I noticed you provided a counterpoint to every one of DaveBuck’s examples, except for slavery. I’m admittedly not religious, so just out of curiosity, how do you reconcile the fact that the Bible seems to condone such a clearly immoral institution?
I’m just curious because you said, “I am quite historically certain that we believe the same thing now as we believed in 33 A.D.” How can you make that statement given that slavery was pretty much universally recognized as a morally acceptable institution for hundreds of years?
St. Paul also placed a direct command on Philemon to free a slave, Onesimus, in Philemon 1:15-17.
And those are just a couple of examples. Despite the fact that slavery was just part of the landscape everywhere in the ancient world, the Bible still speaks against it (and was the first authority to do so.)
And you realize, of course, (1) that slavery is still rife throughout most of the world, and (2) that it was the Christians who freed the slaves in England and in America, and spread this concept through the world?
Ah. That's partly my fault as I had a slavery example in the first paragraph but took it out for a different reason, and then forgot to address the issue later.
Here's a couple of historical analyses from a Catholic perspective:
But just to summarize from what the second article said, slavery as an institution was not condemned per se, (partly for Biblical reasons and partly because of a very libertarian argument that people should be allowed to sell themselves into slavery to ameliorate their economic situation). But regardless of the *institution* of slavery, the slave was always regarded a child of God who deserved to be treated as such. And under this regime, note that actual slavery had all but disappeared in Europe the Middle Ages, and several religious orders were founded specifically with the goal of ransoming slaves from captivity (e.g. the Mercedarians)
As far as modern slavery based on race, the article says "It is unnecessary to observe that the practice of capturing savages or barbarians for the purpose of making slaves of them has always been condemned as a heinous offence against justice, and no just title could be created by this procedure."
Which is why Pope Paul III in Sublimus Dei forbade enslaving the Indians as early as 1537. Later bulls excommunicated people involved the slave trade (e.g. In Supremo, in 1839)