Tip # 59 Look At What You're Sacrificing
Apr. 24th, 2016 02:53 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
wingedbeastRecently, I got into a discussion about the morality of slavery as it was practiced in the Old Testament. I took the position that it was immoral and that attempting to treat that as just requires treating the slaves in question as less than human. This was in the comments of a conservative Christian blog, so I got some arguments on that. The arguments I got are good examples of evangelists and apologists sacrificing important things in the name of winning.
One of the arguments was that the slavery, as it was practiced, was good on the basis of Divine Command Morality. The argument went that Divine Command was the only possible way that there could be an objectively true morality, therefore the slavery was good because it was according to the law as commanded by God. The other argument I'll focus on, here, is that God's commandment to love one another as you love yourself makes the slavery good, so long as it was practiced within the law.
Each of these sacrifices a key concept. In the first, you sacrifice the notion that morality is anything but a technicality. There's a reason that biblical literalists will, when talking about slavery in the American South, point to the immorality of capturing slaves, and that's because they can't object to a system that makes people born into slavery, to whippings, or, if there isn't immediate violence to the act, rape. This is because factors like concern for people, suffering, loss, even death involved all have to take a distant back seat to the dictates of God. So, in the name of winning the moral arguments, on the basis that morality must be owned by monotheistic religions, morality, as a meaningful concept, is sacrificed.
In the second argument, the concept sacrificed is "love". For similar reasons to the first, it is no longer an option to decipher love through action, but love must be accepted as a panacea to cover for anything that would otherwise be viewable as immoral.
To bring this to the more blatantly Orwellian, have you heard the claim that the only possible freedom is slavery to God? I have, several times, and I've noted that the word "freedom" loses all meaning in such context.
The reason you want to be aware of this is that you may, if we accept the framework you present with these or similar arguments, "win" the argument, but that will never be convincing. We won't be convinced because we won't accept the framework that requires that freedom, love, and morality be nothing more than empty shells, composed of sounds and letters but containing nothing.
What does it gain a belief to win the argument but lose all meaning?
One of the arguments was that the slavery, as it was practiced, was good on the basis of Divine Command Morality. The argument went that Divine Command was the only possible way that there could be an objectively true morality, therefore the slavery was good because it was according to the law as commanded by God. The other argument I'll focus on, here, is that God's commandment to love one another as you love yourself makes the slavery good, so long as it was practiced within the law.
Each of these sacrifices a key concept. In the first, you sacrifice the notion that morality is anything but a technicality. There's a reason that biblical literalists will, when talking about slavery in the American South, point to the immorality of capturing slaves, and that's because they can't object to a system that makes people born into slavery, to whippings, or, if there isn't immediate violence to the act, rape. This is because factors like concern for people, suffering, loss, even death involved all have to take a distant back seat to the dictates of God. So, in the name of winning the moral arguments, on the basis that morality must be owned by monotheistic religions, morality, as a meaningful concept, is sacrificed.
In the second argument, the concept sacrificed is "love". For similar reasons to the first, it is no longer an option to decipher love through action, but love must be accepted as a panacea to cover for anything that would otherwise be viewable as immoral.
To bring this to the more blatantly Orwellian, have you heard the claim that the only possible freedom is slavery to God? I have, several times, and I've noted that the word "freedom" loses all meaning in such context.
The reason you want to be aware of this is that you may, if we accept the framework you present with these or similar arguments, "win" the argument, but that will never be convincing. We won't be convinced because we won't accept the framework that requires that freedom, love, and morality be nothing more than empty shells, composed of sounds and letters but containing nothing.
What does it gain a belief to win the argument but lose all meaning?
