And since God tolerated it, they were to be well treated... Those protected by the tennants of the 10 Commandments likely faired the best of all, certainly better than the Egyptians when God allowed the Jews to be enslaved by Egypt. As slaves, they were terribly oppressed in Egypt.
Let us assume for sake of argument that Jews were in fact enslaved in Egypt and they had a hard time there.
I am hard pressed to understand how you get from that to an idea that they were worse off than anyone else held as slaves, and more than that to say that slaves held by those who believed in the 10 commandments were treated better than under other slave owning cultures.
There are plenty of records of what slave life was like under Xianity and it was not something less than dreadful. The tales within the Bible itself which explain how slaves can be treated are pretty darn bad (as schraf pointed out), and ever since Xians ran Rome other races have been getting butchered while enslaved. Actually I guess I could take it back as far as Jews wiping out the Canaanites.
In any case, your case here has been that while the 10Cs were generally taught and influencing US culture, life was somehow more moral. Yet that was exactly the time during which Slavery and Racism flourished in the US.
We not only had the world's most brutal slave practices (Europe gave up slavery before us and pointed to our brutality) but ran a near genocidal purge of native americans.
I don't mind if you say that the 10 Cs can be a good influence for some people, but it is time to take off the rose colored glasses when you start preaching that we were more moral back when it was being generally taught, and that slavery and genocide was somehow nicer when Xians or Jews held the whip and sword.
Its garbage like that which I hold as evidence that subjectivism is not only true in practice, but that absolutism reduces to the worst kind of subjectivism... apologetics for self-indulgence to the point of tyranny.
This message has been edited by holmes, 01-26-2005 11:58 AM
holmes
"...what a fool believes he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.."(D. Bros)
"...don't believe I'm taken in by stories I have heard, I just read the Daily News and swear by every word.."(Steely Dan)
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