their minds. Doesn't mean their kids will agree with them.
*"A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents... but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it."
That's why they are defunded schools, and stripping actual history out of them, lest their kids realize empathy, and not be cruel, and hateful, like them.
Sorry, but I can't do that without lying to myself. And I'm not living in UnUSA and I have no plans to do so in the near future.
I think you are right.
Anybody wanna help me go abduct one of these “Slavery was okay, actually!” types? I’m guessing it would take less than a week as my slave - less than 24 hours for all but the hardest cases - to change their minds.
I mean, that’s consent, right? They DID say it was okay. Can anyone from the BDSM community weigh in?
Consent isn't just important- it's the basis for 𝘦𝘷𝘦𝘳𝘺𝘵𝘩𝘪𝘯𝘨 else. If you can't grok the concept that the submissive is the one with the ultimate veto over everything that happens in a scene, no matter how tame or how extreme, you're going to have a 𝘷𝘦𝘳𝘺 short and 𝘷𝘦𝘳𝘺 unpleasant experience in the BDSM community. Abusers are, unequivocally, 𝘯𝘰𝘵 welcome.
There is also an expectation that anyone who wants to play the Dominant role should first have experience as a submissive, and if you aren't willing to do that... well, word gets around. 𝘘𝘶𝘪𝘤𝘬𝘭𝘺.
There is a novel where your last point is emphasized. Dom(me)s in training have to follow a lesson about spanking or anal play, and they nearly pissed themselves when they learned it wouldn't be X teaching them but his wife and sub.
There's a saying in the scene: "Power flows from the submissive." An important saying, worth keeping in mind.
GMTA.
The bible says you can beat your slaves - you just can't kill them or knock their teeth out.
Safe, sane and consensual is the motto. I say go for it, it is obviously their fantasy, and a responsible practitioner always tries any act on themself first. How can they train others if they don't know what being a good master entails?
“ … But we cannot condemn the entire institution of slavery outright; we just cannot do that because the Bible does not do that.”
So I guess abortion also cannot be condemned. Right?
Edited to shorten and focus a bit better.
Obviously, Haymes knows about Exodus 21 and Leviticus 25, but I wonder if he's acquainted with Numbers 5:11-31.
Or does he just ignore it because it's inconvenient?
"I'll take that cherry right there."
That is logic, Christian fascists assholes don’t do logic very well. If fact, MAGAS don’t do thinking well either.
Critical analysis is a foreign land to them.