JCC Arena The Theist/Atheist Thunderdome™

Actually, I believe it was Adam and Eve's son Cain, who committed the first murder, resulting in God "marking" him. Many people believe that the mark was darkening Cain's skin so that descendents would be able to tell who he and his descendents were.

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curse_of_Ham

The story's original objective was to justify the subjection of the Canaanites to the Israelites,[4] but in later centuries, the narrative was interpreted by some Jews, Christians, and Muslims as an explanation for black skin, as well as slavery.[5] Nevertheless, most Christian denominations and all Islamic, Jewish denominations now strongly disagree with such interpretations due to the fact that in the biblical text, Ham himself is not cursed and race or skin color is never mentioned.[6]

 

Cain's descendants are all dead. God killed them in the flood, which was only survived by Noah's immediate family, who was of the line of Seth.

 

Well thanks for the correction. Apparently I don't know the bible as well as I thought I did.

 

Zombie Jesus nativity scene

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Not allowed.

 

That is actually because we have Christianity for the most part under control. Various religious leaders tried to have blasphemy become a fine worth half a million dollars after the Janet Jackson Superbowl fiasco. And hey, never mind that Planned Parenthood shooting these past few days.

 

Thanks to the last three posts for ensuring that this thread stays thoroughly stupid and mildly bigoted.

Sigh.

 

You're welcome. It is bigoted that people want to fine you for blasphemy concerning their gods.

 

Ah yes, the flood. That little morality fairytale where an all powerful Creator, dissatisfied or otherwise disappointed with his creations, instead of, I dunno, snapping his fingers and resetting things in an instant, decided to kill everything horribly by way of drowning. But not before having this old man build this big effing boat-box thing where he'd store his handful of a family and only two of every other known species to ride out the rain and then repopulate the Earth (hah) through massive inbreeding.

Why go though all the trouble, really? Why snuff out the animals? They weren't the problem. Humanity was (and still is, I suppose). All the Creator had to do was sigh, whisper something along the lines of "no more humans" and let the animal kingdom or some other better species inherit the world. Man, it's a shame Moses or whoever wrote the silly tale didn't have a better editor at hand to point that out to him.

 

There's no such thing as blasphemy, Beezer. Your religious beliefs do not get to dictate how others conduct themselves.

 

Logically, since the scriptures mention slavery and establish rules for capturing and keeping slaves, slavery must pre-date scripture. But can it pre-date religion itself? Surely the further back in time you look, the harder it is to discriminate between religion, culture and superstition, and going back further than 'the dawn of man' it would probably become gradually more meaningless to discriminate between culture, superstition, and instinctive behaviour.

So what does it mean for slavery to exist without religion? Recognising both as concepts that have only been differentiated thanks to aeons of mental/cultural/biological evolution means it's a rather complicated chicken and egg paradox.

If you limit the question to refer to an individual's personal beliefs, it's possible that some historic/prehistoric slavers privately had no supernatural beliefs by chance, but unlikely that they would make such views known publicly if they believed in self preservation. It's more probable that people keeping or trading slaves in the 21st century might be genuine atheists, sure, but given the statistics it's far more likely that they're religious, even pious. But modern day slavers smuggling sex workers through economically developed nations are a very different breed to the legally/morally/religiously sanctioned slavers of ancient times. Modern day slavers using slaves in the traditional sense in places like India, Pakistan, Mauritania and Myanmar, I'd guess are almost 100% religious, or at least acting within the constraints of religious norms.

We can at least point to IS as a religious organisation promoting slavery, and notice that many Muslim majority countries were about 100 years slower to abolish slavery (Mauritania are still working on it). We can look at a map of slavery by country and, well, is it just me or does anyone else notice a trend between a country's economic development, religiosity, and slave population?



Italy and USA have fairly high religiosity and low slavery, and I'm sure there are more examples that might falsify my hypothesis. I'll leave that as homework for the dedicated religious apologist.

 

Yeah, I mean, I would view "religion" as a codified set of beliefs adhered to by a significant group of people. One person may have beliefs or superstitions or spirituality or even what we might call faith. But religion is more than all those things. I mean, in my opinion. Spirituality is individual as it can be; religion requires a certain level of group adherence, I would say. But it's a difficult parsing, sure.

 

They're getting the timeline wrong. Jesus wasn't a zombie until he came back from the dead, duh.

 

I'm not sure religion is much more than those things. I'd characterise religion as a formalised set of communicated spiritual beliefs based on superstitious thinking, which were in turn based on paranoia and optimism/wishful thinking. There's a lot of linguistic trickery attached to it - qualifying as a religion or quasi-religion by your standards may depend on having a large enough vocabulary to communicate and formalise a set of abstract spiritual ideas... But to an unbiased alien zoologist our ape behaviours might not look that far removed from our cousins.

There's group adherence observed in other ape/primate communities. There are other aspects of religious culture you could choose to identify too, such as charismatic leaders, sects, even schisms and heresy if you're selective enough. My point is that primitive man will have always had some kind of proto-religion in the sense that the ingredients and tools were kind of always there, just less sophisticated and specialised. The cultural/religious/spiritual/superstitious life of our ancestors may seem unsophisticated to us, but it presumably felt just as important, valid and mysterious. Looking at the few examples we have of tribal people living apart from global civilisation, there seems to be much less distinction made between religious/spiritual life and the material world, which suggests that our modern distinctions are a product of our cultural evolution, for better or worse.

 

Yeah because religion is a socially constructed thing then it is necessarily tied to the social and cultural norms of the society within which the religious doctrine is formulated. Scripture had to deal with slavery because slavery was a thing at the time. The major problem with religion now is that for many religious people their 'faith' is tied to scripture, and because scripture is tied to the cultural/social norms that existed at the time it was written, then scripture is necessarily socially and culturally backward. It is "frozen in time". So religious people have to kind of jump through intellectual hoops to keep up with the times, but also honour their scripture as the word of God. Which is why I don't really subscribe to the idea that all religious people are motivated by scripture at all times. You can have a person who is religious and does bad things which are not necessariily tied to their religious beliefs or does good things which seem to contradict their religious beliefs.

Basically I think that religion and slavery are tied only in the sense that slavery was a thing when scripture was written. In more modern times I believe that slavery is not a religious mandate but is driven by other factors such as economic opportunism, racism and other social/cultural/economic issues. The fact the people who participate in slavery are religious to me is more correllation rather than causation.

 

Planned Parenthood shooter can do what he wants 'cuz Jebus.

Apologists are quick to label him as being not a "true" Christian, but in fact, his actions are entirely consistent with the Christian ideology. And that shows just how dangerous fanatical belief can be.

 

Yeah, try again. Your argument is literally and directly contradicted by the Bible. There are plenty of unhinged, violent people who are Christians, and even who claim to be acting in Christianity's interest. But you really can't say it's "consistent with Christian ideology." That's just flatly incorrect.

 

Is it incorrect to say that the core of Christian philosophy is "believe in Jesus and your sins will be forgiven and you'll get into heaven?" Why else would Christians constantly quote John 3:16 if that weren't the case?

 

It is incorrect to say that belief in Jesus means that you can thereafter "Do whatever you want." I just quoted the passage that specifically says that is not the case.

 

The passage you quoted is a rhetorical question. It's not a mandate to "do this" or "don't do this." And even if it were, Christians are always ignoring or creatively interpreting the parts of the Bible they find to be inconvenient.

 

The answer to the question is the very next sentence, which I also quoted.

In what universe do you live in where a religious text saying "God forbid" isn't telling you not to do something?

 

According to Christianity, everyone is a sinner and all sins are equal in the eyes of God. Stealing a pencil is exactly the same as committing genocide. Believing in Jesus effectively erases those sins, and therefore you get into heaven when you die. But professing belief doesn't mean you must live a sin-free life from that point on. Even those who believe in Jesus still continue to sin anyway, don't they?

And you're still missing the point. Whether he was correct or not, Dear felt that his beliefs gave him carte blanche to do whatever he wanted. And that is precisely the reason why conservative Christianity is the most dangerous form of belief out there.

 

Any radical believes their beliefs give them carte blanche to do whatever they want. That's why extremism in general is dangerous.

And as for sin, all sins are sins, they all have the effect of having you "miss the mark of perfection" and needing Jesus. But some sins are definitely graver than others. Stealing a pencil is NOT the same as committing genocide. They are both equally sins, meaning they both miss the mark of perfection, but there's no comparison between which one is worse. God forgives sin through Jesus, and basically anything can be forgiven if the person truly repents (not just say "I believe in Jesus").