Most Americans in Abraham Lincoln's day were Christians. (Christians who didnt own slaves.) Prove me wrong.

[Lion IRC]

My great grandfather... believed slavery was immoral not because of the Bible but because owning people was wrong.

You literally beg me to ask....

Did he believe it was immoral because it was wrong, or did he believe it was wrong because it was immoral?

 

[laughing dog]

My great grandfather... believed slavery was immoral not because of the Bible but because owning people was wrong.

You literally beg me to ask....

Did he believe it was immoral because it was wrong, or did he believe it was wrong because it was immoral?

I did not beg you to ask anything. But to answer your pointless question - the former.

 

[pood]

Having lost all his other arguments, and having abdicated the field by refusing to respond to the challenges and refutations presented to him, I now sense … a lame attempt to “prove” that there is an objective morality, and that this morality can only be underwritten by the biblical Santa in the Sky, who proved his own morality by, among other things, according to the myth, drowning everyone and everything on earth except for a handful.

 

[Lion IRC]

No.
He said the bible didn't inform his great grandfather's moral judgement but left a great big vacuous, question begging hole in the place where his great grandfather actually DID get his belief instead.

 

[Lion IRC]

So far laughing dog has given us;

The anti slavery view prevailed due to North’s victory over the South.

and

Slavery is bad because it's bad.

 

[laughing dog]

No.
He said the bible didn't inform his great grandfather's moral judgement but left a great big vacuous, question begging hole in the place where his great grandfather actually DID get his belief instead.

I gather from his letters and the descriptions from my grandmother and father, he came to his convictions from observation and reflection.

 

[pood]

No.
He said the bible didn't inform his great grandfather's moral judgement but left a great big vacuous, question begging hole in the place where his great grandfather actually DID get his belief instead.

Oops, how surprising. Yes, another vapid attempt to demonstrate that morals come from the bible’s Santa in the Sky, who as legend has it committed worldwide genocide via rain.

Also, his alleged “hole” is not “question begging.”

Morality come from evolution. Social species evolve traits like reciprocal altruism, empathy, and a sense of fair play because those traits proved advantageous in spreading their genes. Young children who have never heard of Goddie display such traits. Many other social species do as well.

 

[laughing dog]

So far laughing dog has given us;

The anti slavery view prevailed due to North’s victory over the South.

and

Slavery is bad because it's bad.

I get that some many Christians prefer simple and stupid explanations to rational thought. But I said neither.

 

[bilby]

I put this in the same file along with Nazi plans to bomb New York in WW2.

Every culture or society will have elements that are divorced from reality and it always makes good reading.

Yeah, but sometimes those crazies actually succeed. Like the Nazi plan to build rocket artillery that could strike London from Western France, or the British and American plan to harness the energy in atomic nucleii to make a bomb that could destroy an entire city.

 

[TomC]

No.
He said the bible didn't inform his great grandfather's moral judgement but left a great big vacuous, question begging hole in the place where his great grandfather actually DID get his belief instead.

Trying to read the minds of long dead people isn't really very sensible.

But if, in fact, great grandpa had an issue with slavery it didn't come from the Scriptures. Far more likely it was the result of people adopting Enlightenment values and secular ethics. That included Christians in increasing numbers.
That's still true today. You won't find much support for democracy or human equality in scriptures. Those are quite modern improvements to our moral sophistication, as a whole.
If abolition of slavery were a Christian, Scriptural, value the history of the Americas would be profoundly different. But it is not.
Tom

 

[bilby]

No.
He said the bible didn't inform his great grandfather's moral judgement but left a great big vacuous, question begging hole in the place where his great grandfather actually DID get his belief instead.

The Bible is tiny. That great big "vacuous hole" of non-Biblical sources of information is filled with literally billions of other books that describe reality, and, of course, with reality itself - any of which might be used as a source of morals, and all of which are at worst just as good as the Bible, and in most cases FAR superior.

It has been demonstrable for millennia that morals cannot derive from an authority, and central to that proof is the fact that attempting to do so is, necessarily, question begging.

 

[DBT]

There is nothing written in the bible that condemns slavery, but there are verses that support it.

 

[pood]

“Slaves, obey your earthly masters.”

 

[ideologyhunter]

He thinks that you can extrapolate abolitionism from the Bible. Funny that Christians didn't do that for most of their movement's history. No one in the Bible says slaves should be freed. Bondage is accepted in the Bible as a viable part of human society.
The Bible will tell you what to eat, how to prepare an animal sacrifice; it has chapter after chapter about being ritually clean/unclean...not a solitary verse about the inherent evil in owning, selling, coercing and abusing your fellow human. God's big message to humankind....

 

[Lion IRC]

No.
He said the bible didn't inform his great grandfather's moral judgement but left a great big vacuous, question begging hole in the place where his great grandfather actually DID get his belief instead.

I gather from his letters and the descriptions from my grandmother and father, he came to his convictions from observation and reflection.

Ever checked to see if your Great Grandfather's name, date of birth, marriage, baptism, spouse, children, etc was written in any family bible?

 

[Lion IRC]

There is nothing written in the bible that condemns slavery, but there are verses that support it.

Slavery is wage theft.
The bible says thou shalt not steal.

 

[pood]

No.
He said the bible didn't inform his great grandfather's moral judgement but left a great big vacuous, question begging hole in the place where his great grandfather actually DID get his belief instead.

I gather from his letters and the descriptions from my grandmother and father, he came to his convictions from observation and reflection.

Ever checked to see if your Great Grandfather's name, date of birth, marriage, baptism, spouse, children, etc was written in any family bible?

Which, if so, would prove … something?

 

[pood]

There is nothing written in the bible that condemns slavery, but there are verses that support it.

Slavery is wage theft.
The bible says thou shalt not steal.

It also says, “slaves, obey your earthly masters.”

 

[pood]

It also says, “an eye for an eye,” and later, “turn the other cheek.” Now what?

 

[Lion IRC]

If abolition of slavery were a Christian, Scriptural, value the history of the Americas would be profoundly different. But it is not.

If slavery was an undisputed, perfectly obvious Christian, scriptural value, why did an overwhelmingly Christian nation abolish slavery?