The Pope's speech to the German Parliament

[fpb]

http://www.mercatornet.com/articles/view/the_listening_heart
As ever, the man is worth listening to. But the responses in the comments thread just show how bloody useless it is to deliver intellectually distinguished and morally valuable speeches in a world where most people know no history but are stuffed full of out-of-context factoids and believe themselves entitled to judge.

Comments

Six

[fpb.livejournal.com]

A few Stoics and the odd Cynic (and the Cynics weren't taken seriously as philosophers) may have argued against slavery as a piece of clever talk, in the certainty that society would do nothing to change something so fundamental to it. Christian Europe abolished it TWICE. When it was reintroduced by Venice, they had to invent a new word to describe it ("Slave", from the ethnic Slavs who were the first to be conqured and sold by marauding Venetians), because the old Latin word seruus had been wholly emptied of meaning and reduced to a kind of contractual relationship. No other society has ever even tried to abolish slavery. None other. Enslavement and sale was still a regular government-mandated punishment in nineteenth-century China, and the slave markets flourished in India and the Muslim world until armed European invaders shut them down by force.

Re: Six

[ihuitl.livejournal.com]

Dismissing pre-Christian anti-slavery arguments of the entirety of the stoics and cynics as "clever talk" or lip service seems to be unsupported (unless you want to assume such for the convenience of your position), nor does their lack of popularity mean the ideas were not in the air...again, the fact the Pope mentions them as early influences of natural law and such means the church at least took them seriously.

Re: Six

[fpb.livejournal.com]

No, sir, it's up to you to prove that anyone anywhere except in Christendom ever came even close to abolishing slavery in practice. And you can't, because nobody ever did. With one exception: the Jews.

Re: Six

[ihuitl.livejournal.com]

I'm not arguing abolition was done by pre-Christian slaveholding societies, rather an influence in theory from prominent dissenting views partly contributed to its later abolition in practice. The Pope said that, not me:

"Christian theologians thereby aligned themselves with a philosophical and juridical movement that began to take shape in the second century B.C. In the first half of that century, the social natural law developed by the Stoic philosophers came into contact with leading teachers of Roman Law. Through this encounter, the juridical culture of the West was born, which was and is of key significance for the juridical culture of mankind."

"This pre-Christian marriage between law and philosophy opened up the path that led via the Christian Middle Ages and the juridical developments of the Age of Enlightenment all the way to the Declaration of Human Rights and to our German Basic Law of 1949, with which our nation committed itself to “inviolable and inalienable human rights as the foundation of every human community, and of peace and justice in the world”.

So I suppose in retrospect I don't disagree with the Pope on Western history up to the Enlightenment, so much as I disagree with the notion that positivist reason is endangering our notions of human rights and that you need faith to uphold them. Per Steven Pinker's "A History of Violence" and basic history itself, it can be seen that our society has become more civilized and egalitarian, even Church influence waxed and waned as the secular Enlightenment and positivist reason came to the fore.