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Unknown A
What's important is the effects that Christianity has actually created. No, it's not what it's actually brought about. Absolutely.
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Unknown B
It's about what the Bible says. Christ. Christianity is based on the book and we're talking about. And the book says slavery is okay, you can buy and sell slaves.
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Unknown A
Continue. It's about the actual effects. Most people throughout history are not gonna agree with your interpretation. There's a reason the abolition that'wrong came out through the Christian.
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Unknown B
It did not.
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Unknown A
It definitely.
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Unknown C
Every tradition, every structure, every government, every moral framework commits atrocities. Every single one of them. So we're talking about comparing the core values of a moral tradition to another one or a lack thereof.
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Unknown B
What are the core values of Christianity? Because my reading of the Bible is that the core value of Christianity is that men are more equal than women. Men are higher status. Slavery is okay. Genocide'okay.
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Unknown A
So on that note, I mean that you said that's your reading. It's not, not important about what your're reading is. It's about. What's important is the effects that Christianity has actually created.
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Unknown B
No, it's not.
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Unknown A
It's actually brought about. Absolutely.
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Unknown B
It's about what the Bible saysianity is based on the book and we're talking about. And the book says slavery is okay, you can buy and sell slaves.
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Unknown A
Let continue. It's about the actual effects. Most people throughout history are not gonna agree with your interpretation. There's a reason the abolition came out through the Christian movement.
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Unknown B
It did not.
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Unknown A
It definitely did.
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Unknown B
It absolutely not. Christiansgle were burning crosses on people's yards. Even after abolition, the Christians were quoting the Bible to endorse slavery.
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Unknown A
You don me.
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Unknown B
Go ahead ahead.
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Unknown A
So yes, people justified slavery in every culture. Something weird started happening in Europe and then through the American tradition is that people started saying no slavery should be abolish when there are reasons. If you read John Coffey, if you read Robert Fogel, who is not a Christian, Ben Wright, the abolitionists were very much arguing from the Christian tradition that it should be abolished. Did Christians try to justify slavery? Absolutely. Everyone everywhere tried to justify slavery. But surprisingly, as historians will note on this issue over time, through the Christian tradition, they started saying, hey, there are certain things in the Bible which demand that we end slavery. So now this is again what most historians will say. Out of the Christian tradition we see a strong abolitionist movement who needs early abolitionists. We're settiting biblical verses, biblical values for their reason to end slavery.
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Unknown C
So wor the enslavers and John Brown, who was deeply moted by Christianity Walked up to slavers and blast them in the face without question. Murdering tons of people. And the taking of Harper's the most famous moment. People don't realize John Brown and his sons and his gang were going through Kansas and straight murdering people without question. Because they said, you are an affront to God. So we can talk about the abolitionists. Like it's remarkable to me. You go to the casino down the street and they've got $25ips with John Brown hilld as a hero despite the fact that he was hanged for treason. And I'm like, look man, I appreciate the abolitionist stuff, but I don't know that I'd ever get behind a guy who would walk up to a random person and put and blow his face off. Like that's not the kind of world on.
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Unknown C
But that was Christianity, right? Obviously this country was like 99% Christian at the time. I mean that meant that abolitionists and the obviously they were all Christians.
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Unknown A
Nobody gets credit.
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Unknown B
Yah, no, you don't get credit for using the Bible to abolish it. In fact, Jefferson Davis, the president of the Confederacy said who gave them the right to decide that it's a sin? By what standard do they measure it? Not the Constitution. The Constitution recognizes the property in many forms, imposes obligations in its connectionn in that recognition. Not the Bible, it justifies it. And then he says later, it is not the cause of Christianity. It cannot be. For servitude is the only agency through which Christianity has reached a degraded race. The only means by which they have been civilized and elevated. And church fathers all throughout history said the same thing. Basil said it, Ambrose said it. There had dozens of church fathers and popes who all said that slavery was the means by which we're gonna bring these heathen races to Christianity. Because Leviticus 25 says so.
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Unknown C
But it's a moot point. Christians also abolish slavery, but nobody gets credit for it. So therefore is not of Christianity. It's moot. We can sit here and be like, do you know the Christians abolish slavery? Sure. They also did it too. Okay, it's zero. What's the next point?
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Unknown B
But the justification for it is in the Bible.
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Unknown C
That's why saying and every, every country, every nation, every peoples in the world had slavery. To this day, the North African slave trade has been reignited due to the operations of American constitutional republicanism. So if we're gonna talk about who's at fault for slavery right now, it's the American democratic system. Should we abolish It I don't think so. But it is the absolute fault of western NATO countries who are not abiding by some religious doctrine who blew the crap out of Libya reigniting North. I'm sorry, the North African slave trade. I Atlantic North African slave trade. So history shows us everybody did slavery. Christians did too. Christians justified slavery at the time. Muslims did too. Christians abolish slavery and then western constitutional republicanism reignited slavery. And so I'm not gonna sit here and argue that the Constitution in America is bad. I think it's a great country with evil people wielding us like a tool to evil ends.
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Unknown A
And again we go back to my point. Everyone justified slavery from their traditions in the ancient world. Why do we now think slavery is wrong today? Go back and read what the abolitionists were doing. There was something in Christianity that started. Did most people early on try to justify it? Absolutely. But the abolitions were not arguing from enlightenment ideas, secular ideas. I mean one of the earliest anti slavery checks is called the selling of Joseph for a reason. They were arguing from the Christian tradition. Okay, so there was something moving within Christianity that Tom Holland talks about that did eventually lead to this new change in our ethics and our understanding of slavery that did get abolished. That, that did lead to its abolishing it. So there was something within it that did didn't happen in Muslim countries, it didn't happen in the Far East.
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Unknown A
Even early enlightened thinkers like Voltaire and David Humeor trying to justify slavery. So I mean like everyone tried to justify slavery. The question we did to ask is what motivated the abolitionists. You can again say yeah, Christians did justify slavery. That doesn't challenge the fact that what the abolitionists were using and arguing from. Right.
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Unknown B
But there have been multiple societies that abolished slavery many thousands of years prior to the U.S. there was a dynasty in China in the B.C. era that abolished slavery. Fair time period. There was a leader in India for a period of a couple hundred years where slavery was abolished. There were stoics in Greece that were abolitionists.
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Unknown A
No there weren't. There weren't any sto.
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Unknown B
There actually was Seneca epic.
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Unknown A
No, he did not say Senecaus was up for example in early Slaveeca.
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Unknown B
Absolutely advocated for getting rid of slavery. Said it was an immoral institution.
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Unknown A
Another was immoral. He didn't say it should go away.
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Unknown B
There was another. There was quite a few stoics that agreed with him.
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Unknown A
They agreed slavery was bad, but they didn't call for abolition. The first person they called for the abolition of slavery, Gregory of Nisa that is Wrong. No, Gregory of Nis is the first.
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Unknown B
He's the first Christian that talked about abolishing slavery. But he was outruled by the other church fathersactly.
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Unknown A
The church fathers disagreed with him. No, no. He's the first person in history to call for the abolition.
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Unknown B
He certainly is not the first person in history. In fact, I already quoted you. There's I think the wing dynasty in China and then there's another dynasty in.
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Unknown A
India that abolished it have universal abolitione.
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Unknown B
That was universally abolitioned.
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Unknown C
I have a fact check. Seneca did not explicitly advocate for abolishing slavery. While he criticized mistreatment of slaves and encouraged dom main treatment, he accepted slavery as a social institution. The sources for this are moral letters to Lucillius, letter 47 and Seneca D benefic book 3, chapter 18. And then there is a book in 1994 discussing Roman S attitudes towards slavery called Bradley Keith Slaver Soc in Roman.
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Unknown A
Would he, would he have been Seneca.
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Unknown C
Have been executed if he'd called for the abolition of it?
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Unknown A
Executed it just. Kyle Harper talks about this in his book. No one even questioned it. It's like trying to say could we get rid of water or money? Yeah, they just knew that this was just something they could never go with.
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Unknown C
Money'a really good example. I think people need to understand when we talk about slavery in the United States, most people, they envision a black man in a field being beaten by a slave owner. They don't realize how pervasive and widespread the institution of slavery was. Beyond farming itself, there were coupblers black men who were trained to make shoes, who worked in cities and ran shoe stores where they transacted. But slavery meant that they had no legal rights. That means there was a person who owned them and they wanted them to do this job. There's also an important factor in that they were depending on what the slave owner or thel master wanted, they could make money for themselves. And in fact Frederick Douglass bought his own freedom and then later bought the freedom of his wife and his child. It shouldn't have happened that way.
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Unknown C
No, but. And obviously slavery is bad. The reason I bring this up is I kind of lost my train of thought. I'm sorry. Slavery was viewed as exactly as we would do something like money an economic institution that exists and is a function of government. And then slowly over time sentiments towards it started to shift to the direction and it ended up with a very bloody war in the United States. Now for other like for the uk they basically said we're ending slavery and then we're gonna have to pay back everybody for taking their slaves away from them. They did a big debt and then they ended up paying. I don't know, it took them like a hundred years to pay off the deb.
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Unknown A
It took a good, you know, 100 years. It started early with like Anabaptists and Methodists working together. And eventually they started to get legislation passed. They got rid of the slave trade in some new territories under William Penn. And then shortly after, theyolish the slave trade throughout the British Empire. And then a couple decades later, they emancipated slave. So it was a slow process.
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Unknown C
We'll shift a little bit now. I'll jump to my good friend Bill Maher. Right, Go for it.
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Unknown B
Before you get too far, the emperor that abolished slavery in China was not Wing, it was Wang. I apologize for that. And the. That was in. In the first century in India, hundreds years before that, there was Ashoka who abolished slavery. Now it came back years later. But early abolitionists existed throughout the world.
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Unknown C
So I want to shift to our good friend Bill Maher. Not really a good friend, but he's not that bad. He's allri.
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Unknown B
Right.
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Unknown C
Obviously he made that documentary religionious and you know, he goes around challenging people's views and things and such, and that's always okay. The reason to bring him up is that Dennis Prager made a good example. He has a good example of moral tradition and where you go when you destroy. And he calls it, I think he calls it, I always get it wrong, cut stem politics, something like this, where he basically says, you have this, the root of a society, which in his view is the Judeo Christian mor. And he's Jewish, obviously. And it grows into this beautiful flower that someone then cuts from the stem and holds up in the air and shows everyone how beautiful it is. But you know that once it's cut from its roots, it will eventually start to die. And that's where we're at right now. You can hold up this beautiful American society, but as in his view, Judeo Christian values, Wayne, it eventually is going to die.
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Unknown C
Thanks for watching this clip from the Culture War podcast. We're live every Friday, 10am to noon, so subscribe and come hang out.