Posted on 10/03/2014 12:52:20 PM PDT by markomalley
I would say that the NT neither approves nor disapproves of slavery. It simply takes it for granted as a fact of life that absolutely nobody had yet announced was a moral wrong.
I don’t think I’ve ever claimed that the Bible says slavery is immoral. Unfortunately, it doesn’t.
What the Bible did do, however, is proclaim more boldly than anything before it the common fatherhood of God and brotherhood of man. That principles eventually led to the demise of slavery.
My comment, however, was not about slavery as such, which sadly continued for almost 1500 years in “Christian” countries. It was about the practice of routinely enslaving and raping the women of conquered tribes or nations.
I believe this became illegal in Christian countries a lot sooner than slavery itself. For instance, while there was a lot of rape that no doubt went on during the 100 Years War, I don’t remember reading about chained coffles of French women being shipped back across the Channel as sex slaves for the English.
“All nations of the ancient world, including Israel, enslaved those they defeated in combat and took the women as sex slaves.”.........
Didn’t the American Indians do this as well?
I did say all nations.
To be fair, it depended on the level of “civilization.” Hunter-gatherer types had little economic use for slaves. They generally killed all the males or adopted them into the tribe. However, men can always use another women, and so women were enslaved or married (a distinction without much difference in many tribes).
That is, I think, a somewhat important fact it’s hard for us to grasp. For many women down through history, being enslaved after their men lost a was just didn’t change things that much for them. They were already slaves in many ways in all but name.
An interesting exception to the hunter-gatherer rule was in the Pacific NW, where the land was so productive they were able to develop a sophisticated society with slavery and human sacrifice despite no agriculture. The Haida and Tlingit of Alaska raided as far as California for slaves.
As societies moved up the ladder to chiefdoms and then states, slavery became, AFAIK, universal.
We would have to GIVE them money to take her...
Throw in the corpse of Helen Thomas and Chelsea Clinton... they will run away. Especially if you tell them Helen is one if the 72 virgins...
....Because the Christian faith believes all that is good, holy, and right.
Yes. And, although legal, socially-accepted sex slavery died out wherever Christianity spread, it persisted in societies where slavery still existed and concubinage had some sort of legal sanction, and until very recently, slavery or slave-like conditions, were a normal part of the fabric of every society since the development of agriculture. America and the countries of Latin America (including Brazil which also imported African slaves and didn’t get around to abolishing slavery until 1888, but somehow gets no guff about it from the left the way America does) had the misfortune of being the last new societies to arise before the most of mankind finally decided that the ownership of other human beings was unconscionable.
Sure, in much of Christendom, full on slavery had been replaced with serfdom a long time before, but it was basically in the 19th century that all that, both slavery and serfdom, came to an end, even in the Ottoman Empire, though the Muslim countries that arose when it broke up, Turkey and Syria, excepted, backslid and (on paper at least) only reabolished slavery in the 20th century — Ethiopia and a few bits of Hindu and Buddhist Asia only getting around to abolishing it in 20th century, as well.
Fixed it.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.
