BrotherMan

What a load of crap, not to mention in direct conflict with your previous assertion.

Again, the Bible falls way short and well behind the modern mindset.

On top of that, your analogy still fails. Endentured servitude is at the behest of the master, not the slave. I can freely choose to stay at my current job, find a new one or even start my own business. If I were a slave, I would have no option save what my master allowed.

yguy

That's a half-truth. While everyone has the potential to commit either sin, people who have actually murdered someone aren't that easy to come by, and adultery has been eschewed by many.

yguy

Not at all. I was using "enslavement" in the pejorative sense of one serving under the crack of the whip. Paul was not.

It may start out that way, but it doesn't have to stay that way. You think there wasn't a black person or two who didn't realize they had it better here than they did where they were born? Likely those who served Jefferson, Washington and the like did.

If you were happy where you were, it wouldn't matter. And in Paul's time, it wouldn't matter whether a Christian slavemaster would have allowed him freedom, because the person would just end up being a slave to someone else.

yguy

Have you never heard how a prisoner can be more free than his guard?

Abel Stable

So what does this mean? Where is the half-truth?
You seemed to suggest that the human desire to have slaves is as strong as their desire to breathe. Your analogies are so extreme as to be ludicrous. Anyway, where was the half-truth?
Yes. I suppose that's why those negroes seemed to be so upbeat and carefree singing spirituals in the cotton fields.
Slavery is Freedom, indeed.

yguy

Sorry, I don't know how to make it any more plain.

Not just to have slaves, but to be slaves. That's what personality cults are all about. It's easy to see from an atheist POV that many Christians are effectively enslaved to the Robert Tiltons of the world, as surely as atheists were slaves to Stalin. It's so much easier to go along to get along.

I remember in my HS psych class learning how the Chinese handled POW's in the Korean war. The first thing they did was separate the independent thinkers from the culls and dullards, who amounted to about 95% of them. The independent ones were put under strict guard, but the rest were very manageable by various mind control techniques, so that the guard/prisoner ratio was very low.

yguy

Whoosh!

Abel Stable

You're not kidding? How do you propose to speak for the feelings of kidnapped slaves? And what do you mean by realize? Gimmie a break.

yguy

Nope.

Do you think the standard of living of the average slave in America was better or worse than in their native land? I'm gonna take a wild guess and say it was better.

Couple that with the fact that for at least some it was only a change in ownership, and it appears that for those who survived the trip, it was, on average, a step up. Otherwise I would expect those who earned their freedom to make their way back to their native land, and I've never heard of even a hint of such an exodus.

Jinto

Oh yeah, you've been rippred illegally from your homeland by people with superior firepower, have finally managed to get away from your slaver (but are likely still poor, unless you robbed the guy on your way out), and you would expect these people to invest their time and resources in a hostile society to gain enough money to pay for a voyage to a land that nobody (white) actually wants to visit, and for which there is little demand for tickets aside from that given by the slave traders, and so consequently securing such a voyage is probably impossible, just so they could go home and promptly get captured AGAIN by the next slave party that moves through their homeland. Yeah... I don't even think the KKK had that low an opinion of black people's intelligence.

But this is minor considering the fact that your whole argument is predicated on the assumption that there is no difference between a person who works for money and a slave, which seems to be like saying that there is no difference between prostitution and forcible rape. That is, of course, the most ludicrous concept I have ever heard of. Unfortunately, I suspect that I am going to have to explain in my next post WHY there is a difference between prostitution and forcible rape, since we all know that you'll defend anything if it is in the bible.