Religious apologetics for slavery

[hongi]

I think he'll just disagree with me, and then look at me funny for taking the Bible more seriously than he does.

I think he has a point there. Someone who thinks that a book is full of gibberish should not take its literal wording as seriously as one who thinks that a book is full of historical vignettes and useful allegory mixed in with bouts of self-righteous self-justification by the authors.

It's obvious to me that your friend is starting from an assumption that God has to be good, and that assumption is influencing the way he looks at his holy text. He assumes that God would never order slavery, and so when the Bible depicts him as such, it was fallible humans that messed around with the text. Fundamentalists would accuse of him of destroying the reliability of the Bible - what parts can be trusted, what parts were human interpolations?

I'm an atheist. I have no such hook ups, I don't have to believe that God is outright evil or good from the beginning, I don't try to soften his depicted abuses or pontificate on his glorious achievments. My faith is not at stake. Your friend on the other hand wants to believe in the Bible...and not believe in it at the same time.

[Simon_Jester]

That's rather self-defeating. Using this logic you can't trust anything in the Bible.

He doesn't, at least not very far.

He doesn't rule out miracles, but he doesn't trust the Bible to be a reliable historical account of much of anything in particular. Was quite a dedicated rationalist until the day he, in his own words, "started listening to the voice in his head."

Weird guy.

[Lord of the Abyss]

I believe the point being made is that slavery is economically less productive. It may be more profitable for the owners because they aren't paying the slave workers, but that doesn't mean that the whole system of slaves + owners is as productive as free workers + employers.

That really depends on the economic and cultural paradigm you're using slaves within. The Romans were better off using slaves over paid workers because salves were available in huge numbers, and were thus cheap and easy to throw at a problem, compensating for low individual productivity. It also didn't matter if they died, since there were always more cheap slaves where the dead ones came from. Meanwhile, paid laborers, while more productive, didn't have the advantage of industry, had to be paid, and had to have at least some concessions towards safety made because if you tried to work them to death or something, they'd just leave.

But that doesn't mean that Rome, as a culture was better off economically speaking for slavery. Slaves are both inferior workers, and provide less of a market; they are a drag on an economy. A difference between the American Old South and the Romans was that the Romans didn't have any significant competitors who didn't use slaves; the competitive disadvantages of slavery therefore only weakened them in absolute terms, not relative to their enemies. Also for that reason, among the Romans the argument "slavery is the way of the world, there's no other way to run a civilization" would work a lot better than it did in America. The Romans probably didn't know that their addiction to slavery was hurting them; the South did, or at least had the evidence thrust in front of it.

[Gil Hamilton]

I already conceded I should have given more thought to the 'lower classes' of slaves which made up the bulk of the working class, but tell me were there not more laws regarding treatment and protection of slaves back then? More so than the African slaves that were put to work in the American South? If you have access to more, better information by all means please share it. I've admitted in numerous posts already that I made a mistake by limiting my comments only to the classes of slaves that served as skilled labor.

Not as many laws as you'd think. It largely came down to who ever had power made the rules. There was a Carthagean Slave Manual that found its way into Latin following the Punic Wars, which eventually was translated into Arabic, used by Arab Slavers, and even found its way into the libraries of people like Thomas Jefferson.

Now, in bringing this back to the subject, how much of the slavery in Ancient times (either dirt slaves or skilled artisans) were enslaved based on religious justification... or just because the King/Pharaoh/Caesar/etc simply had the power to do so, and his religion played no role in the decision?

Alot of those Kings and Pharoahs EXISTED on religious authority. Virtually all of them, in fact. Though slavery as justified by religion? The ancient Hebrews certainly did, for example, with Yahweh himself ordering whole peoples into Israelite slavery and even baking it into the story of Noah's sons that dark skinned people existed to be servants (Christianity would later pick this up).

[Thanas]

Not as many laws as you'd think. It largely came down to who ever had power made the rules. There was a Carthagean Slave Manual that found its way into Latin following the Punic Wars, which eventually was translated into Arabic, used by Arab Slavers, and even found its way into the libraries of people like Thomas Jefferson.

We do have a longstanding tradition of Roman laws outlawing cruelty to slaves. Of course, how they were observed is another matter and impossible to prove either way. We do know that they were enforced in some cases even against senators. So yeah, several laws exist.