This is new? I learned that my freshman year in Roman Civ.

Not many of us left who took Roman Civ though.

The Egyptians' slaves might beg to differ.

They didn't have a morality, but the slaves did.

Or the Hebrews in Babylon.

I don't feel any need to change my view of the Roman family.

But, for a less cheerful view of classical slavery, read "Courtesans and Fishcakes."

Greek, not Roman, but pre-Age of Reason.

Yet no homosexual marriage.

Same as, pritnear, at least in Athens.

I would imagine that being Cicero's wine steward was probably a very different thing than being Cato's field hand.

Slaves in Athens' silver mines were not expected to live more than a year. In Roman alum mines in Spain, only a few weeks.

Pet house slaves were one thing. Chattel slavery has a deep history and only in the Age of Reason did anyone ever think to object to it.

C'mon, Harry, you know full well the fight against slavery was Christian-inspired. It was a long, bitter fight requiring great self-denial and was beyond the efforts of effete proto-scientists musing about objective truth. It was the ferocious zeal of fundamentalist, middle-ranking British officers that stopped the international trade and churches that pushed the issue in the States. At that time, the Age of Reason types were sousing themselves with port as they discussed Regency fashion and powdered their wigs.

Peter:

Chattel slavery in the West started after the Europeans discovered Equatorial West Africa, and the Caribbean Islands. The latter required lots of manual labor under brutal conditions, the former had a population very visibly distinctive from the Europeans.

The Catholic Church (1500s) concluded the Africans did not have souls, and could therefore be treated like animals.

In the United States, you could find as many religious people against slavery as for it.

Jeff:

Exactly. It was a function of racial science.

Jeff;

"The Catholic Church (1500s) concluded the Africans did not have souls, and could therefore be treated like animals."

Where do you come up with stuff like this?

Forget your fevered imagination as to how it started. The point is it was the religious that stopped it.

Jeff:

"Sixty years before Columbus "discovered" the New World, Pope Eugene IV condemned the enslavement of peoples in the newly colonized Canary Islands. His bull Sicut Dudum (1435) rebuked European enslavers and commanded that "all and each of the faithful of each sex, within the space of fifteen days of the publication of these letters in the place where they live, that they restore to their earlier liberty all and each person of either sex who were once residents of [the] Canary Islands . . . who have been made subject to slavery. These people are to be totally and perpetually free and are to be let go without the exaction or reception of any money."

A century later, Pope Paul III applied the same principle to the newly encountered inhabitants of the West and South Indies in the bull Sublimis Deus (1537). Therein he described the enslavers as allies of the devil and declared attempts to justify such slavery "null and void." Accompanying the bull was another document, Pastorale Officium, which attached a latae sententiae excommunication remittable only by the pope himself for those who attempted to enslave the Indians or steal their goods.

When Europeans began enslaving Africans as a cheap source of labor, the Holy Office of the Inquisition was asked about the morality of enslaving innocent blacks (Response of the Congregation of the Holy Office, 230, March 20, 1686). The practice was rejected, as was trading such slaves. Slaveholders, the Holy Office declared, were obliged to emancipate and even compensate blacks unjustly enslaved.

Papal condemnation of slavery persisted throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Pope Gregory XVI's 1839 bull, In Supremo, for instance, reiterated papal opposition to enslaving "Indians, blacks, or other such people" and forbade "any ecclesiastic or lay person from presuming to defend as permissible this trade in blacks under no matter what pretext or excuse." In 1888 and again in 1890, Pope Leo XIII forcefully condemned slavery and sought its elimination where it persisted in parts of South America and Africa. "

Yet the Canary Islanders were exterminated. That I suppose counts among the glories of the Spanish Empire.

Full credit, Peter, to the Christian religious drive against slavery. But get your ideas in order. Until the secularists started thinking about it, Christians never had any problem with slavery as such.

Even your pope objected only to unjustly enslaved Africans. The justly enslaved did not trouble him, and he owned African slaves, who were, contra Orrin, chattels and very brutally treated.

The conceptual breakthrough was the idea that no one should ever be enslaved. Nobody ever thought of that until the Age of Enlightenment, a telling fact, inasmuch as the church had had over a thousand years to wrestle with the idea -- had it been inclined to, which it never was.

Yes, but slavery isn't immoral per se, though forms of it may be, anymore than killing is immoral per se.

Harry:

1435 is the Age of Enlightenment? Christians had no problem with slavery until secularists raised the issue and unleashed a torrent of religious zeal? The Pope owned slaves?

You won't be insulted if I ask for sources, will you?

It was all particularist antislavery until the 18th century. The church, like Orrin now, never had any objections to slavery as such. It wasn't even a sin.

Ever hear of galley slaves? Who do you think rowed those papal galleys?

Forms of slavery may be wrong, but the institution in its entirety still be a good thing. For example, one assumes the 30 million Muslims you want dead would prefer it.

Papal galleys? Rowed papal galleys? Harry, where did these galleys take the popes?

Particularist anti-slavery? You mean the Church was particularly concerned about slavery where and when it arose? Is your objection that the church focused its opposition on the fate of real, live slaves rather than slavery as an abstract idea? Yes, that would fit.

oj:

I'm not sure that you should assume that all those Muslims would prefer slavery to death.
Certainly some would...

As for me, give me liberty, or give me death.
Quite literally.

Peter:

Well, you quote pummeled me there.

Unfortunately, I can't remember where I read about the Church's attitude towards black Africans in the years immediately following the European discovery of equatorial Africa and the establishing of sugar plantations in the Caribbean.

But I think other evidence substantiates my point about that period--the Catholic missionaries in the area paid far more attention to the indigenous Americans than the chattel slaves.

Why is that?

Jeff:
I think that was in Landes right after he says that the Inquisition caused Spain's downfall.

Michael:

We all say that, but few even struggle against death when it comes.

I don't know. Are you complaining they didn't do enough for chattel slaves or complimenting them on their efforts with natives? Careful now, the modern secular line is that the Church committed cultural genocide with the natives. Harry will tell you all about it. Funny how the Church is to be condemned both for what it did and what it didn't.

Peter:

My point is that religious justification can be found on both sides of the issue. Ultimately, for the most part, it came down on the right side.

The Church, full of religious certainty, completely trashed the natives religious beliefs, did it not?

It looked towards saving the souls of the Indians, but ignored (at least relatively, and likely absolutely)the Africans, did it not?

Yes, Peter, the popes owned galley slaves.

By particularist antislavery, I mean the Church distinguished some people as enslavable and some as not.

Peter confirms my point by looking up the bull against unjust enslavement. The Church, therefore, had no objections to just enslavement.

Orrin misinterprets the color line in slavery.

Before the direct European encounter with black Africa, slaves were recruited indifferently with different color skins into Europe. That's how Slavs got their names.

The Mediterranean Europeans favored Muslim slaves, who were predominantly Arab or Berber. When the Portuguese started working their way down Mauritania, they took slaves on the grounds that they were Muslim.

As they got farther south, the encountered pagan Africans, but did not realize they were not Muslims, so continued enslaving them with the Church's blessing.

Over time, and because of easier markets, almost all slaves taken by Europeans ended up black, and blackness and slavery got conflated.

But ideologically that was a late development.

Moral antislavery arose from the tension between the universalism of Christianity (which, in its better moments, tends to be colorblind) and the different universalism of Englightenment skepticism.

It is noteworthy that Christianity by itself never got beyond particularist antislavery.

The revival of slavery in the 20th century suggests powerful motives for enslavement and makes the 18th century conception of moral antislavery all the more remarkable.

Harry:

Garbage! Unjust enslavement refers to the fact that the church accepted feudal serfdom, which bound to lord and land, and indentured labour. These are both unacceptable to us but they existed in a context of rights and duties, not personal property. The idea that the Church accepted the chattel slavery of non-Christians is absurd. Obviously Jewish history would be very different it it had.

And I want a source for papal galley slaves, please. You are a journalist, it can't be that hard to find proof of such an outrage.

Peter:

The Church felt the Jews had souls, making enslavement of them unjust.

For awhile, the Church deemed blacks did not have souls.

The distinction wasn't between Christian and non-Christian, but between human and non-human.

In the new world, the Church deemed indigenous Americans human and African slaves non-human.

Hence the different amount of effort directed towards saving souls. Can't save what isn't there in the first place.

Jeff:

Now you're catching on--it's a simple scientific error, like saying a fetus isn't human.

Deciding when a fetus becomes human is a spiritual matter, upon which not all religions agree. Heck, religions can't even always agree on which humans are human.

Jeff:

Not really. It's a political matter and they don't vote--so we feel we can kill them.

No, really it is a spiritual matter.

"We" don't kill them, individual women do, integrating whatever spirituality they possess into the decision.

If all women agreed with your spiritual outlook, there wouldn't be an issue to discuss.

But they don't. They draw different spiritual conclusions. So it is a spiritual matter.

Yes, Jeff, we're well aware you refuse moral culpability for the horrors you advocate. But the babies aren't dying because of matters of the spirit but because the Court made it legal to kill the powerless.

OJ:

Do you read what I write, or make up what I write as I go along?

My moral culbability, such as it might be, doesn't enter in to this discussion. But it is a good example of your resorting to ad hominem attack rather than addressing the issue at hand.

Women who agree with your spiritual formulation don't terminate pregnancies. Those who do terminate pregnancies don't share your formulation.

It is very much a matter of spiritual difference of opinion.

No, it's just power. It has been a particularly pernicious exercise of power because women, feeling themselves oppressed for so long, have eagerly seized the ultimate expression of power that the culture affords, the right to kill another.

Wrong on the facts. Women have exposed unwanted infants across all cultures since time immemorial. Abortion, when used as ex post facto birth control is just a different means of infant exposure.

That doesn't make it right, but it contradicts your blyth assertion.

Besides, you are being single dimensional. Ex post facto birth control is not the only reason for abortion. There are other reasons which bear very much on ones spirituality and considerations of what is moral.

Jeff:

There are always other reasons for the crimes we commit--the cotton needed to be picked, for instance.

That's as may be. Whether it is a crime is a matter of spiritual opinion.

No, legality, by definition, is a mere function of political power. Women have more power than fetuses