Comments on: Real Men Prove Darwin Wrong (Again)

By: Stan

Stan — Sun, 04 Jul 2010 16:57:01 +0000

The slaves should walk off the plantation and obey their masters (Jesus Christ). Slavery is man’s institution. Jesus did not follow man’s institutions. No one else has to either. If the guys who created this institution kill someone else from choosing to walk off the plantation and into a life with Christ than he just violated a commandment, and that is on them. What makes a person go out and put a chain around someone’s neck? Beats me. I have better things to do then going around putting chains on people’s necks.

By: Publius

Publius — Wed, 07 Apr 2010 20:43:01 +0000

Clearly, the bible sanctions slavery when slaves are told to obey their masters. Because the gospel is a message of freedom, slaves might accept Christianity as a justification to seek their freedom from earthly master, no? This passage doesn’t praise the glories of slavery, it keeps people from breaking the already established law (slavery) in the name of Christianity. You still miss the point of the passage where slaves were to “obey their masters”; you’re not understanding the bible as life-changing, just as a religious text to be interpreted in your own worldview.

Hell I wish I could narrowly interpret any text I wanted and draw bad conclusions. Christianity is designed to fit the cultural mold of any society where it comes in, not the other way around. Christianity is not about rebellion, it is about inner revolution. If Jesus (or Paul, or Peter) had told slaves to not obey their masters, then the persecution of the early would have been justified.

I guess I understand something that you are unwilling to, about what the bible is about. For you, the bible is full of terrible injustices: every man should be “free” and moms can kill their babies if they want to (what an outstanding contradiction). I would rather have a foreign person taken as a slave rather than slaughtered (which was custom in the Old Testament; strange). Should they later be freed to return to their land at an arbitrary time? Or should they work out their lives, still able to buy their freedom from their masters? Slavery is still not an absolute state, something you miss.

By: ben

ben — Fri, 26 Mar 2010 03:38:49 +0000

So I guess real men prove Darwin wrong, and endorse slavery? Sounds about right.

By: Larry Arnhart

Larry Arnhart — Thu, 25 Mar 2010 16:07:42 +0000

Publius,

The liberation of slaves after 7 years applied only to Hebrew slaves.

The killing of slaves was not punished as murder.

The ownership of non-Hebrew slaves was passed on by inheritance.

The New Testament sanctions Roman slavery.

These and other points indicate the seriousness of the Bible’s support of slavery.

By: Ben

Ben — Thu, 25 Mar 2010 01:44:55 +0000

Having read Dr. Arnhart’s work on “filter[ing] the Bible through our natural moral sense” and understanding “how religious morality is unreliable if it is not checked by natural morality”; I tend to agree with him about the utter ambiguity of the Bible as well as some of the morally contemptible notions advocated thereof. A guided tour through our natural inclinations he says in association with religion is the most appropriate venturing forward. Supporting ambiguity was science and all of the natural principles that follow blissfully thereof can lead to the good life. Whether this is actually true, that we have natural inclinations that can be reinforced by religion, is something that I feel is the cusp of it all however. Something I find ironic is that neither God nor these Natural inclinations can truly be described adequately as fundamentally truthful, nor has anyone actually attempted to do that. Making Arnharts position stronger in the sense that both idea manifest from the same notion and are both equal guides on out tour.

By: Publius

Publius — Wed, 24 Mar 2010 22:34:04 +0000

Larry: to use the bible to argue against slavery, we have to understand what things like “slavery” meant in biblical times, and also what Jewish law was like.
Race-based slavery was nothing like biblical slavery; slaves in the bible could raise families, buy themselves out of slavery, and were released every 7 years from enslavement. Only the working power of a slave was owned, and not his life, as was the case in race-based slavery.
So it’s not so much a filtering of the bible through natural morality as it is an understanding of what the bible actually says.
But I don’t think that understanding the bible would be good for the species anyway, so why try it?

By: Larry Arnhart

Larry Arnhart — Wed, 24 Mar 2010 18:32:10 +0000

Lincoln’s Second Inaugural indicates that one lesson of the Civil War is that we cannot rely on Biblical religion to resolve a great moral issue like slavery. “Each side reads the same Bible, and prays to the same God, and each invokes His aid against the other.”

Both Lincoln and Darwin were disturbed by how proslavery folks could use the Bible to support the morality of slavery.

To use the Bible to argue against slavery, we have to filter the Bible through our natural moral sense, which allows us to correct its moral mistake in sanctioning slavery.

This is a good illustration of how religious morality is unreliable if it is not checked by natural morality.

By: Peter Lawler

Peter Lawler — Wed, 24 Mar 2010 17:51:52 +0000

That Lincoln was ok with the idea that evolution happened I have no doubt. That there’s some Darwinian foundation to his noble rhetoric seems less likely. And didn’t Lincoln’s view of WHO we are deepen as a result of the experience of the Civil War? (See the Second Inaugural, for example.) It’s hard to imagine a Darwinian explanation for the war or people dying to make men they’ve never met free. In the most important sense, Jefferson was more Darwinian than Lincoln, and that’s not praise in this context. (I probably should add that I’m against making Lincoln some kind of secular saint or the final arbiter of anything really important. He was a fine commander-in-chief, and it’s good the North won the war.)

By: Larry Arnhart

Larry Arnhart — Wed, 24 Mar 2010 16:23:33 +0000

According to Billy Herndon, Lincoln accepted the theory of evolution as taught by Robert Chambers in his VESTIGES OF THE NATURAL HISTORY OF CREATION, which Darwin recognized as an early version of his theory.

Darwin was on Lincoln’s side in the Civil War, although he thought Lincoln should have moved more quickly to abolish slavery.

By: Peter Lawler

Peter Lawler — Wed, 24 Mar 2010 15:58:04 +0000

Well, I agree with Larry, of course. But truth to tell I wouldn’t go to a Progressive or a Darwinian to dedicate myself to the proposition that all men are created equal. Darwin’s own political teaching was a kind of soft utopianism that might be compatible with progressivism and certainly would have been mocked by Lincoln. We’re certainly not evolving toward a universal sympathy for all created beings either by Nature or History. And if we were, even Darwin suggests, hard reason would suggest that such sentimentality would be bad for the species.