Quote:
Originally Posted by ZNPaaneah
According to the Bible they could walk away. People were sold into slavery to pay off debts, once the debt was paid they could walk away. People were taken as slaves in war, but once a certain period was over they could walk away.
Read the Jungle, those conditions in the meat packing plants were worse than slavery for most.
Sweatshops pay a rate that will not allow the person to escape poverty so they are essentially a slave until they get sick, in which case they don't work, they don't get paid and they don't have benefits. Also, they then lose their job. Unlike a slave who might get medical care and who had "a job for life".
I am not playing loosey goosey with the definition, I am using your definition. What I am saying is that the reason we stopped using slave labor is because it is more expensive than sweatshops. You have to buy, feed, and care for a slave for life even though 20 years of that time might not be profitable work. With a sweatshop they just pay for those who can work. You don't raise them as children prior to when they can work and you don't care for them when they are elderly. There are no health benefits and no vacation time. The average slave had it much better than the average sweatshop worker does today.
My point was that you think it was some kind of moral enlightenment that did away with slavery. It was simple economics and greed.
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Okay, okay! I get it. The Bible equivocates on the meaning of slavery. And makes it hard to pin down.
The problem is that it never forbids it. If it had, the West, being of the Bible, wouldn't have participated in the slave trade. And even more important to me, my cradle religion wouldn't have had any Biblical ground to stand on in their support for slavery.
Then maybe the states wouldn't have been divided enough for a civil war to happen, and our first republican president wouldn't have killed the republic.
If only the Bible, Jesus, and followers thereafter, had forbidden slavery.
They didn't.
". . . the idea of human rights, that is, the notion that a human being has a set of inviolable rights simply on grounds of being human, began during the era of renaissance humanism in the early modern period."*
It took renaissance humanism, not the Bible, to recognize that slavery was/is wrong.
* Reference = "History of human rights" -
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_human_rights