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Post by pim on Apr 20, 2016 22:34:03 GMT 10
So I guess it's the purist "principle" and pious claptrap. How utterly boring.
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Post by pim on Apr 20, 2016 23:49:59 GMT 10
"...This above all: to thine own self be true." Indeed, and I question whether you are really being true to "thine own self" Irrelevant. No disrespect intended to your nearest & dearest. This is not about your specific situation. It isn't about that. I'm sorry if you can't see it. Again, irrelevant - unless you want to generalise from your specific situation and choices and impose your values on others and to sneer (useful word that you've introduced, Yorick) at the entirely valid choices and values of others which just happen to be at variance with your own. Again, irrelevant. This is your personal choice. Your point being ... ? Mate I don’t care if you were married in a Pastafarian ceremony presided over by the Flying Spaghetti Monster. Why are you telling us about your personal choices that you had every right to make? This is irrelevant. I think you made that clear long ago, Yorick. So why the repetition? I'm not questioning your right to believe/disbelieve. What I do challenge is the arrogance with which you troll this board and gratuitously insult people who do profess a religious faith. What "facts"? You haven't put forward any "facts". Just irrelevancies. Tell you what, you don't have to agree with me, Yorick. And I'm not interested in your disapproval. Nobody is forcing you to believe/disbelieve anything. I'm going to my grandsons' christening. That’s two little kids who are going to be very happy to see their grandfather, and one grandfather who's going to be happy to be with his grandkids. It'll be a happy occasion with relatives travelling from Qld, NSW and SA and converging on Canberra. That’s what it's all about. And that’s an unalterable fact. You don’t have to agree with me, but don't lecture me on "truth" or "facts". Your grasp of both is pretty slippery. |
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Post by pim on Apr 21, 2016 8:42:27 GMT 10
I still don't believe that you're so much in thrall to your atheist "principle" (with the accent on "your". I don't have a problem with atheism per se. Just yours. I find it phony) that you'd allow it to trump your most significant personal relationships.
But let's take it away from you and me and put it "out there" by returning to our hypothetical:
John Doe meets Jane and they fall in love and decide to get married. But here's the kicker: John is an atheist and Jane is a devout and practising Christian. It happens! Amor omnia vincit and all that! If you fall in love you fall in love. Maybe she's a real honey and he's a good kisser, who knows! But it happens. Cupid shoots his arrows and they are both smitten. They decide to get married. That’s when they start facing issues: Jane wants a church wedding. What is John to do? He is dotty about Jane and wants to marry her. Does he agree to the church wedding? Is Paris worth a mass? Let’s move on. John and Jane are now married and have had their first child. They'd resolved their wedding issue either in John's favour or Jane's - how do you compromise on whether or not to hold a church wedding? Anyhow they've worked through that one somehow and now with the birth of their first child the question of christening arises. We know what Jane's position is but what about John? Jane puts her foot down and insists on a christening. It's going to happen with or without John who realises that he's going to have to decide whether his secular "principles" are important enough to be at the expense of his marriage. John loves his wife but if he boycotts his child's christening it could destroy his relationship with his wife. These are important and weighty matters! I know what I'd do!
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Post by sonex on Apr 21, 2016 13:57:33 GMT 10
The thing is Yorick, In the catholic faith there is a penalty for children who may die without being baptized. They won't be allowed into heaven, no consolation for parents such as "you will meet again in heaven". Some priests have, in the past, refused to bury children who have not been baptized in consecrated ground, they were put with criminals.
So you see there is every reason for catholic parents to baptize their children.
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Post by pim on Apr 21, 2016 15:01:48 GMT 10
Sonex is correct. You wanna blame the Catholic Church for that? Fine! I won't spring to their defence. There's an obvious humanist critique you can make and I'd expect you to make it. Not very well or eloquently but that's only because your "atheism" is shallow and not well thought through, but a humanist and atheist capable of some depth would find the sort of Catholic position that Sonex describes easy meat. However there is also a Christian critique to make of Sonex's Catholic scenario - and a savage one. All in terms of 1Cor13. So while the low-hanging fruit that Sonex presents, which is the Catholicism of the George Pell variety, deserves all the scorn and disdain it gets, in itself it doesn't "prove" anything about belief/disbelief. But Sonex is right to point it out. It's the worst type of Papist sludge, drawn from the murky depths of bog Irish Australian Catholicism which owes everything to Irish tribalism faced with English oppression, and nothing to theology.
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Post by pim on Apr 21, 2016 15:20:54 GMT 10
I'm right though aren't I!!  |
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Post by pim on Apr 21, 2016 15:33:10 GMT 10
Lol
Poor guy wants the last word. Should I be charitable and let have the last word? Hmm I am feeling a little charitable today ... Ok then.
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Post by Occam's Spork on May 11, 2016 21:48:24 GMT 10
Easy, you either pretend to follow the great lie, or you don't. Much like: "You either insist others must follow those moral absolutes, or you don't?"  |
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Post by Occam's Spork on May 12, 2016 0:32:01 GMT 10
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Post by pim on May 12, 2016 17:06:01 GMT 10
Back in your box you Sanctimonious Scatterbrain.   |
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Post by Occam's Spork on Jun 17, 2016 12:22:52 GMT 10
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Post by slartibartfast on Jun 18, 2016 0:56:44 GMT 10
Stop it with the self-portraits! |
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Post by Occam's Spork on Jun 19, 2016 1:36:37 GMT 10
Stop it with the self-portraits! Yeah? Well I don't like you either, stranger on the internet!  |
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Post by slartibartfast on Jun 19, 2016 18:04:57 GMT 10
I didn't say I don't like you, I just
prefer if you did not put up pictures of yourself.
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Post by pim on Jun 22, 2016 3:15:50 GMT 10
I know this is an old thread and I certainly don't want to get between slarti and Occam on the question of slavery. In point of fact I'd just like to play devil's advocate and ask if indeed slavery was always wrong. Slavery still exists, btw. Not just in backward godforsaken hellholes but if you live in any major Australian city or regional centre you can be sure there are slaves within a couple of km from you. Sex slaves certainly but not just sex slaves. The 7/11 foreign worker scandal ticks all the boxes for slavery. Occam I'm prepared to wager that these sorts of scams are in Canada too and in cities like Toronto. Is that sort of slavery wrong? I'm sure we'd all agree that it is even though we Australians know just how difficult it's been not just to bring the 7/11 (Occam 7/11 is a convenience store chain that employs foreign workers ... it's a long story!) scam to court, but to raise it in the first place. So even though the law says it's wrong it's a case of the law walking the walk in addition to talking the talk. These days we all condemn the practice of enslavement on the basis of skin colour which was a feature of European settlement of the New World. Nobody, not even Donald Trump, is going to argue that it was morally justified. But hang on! There are people in England who are wealthy today because their ancestors made a shitload of money from slavery - bearing in mind that slavery wasn't made illegal throughout the British Empire until 1833, and that means Canada, NZ and Australia too. It seems that part of the 1833 Slavery Abolition Act provided for substantial compensation for "loss of property" for former slave owners. So what, morally, should their wealthy present day descendants do? Ill-gotten gains? What would you do if you were to make the uncomfortable discovery that you had ancestors in the 1700s or earlier (or later!) who made money from the slave trade? Take your time ... But go back still further, to the ancient world. Slavery was essential to ancient civilizations. The business model of the Roman legions was to enslave the populations it conquered and sell them on the international slave market. Human muscle power was the primary energy source in the ancient world. More than wind or flowing water or beasts of burden. That kind of made the Roman legions the Caltex or BP of their day. I put it to anyone that human civilization would have been impossible without slavery. Was it wrong? We can debate it and I agree that arguing in favour of slavery is a hard sell! Anyone could be a slave. Hell some people even paid down debt by selling themselves into slavery. And all of this at the time the bible was written and redacted. Fast forward to early Christianity - late 500s to early 600s, the papacy of Gregory 1. Rome had fallen and the Anglo Saxons of what would later be called England were still pagans. The story goes that the Pope happened to be at the Roman slave markets. What was he doing there? Some shopping? Anyhow he happened to notice a coffle of blond blue-eyed slave boys (this stuff about priests and pretty kids obviously goes back a long way!) and he asked who/what they were. "Angles, your Holiness" came the reply. "Non Angli sed Angeli" came the Latin response. Not Angles but angels. History does not record whether he bought any but what's noteworthy is the total lack of moral judgement by Pope Gregory who is known to history as The Great. Clearly he had no moral qualms about slavery. So is it more the case that today our moral condemnation of slavery arises more from the fact that we don't need slaves than from any moral superiority? If we needed slaves to make our lifestyles possible, we'd find a way to justify slavery quick smart! |
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Post by slartibartfast on Jun 22, 2016 9:57:15 GMT 10
Thanks for trying to answer an old question, Pim. I note that the one who was asked the question didn't.
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Post by sonex on Jun 22, 2016 10:19:24 GMT 10
We are not responsible for what our ancestors did, and of course slavery is wrong, people are not commodities to be bought and sold.
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Post by pim on Jun 22, 2016 16:06:58 GMT 10
I'm not arguing in favour of slavery, Sonex. Strewth, who could?? But we - that is, you and I - profit from slavery. Witness the scams involving non English-speaking fruit pickers employed by labour hire companies to pick fruit for the supermarket chains that have had the whistle blown on them by Four Corners. Any labour hire scam in which the so-called "employer" holds the workers' passports, forces the workers into a position in which they're in technical breach of their visa conditions, withholds their pay or pays them a pittance (siphoning off the lion's share because of some "debt" obligation on the part of the workers), forces them to work long hours and to live in squalid conditions and threatens to dob them in to Peter Dutton’s Immigration Department if they complain, ticks the boxes for slavery as far as I'm concerned. So when Coles brags about its low prices we know that part of the reason is that its fresh produce is sourced from slave labour and by claiming to pass the low prices on to us, the lucky consumers, it's involving us in the scam. So whaddawe do? Boycott Coles and Woolies and only do our grocery shopping at "ethical" supermarkets? How does that work? Incidentally here in the UK they must have had the same issues in the past because the giant supermarket chains Tesco and Sainsbury have signs up throughout their shops informing us how "ethical" they are in sourcing the produce they're selling you, and packets of coffee, tea and sugar have "Fair Trade" plastered all over them. So you get that warm inner glow as you load up your trolley ... until you see that the fresh green beans (just to give you an example) are sourced from places like Kenya where there are huge market gardens growing produce for the supermarkets of affluent Western Europe. Those lovely fresh green beans would have been grown, harvested and packaged by Kenyan workers under what conditions? One thing is for sure, none of that food grown in third world Kenya by Kenyan workers would have fed a single Kenyan. What sort of boxes does that tick? Slavery?
My point Sonex is that the question isn't as morally simple and straightforward as you'd like to think. We think of slavery in terms of the old Confederacy. We remember TV series like "Roots" and some of us have seen the movie "Twelve Years A Slave". There are no moral dilemmas there: slavery is bad, end of story. But bonded labour doesn't just exist in isolated pockets today. It's widespread and an integral part of the global economy, and it's trafficked and sold like any other commodity. And what's more you and I profit from it in terms of cheap food and clothing and very likely in ways we're hardly aware of. For example what are the employment conditions of the cleaners who come into a school after the students and staff have left? Or who clean the office building where my daughter works as a public servant? And how do you ensure that the goods and services you pay for at the retail end of the supply chain are sourced "ethically"? Don't pretend that there are simple and straightforward answers to these questions because there aren't. Slavery isn't something reprehensible that used to happen back in the bad old days of our ancestors that we their more morally superior more "enlightened" descendants can look back on from our comfort zones and go "tut tut". It exists today, it's a lot more widespread than any of us realises and we all of us here are the beneficiaries of it whether we like it or not.
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Post by Occam's Spork on Jun 22, 2016 22:29:02 GMT 10
I believe that slavery was always wrong, Pim. The best test for morality is to check it with the antithesis. Slavery was never condemned; but was it ever celebrated? If people thought it were good, why would they go to lengths to hide it.
There's an important distinction between a moral law, and our understanding of that law. Morals are absolte, our understanding of what is right and wrong is not. It's something we discover by acting, then later weighing the consequences.
In Bible times there were strict guidelines for the Hebrew people. When they conquered a city instead of releasing people into the desert to die; they would take them as slaves. In this sort of situation it wasn't a matter of right from wrong; it was a matter of moral weight. (eg, Is it more wrong to keep a slave, or sentence a man to die alone in the desert?) But the Hebrew people were commanded to release their slaves after 7 years, with the means to sustain themselves. So, to reiterate the answer slartibartfast claims I never gave. Nowhere does the Bible 'approve' of slavery, it only reports that it occurred.
Historically my Great Uncle (who was from Maine), fought in the American Civil war, on the side of the Union.
I won't answer for Rome's Church, as I don't necessarily agree with everything they do.
On a related tangent, I have recently sponsored a Dalit girl from India, who's family grew up in slave conditions. It is my hope that money will pay for her education, so her future family won't have to continue working off debts as slaves.
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Post by pim on Jun 23, 2016 2:26:06 GMT 10
I believe that slavery was always wrong, Pim. The best test for morality is to check it with the antithesis. Slavery was never condemned; but was it ever celebrated? If people thought it were good, why would they go to lengths to hide it. The term "slave" doesn't go back to remote antiquity. There is no classical Latin or Greek origin for the word. To deal with the word briefly, it goes back to the 13th century, to the Medieval Latin word for a Slavic captive. The old English word for a person kept in bondage was "thrall" which still exists in "enthralled". In ancient Rome the word was "servus" which also means "servant" so the shades of meaning get a bit fuzzy. I guess what I'm trying to say is that our modern view of slavery, with all of its black & white moral clarity - i.e. that it’s a BAD THING and aren't we better and more moral for having abolished it - is heavily coloured by the raced-based chattel slavery of the Americas which lasted for about 500 years. It didn’t end with Abraham Lincoln's decree of manumission while the Civil War was still raging and slavery existed in the South (and in parts of the North too until Lincoln's emancipation decree of 1862). I believe race-based chattel slavery existed in places like Brazil until the 1890s. In my country there was a practice called "blackbirding" by which Melanesian tribespeople were abducted from South Pacific islands such as the Solomons and Vanuatu, enslaved and were forced to cut sugar cane in Queensland. This practice endured right up until the beginning of the 20th century. In fact the very first order of business for the newly-minted Australian Parliament when the British enacted the Australian Constitution which came into force in 1901 was the Immigration Restriction Act which is the notorious White Australia Policy. The immediate reason for that Act was to override the State of Queensland and to put a stop to "blackbirding". Which it did! So we have a dark past regarding slavery as well. But the thing is that slavery still exists - everywhere! I freely acknowledge it exists in Australia and I'll bet it exists in Canada. It exists wherever people are trafficked, sold and held in bondage. It kinda muddies the waters when discussing the moral dimension of slavery. I'm a trained applied linguist, Occam so I frequently come at these questions from the words used to describe what we're discussing. In the ancient world there was no difference between a servant and a slave. A Roman would have looked at Lord Grantham in Downton Abbey and would have designated him as Dominus = lord. By the same token he would have looked at the chief butler, Carson, and said "servus" = servant/slave. Now you and I would agree that Carson was a servant but was he a slave? Latin is of no help in making those sorts of distinctions. Slavery in the ancient world was a completely different kettle of fish from the chattel slavery of more than a millennium later in the Americas. I'm not sure that the same moral clarity applies. Sorry, Occam, the rest of your post is interesting too but time has run out at my end. I'd love to hear more about the Civil War connection in your family and as for the Roman Catholic Church, I don't necessarily agree with everything they do either! And that's putting it very mildly! Gotta go! |
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Post by Occam's Spork on Jun 23, 2016 3:54:25 GMT 10
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Post by KTJ on Jun 23, 2016 8:12:08 GMT 10
In Bible times there were strict guidelines for the Hebrew people. When they conquered a city instead of releasing people into the desert to die; they would take them as slaves. So your IMAGINARY GOD endorses slavery? After all, in your bullshit book, there are instructions relating to keeping slaves. So as you are against slavery, does this mean that your imaginary god is full-of-shit? What other delusions lurk within your mind? |
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Post by pim on Jun 23, 2016 8:51:10 GMT 10
Oh piss off KTJ. Go and do whatever Little Jack Horner does to himself in his corner
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Post by Occam's Spork on Jun 23, 2016 9:00:22 GMT 10
So your IMAGINARY GOD endorses slavery? No, overlooking your abysmal ignorance; It would be more accurate to say man wanted it, and He reluctantly 'allowed' men the misguided fruition of their deeds. What is true freedom, should He withhold us from the consequence of our (or other's) choices? The guidelines were to ensure the slaves would not be mistreated. |
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Post by Occam's Spork on Jun 23, 2016 9:13:51 GMT 10
Oh piss off KTJ. Go and do whatever Little Jack Horner does to himself in his corner  |
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