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To: js1138
Part two: Slavery was allowed in the constitution because many of the participants in the constitutional convention were slave owners.It was justified by reference to leviticus --. . .

Not all the signers of the Constitution were slave owners. Ben Franklin wasn't. Why did he support it's ratification?

If Christianity clarified the problem of slavery, making it clearly immoral, why did it take 1860 years for Christians to notice that?

I could say why did it take that long for anybody to notice? The truth is Christians had been calling slavery evil long before that.

Pope Pius II called slavery a "great crime" in 1462 and popes forbid the enslavement of Indians in 1537, 1639 and 1741. Note the three orders. It seems popes aren't as quick to be obeyed as commonly thought. Slavery in the British colonies ended in 1815. Here's a link to slavery and Christianity from the Catholic Encylcopedia. It seems pretty accurate.

Part three: Another justification for slavery was the claim that Africans were not fully human,

That's what "scientists" were claiming.

2,655 posted on 01/03/2003 5:00:09 PM PST by Tribune7
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To: Tribune7
Pope Pius II called slavery a "great crime" in 1462 and popes forbid the enslavement of Indians in 1537, 1639 and 1741. Note the three orders. It seems popes aren't as quick to be obeyed as commonly thought.

OK, Pius II gets some points, as do Christians in general, because I do give Christianity credit for bringing some consistency to morality.

But the time frame still troubles me. Instead of 1860 years, we still have 1462 years. That's a lot of years. It still seems to me that morality evolves, and that new justifications emerge that were never explicity written down. If you believe that God exists outside of time, it seems odd that the most fundamental rules of behavior would apply only at certain places and certain times. It's like trying to operate a complex and dangerous machine with a manual that only reveals itself one page every few hundred years.

2,662 posted on 01/03/2003 5:17:48 PM PST by js1138
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To: Tribune7
That's what "scientists" were claiming.

Which scientists? Confederate scientists?

2,705 posted on 01/03/2003 8:34:13 PM PST by Doctor Stochastic
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