There was no malice. When I saw W0X0F replied, I edited to answer him instead. As for you, this is what I said:
Quote:
Originally Posted by ToothSayer
There's no book which can tell you precisely how to live. Of course Christians can change their morals and interpret the bible differently.
For example, the classification of whether Africans are humans or some kind of quasi-human animal is a question of fact. How you treat them as a result is prescribed by morals, but what they are is something you have to figure out. When the English first encountered sub Saharan Africans, they seemed in every way to English minds to be the latter. Thus they were treated as such. Other cultures like the Tahitians were not seen that way, thus they were bargained with and treaties were made.
Same morals, different fact patterns. With what we know today, still the same morals, but vastly different fact patterns on this topic.
Your brain is so addled with race politics that you're not even understanding context or plain English. It's kind of sick, man.
I picked it because it was a brilliant example of how morality doesn't tell us what the facts are to which we apply that morality, and how horribly wrong we can get it.
How we view the world, factually, is often more important for moral outcomes than morality. Thus we tortured and enslaved our fellow humans for generations because we thought they were less, even though the morality was likely identical. Even God-given religious laws only tell you a part of morality. A small part at that.
Such was the point of my example. Black people weren't enslaved because Christians were bad, they were enslaved because the people of the age genuinely believed they were less and and effectively non-persons/non-entities. Their observations and their common sense told them this. Just as we wholeheartedly believe the same now for animals. Now we know the error of our ways for black people.
You want to pretend that the enslavers were bad people. Maybe some of them were. But at a cultural level, they believed that what they were doing wasn't that different, morally, to what was done to animals.
Similalry, witches weren't killed because the people doing the killing were evil people. They were killed because the people genuinely believed that witchcraft represented a serious danger to their mortal souls and the souls of their loved ones, and that an all-powerful being had commanded the to get rid of them.
Yet in spite of the terrible things that religion has led us to, atheism (and atheist ideas) have lead to far worse outcomes, far more dead, far more oppressed, then religion has ever done. That's all I'm saying.
This is the power of ideas. Where do you think atheist materialism leads, more often?