Attack on the Confederate Flag?

  • Christian Chat is a moderated online Christian community allowing Christians around the world to fellowship with each other in real time chat via webcam, voice, and text, with the Christian Chat app. You can also start or participate in a Bible-based discussion here in the Christian Chat Forums, where members can also share with each other their own videos, pictures, or favorite Christian music.

    If you are a Christian and need encouragement and fellowship, we're here for you! If you are not a Christian but interested in knowing more about Jesus our Lord, you're also welcome! Want to know what the Bible says, and how you can apply it to your life? Join us!

    To make new Christian friends now around the world, click here to join Christian Chat.
Aug 12, 2015
539
7
0
But you brought up 'evolving morality' and now morals change.
True slavery is immoral, especially if it is brutal slavery, compared to freedom.
We have laws that prevent the brutal thug from enslaving the weak.
Do you think those laws are evolving from the rule of the barbaric to the rule of justice?
What is your 'vision' of the last stage of this 'evolving morality' as you call it?
To evolve essentially means to continually change.

There is no "last stage". Cultures will always develop and change with environment and circumstance, as they always have. Moral rights and wrongs blur between, and across, different cultural paradigms. A well known anthropologist called Peggy Reeves found that roughly 35% of all cultures have practiced cannibalism at some point, either as a ritualistic funeral rite, or for sustenance. It would have been considered shameful, feminine even, for a male Maori warrior not to eat his dead opponent's flesh. The Romans held bloodsports in amphitheaters all over Italia and that wasn't widely considered immoral by the populace. The Vatican sanctioned the Holy Crusades across Europe and the populace believed that taking back the Holy Land at the expense of however many settlers and innocents was not only a Christian right, but a duty to God. In Moses' day, slavery was a widely accepted practice, as it was in early North America. More than a few societies throughout history practiced public executions and tortured people accused of crimes in front of jeering crowds. In Jesus' day and well beyond, women used to be effectively sold to men for a dowry price, and considered henceforth male property. Many societies allowed extreme violence against the mentally ill and against homosexuals -- we used to chemically castrate them, if you remember. In heavily Christian countries like Ireland, pregnancy from wedlock often resulted in young mothers facing total social exclusion -- many young innocent women were thrown into horrible children's homes or chucked out on to the streets, because of a deep shame culture. Children (mostly orphans) in Victorian societies used to be sent to workhouses, and the disabled and their families, for many many years, were not given any legal rights to get help, financially or otherwise. That was "the norm", and to deviate from those accepted norms, was by definition, "deviant".

Are you asking me if I think morals have become better? Well, yes, I think the evidence quite clearly shows that they have. No longer do we have people across all continents eating one another in the daylight, as an accepted practice. No longer do we pit poor slaves and outcasts against champions and wild animals for our entertainment. No longer do we even condone torture, much less do it in public spaces. No longer is a child who confronts his parents and says "I feel like a girl", expected to be chucked into a mental institution, beaten into a pulp, chemically castrated or worse. Gay people now have the freedom to choose the lifestyle they wish, in consensual and adult relationships. Young girls who get pregnant tend to be supported more. Contraception and sexual education has enabled a generation to make better choices. Marriage is no longer an essential expectation for a person's life -- people can choose from an array of options from singledom through unmarried partnerships to marriage, if they so wish. Children now have fundamental human rights and are protected in many countries by legislation against abuse and neglect.

Is it perfect? No, it certainly isn't, but it's a helluva lot better than it was a thousand years ago, a hundred years ago, even fifty years ago.
 

crossnote

Senior Member
Nov 24, 2012
30,783
3,686
113
To evolve essentially means to continually change.

There is no "last stage". Cultures will always develop and change with environment and circumstance, as they always have. Moral rights and wrongs blur between, and across, different cultural paradigms. A well known anthropologist called Peggy Reeves found that roughly 35% of all cultures have practiced cannibalism at some point, either as a ritualistic funeral rite, or for sustenance. It would have been considered shameful, feminine even, for a male Maori warrior not to eat his dead opponent's flesh. The Romans held bloodsports in amphitheaters all over Italia and that wasn't widely considered immoral by the populace. The Vatican sanctioned the Holy Crusades across Europe and the populace believed that taking back the Holy Land at the expense of however many settlers and innocents was not only a Christian right, but a duty to God. In Moses' day, slavery was a widely accepted practice, as it was in early North America. More than a few societies throughout history practiced public executions and tortured people accused of crimes in front of jeering crowds. In Jesus' day and well beyond, women used to be effectively sold to men for a dowry price, and considered henceforth male property. Many societies allowed extreme violence against the mentally ill and against homosexuals -- we used to chemically castrate them, if you remember. In heavily Christian countries like Ireland, pregnancy from wedlock often resulted in young mothers facing total social exclusion -- many young innocent women were thrown into horrible children's homes or chucked out on to the streets, because of a deep shame culture. Children (mostly orphans) in Victorian societies used to be sent to workhouses, and the disabled and their families, for many many years, were not given any legal rights to get help, financially or otherwise. That was "the norm", and to deviate from those accepted norms, was by definition, "deviant".

Are you asking me if I think morals have become better? Well, yes, I think the evidence quite clearly shows that they have. No longer do we have people across all continents eating one another in the daylight, as an accepted practice. No longer do we pit poor slaves and outcasts against champions and wild animals for our entertainment. No longer do we even condone torture, much less do it in public spaces. No longer is a child who confronts his parents and says "I feel like a girl", expected to be chucked into a mental institution, beaten into a pulp, chemically castrated or worse. Gay people now have the freedom to choose the lifestyle they wish, in consensual and adult relationships. Young girls who get pregnant tend to be supported more. Contraception and sexual education has enabled a generation to make better choices. Marriage is no longer an essential expectation for a person's life -- people can choose from an array of options from singledom through unmarried partnerships to marriage, if they so wish. Children now have fundamental human rights and are protected in many countries by legislation against abuse and neglect.

Is it perfect? No, it certainly isn't, but it's a helluva lot better than it was a thousand years ago, a hundred years ago, even fifty years ago.
I don't think you have a clue what "slavery" was under the laws of Moses. They were to be treated with the utmost care and dignity.
as cultures move away from the norms which God laid out to mankind it becomes more and more debauched in it's actions.
Drug use, increased child trafficking, abortions, gay marriage,disobedience to authority just some of the signs of a culture on it's last gasp. We are much worse.
 
Aug 12, 2015
539
7
0
I don't think you have a clue what "slavery" was under the laws of Moses. They were to be treated with the utmost care and dignity.
as cultures move away from the norms which God laid out to mankind it becomes more and more debauched in it's actions.
Drug use, increased child trafficking, abortions, gay marriage,disobedience to authority just some of the signs of a culture on it's last gasp. We are much worse.
So, wait, you're telling me that people in Jesus day never used drugs? You seem to think that in the days of ancient Israel, that Jewish law was law throughout the world and the world was just dandy and perfect, well it wasn't. Israel is a miniscule part of the wider ancient world. Most of the world didn't give a damn about Jewish law back then, and most of it still don't. But you're writing here, and it sounds like you're telling me public torture, socially accepted child abuse, accepted violence towards the mentally ill, bloodsport, ownership of women, a total lack of any type of state system to help the poor, people starving on the streets, backstreet unclean abortion, execution of adulterers or young people who have sex outside marriage, and all the other atrocities of a bygone age, are preferably to the current situation in Western countries: free choice, safeguards for children, state funded high-level education, culpability for police officers, laws against all types of violence, contraception, sexual education, and infinitely better quality of life?

Perhaps you should pack up your things and move TO ​Syria.
 
Last edited:

crossnote

Senior Member
Nov 24, 2012
30,783
3,686
113
So, wait, you're telling me that people in Jesus day never used drugs? You seem to think that in the days of ancient Israel, that Jewish law was law throughout the world and the world was just dandy and perfect, well it wasn't. Israel is a miniscule part of the wider ancient world. Most of the world didn't give a damn about Jewish law back then, and most of it still don't. But you're writing here, and it sounds like you're telling me public torture, socially accepted child abuse, accepted violence towards the mentally ill, bloodsport, ownership of women, a total lack of any type of state system to help the poor, people starving on the streets, backstreet unclean abortion, execution of adulterers or young people who have sex outside marriage, and all the other atrocities of a bygone age, are preferably to the current situation in Western countries: free choice, safeguards for children, state funded high-level education, culpability for police officers, laws against all types of violence, contraception, sexual education, and infinitely better quality of life?

Perhaps you should pack up your things and move TO ​Syria.
Those assertions are plainly your vain assumptions about my thoughts.
All I said was when mankind drifts from God's moral laws, and that included Israelites (e,g. offering their infants to Molech) the result is an increased debauched society.
Ahem, God's moral law is written (though tarnished) on all mankind's hearts despite the Fall.
As far as your 'Brave New World' goes, the proof is in the pudding.