"Your Bible condemns any form of resistance. It doesn't endorse passive resistance. It says commands should be obeyed without question. "

Not true. turning the other cheek is a form of passive resitance, for by offering the other cheek, you force the striker to slap you with his clean hand (thereby making him unclean) or to strike you with an open hand, mkaing him your equal. By offering your garments when he takes your shirt, you put the onus on him as it was not a sin to be naked, but to look upon one who was naked was a sin. By offering to walk a second mile, you put the Roman soldiers life at risk, for they were forbidden to force a Jew to carry their load for more than a mile and the punishment for violating this law was death. All forms of passive resitance. Clearly your biblical understanding is limited, but not surprising considering you are a devout athiest.

This is off topic, but how would they know how far a mile was? Did they use those clicky wheels, or did they have odometers built into their armour?

LOL! I think they had GPS satellites in their chariots, Mafia.

I believe mile stones were in use at the time on most major roads, and you could always count out 1000 paces if not.

@Putin - Just for clarity, here is the *entire* passage from Ephesians, the first one I believe you used (I could be wrong, it's on the previous page) to claim Christ endorsed slavery. Please note that Ephesians 6:8 clearly specifies why the slaves should show this respect "Knowing that whatsoever good thing any man doeth, the same shall he receive of the Lord, whether he be bond or free."

Ephesians 6:5-9

5Servants, be obedient to them that are your masters according to the flesh, with fear and trembling, in singleness of your heart, as unto Christ;

6Not with eyeservice, as menpleasers; but as the servants of Christ, doing the will of God from the heart;

7With good will doing service, as to the Lord, and not to men:

8Knowing that whatsoever good thing any man doeth, the same shall he receive of the Lord, whether he be bond or free.

9And, ye masters, do the same things unto them, forbearing threatening: knowing that your Master also is in heaven; neither is there respect of persons with him.

1000 paces? I hope that means left and right equals a pace, not just left or right. Otherwise, you'd have to take a really long stride to hit 5'3".

@ Draug... what's 5'3"? A mile by definition was 1000 paces (in the same way a millenium is 1000 years). It was the metric system in all but name. Some time over the years the definition of how long a mile should be got screwed up in a big way, and we were left with the stupid mile we have today.

Well, the modern mile is 5280 feet, so 1/1000 is approximately 5' 3.36". But the typical stride (left and right) would be between 5 and 5.5 feet in a full march.

Gotcha :)
(Take a deep breath and enjoy the complete immunity the topic of measurements has to both race and religion.... :D
....bloody dull though....)

I notice Putin went away. I guess he couldn't argue with the full passage showing that not only was I right about the motivation for the admonishment, but also that the masters *were* admonished to treat their slaves with respect. Typical Putin. Call others liars (something about making it up, I believe is what he said) and twist quotes then when shown he was clearly wrong, disappear without admitting his errors.

Putin, Iadmit when I am wrong. Will you do the same?

The thing with Putin is that he always resorts to ad hominem, maybe he is best ignored?

That he does. I am amazed OSU would even give him a teaching position to go with his grad studies all things considered. But then I think about myself and realize that I am a different person here than I am in my professional and even home life.

teaching positions normally come standard with grad studies, I taught while in grad school. Putin seems like a smart person, smart enough to be recruited with a teaching package

I should say in liberal arts grad studies, usually teaching assistanships

I'm amused by the hypocritical ad hominem police lowering this discussion, as usual, to my personal background. You can barely bring up a thread without Draugnar doing this. Nobody else does this. I'm also amused that Fulham, who never misses an opportunity to smear Darwin as a racist and a Nazi or both, whining about me resorting to ad hominem attacks. Nor do I see how any of this was particularly ad hominem. But I think ad hominem is just a word Fulham uses when he doesn't want to address something.

So, Putin, how about it? Do you accept the admonishment given to the masters and the motivation for the admonishment given to the slaves as being in the scripture just as I said it was?

No ad hominen here. Just an honest question. Were you wrong in your assertions? Have I shown you enough proof for you to say "yes, I was wrong" as I have previously done in this very thread?

@ Draug Putin will just turn up the a-H gas; that is his normal practice. On this side of the water, certainly in the sciences, p-g students largely get to demonstrate only. All in all maybe this is no bad thing, unless you consider education to be passing on dogmatic ideas rather than an openness of mind.

to be honest draug, i dont think you've proved anything

Huh? What do you mean Santa? He said Christ endorsed slavery and that I made up the part where the NT writers admonished the masters to treat their slaves with the same respect. I showed clear evidence that the motivation for the slaves to show respect and deferrence to their masters was because God would do the same for them as he is no respector of person, free or bond. And then I gave him the exact passage where it tells the masters to do the same unto their slaves. Two very specific statements if his refuted without question.

You know, ignoring for a moment the whole religion/slavery quagmire, I was actually quite impressed by Putin's arguments with respect to Darwin.

"@ Draug Putin will just turn up the a-H gas; that is his normal practice. On this side of the water, certainly in the sciences, p-g students largely get to demonstrate only. All in all maybe this is no bad thing, unless you consider education to be passing on dogmatic ideas rather than an openness of mind.
"

I'm convinced Fulham has no sense of irony whatsoever. He dismisses anything that isn't a natural science, and then touts himself as so very open-minded.

"All forms of passive resitance."

Wow, talk about equivocation. Apparently the new meaning of "resistance" is not only obeying every command, but going out of your way to help those who lord over you. That obviously is on par with Rosa Parks refusing to abide by the segregation law with regard to the buses, or Gandhi refusing to abide the law with regard to the Dharasana Salt Works.

Furthermore we have passages like this: (1 Peter 2:13-17)

"13 Submit yourselves for the Lord’s sake to every human institution, whether to a king as the one in authority, 14 or to governors as sent by him for the punishment of evildoers and the praise of those who do right."

I'm sure you'll come up with some nonsense about how "submitting to every human institution" as they are sent by God = "resistance".

" I guess he couldn't argue with the full passage showing that not only was I right about the motivation for the admonishment"

You haven't shown anything of the sort. You have given no passage whatsoever that indicates that these orders were given because it would result in less bad things happening to slaves at the hand of their masters. It simply says that if you obey your masters, you'll be rewarded in heaven.

Yes you provided a passage which tells masters to exercise restraint in their rule over slaves, because God is master over both slave and master.

But of course this wasn't said by Jesus, and you raised a big fuss over the fact that I cited passages that weren't from Jesus. Jesus told slaves to expect beatings from their masters. Read this passage again:

"The Lord answered, “Who then is the faithful and wise manager, whom the master puts in charge of his servants to give them their food allowance at the proper time? 43 It will be good for that servant whom the master finds doing so when he returns. 44 Truly I tell you, he will put him in charge of all his possessions. 45 But suppose the servant says to himself, ‘My master is taking a long time in coming,’ and he then begins to beat the other servants, both men and women, and to eat and drink and get drunk. 46 The master of that servant will come on a day when he does not expect him and at an hour he is not aware of. He will cut him to pieces and assign him a place with the unbelievers.

47 “The servant who knows the master’s will and does not get ready or does not do what the master wants will be beaten with many blows. 48 But the one who does not know and does things deserving punishment will be beaten with few blows. From everyone who has been given much, much will be demanded; and from the one who has been entrusted with much, much more will be asked."

He said this is in the context of telling his followers to be 'watchful', because he may return at any time. So they must be prepared.

I gotta start getting into this forum stuff more in depth because man. :P

Um, Putin... The passage you wrote is from a parable. It is intended to show what Hod the Gather, who is master of all, will do to his disobedient servants. Yes, I know where you will go now.

As far as the submitting to all men, that is meekness. You are correct that it isn't passive resistance. I was jut showing that your statement to the effect that all Jesus taught was to be passive sans the resistance was wrong.

And the final roof of what was taught was specifically chosen to show that you had pulled an excerpt from a longer passage and then said I made up the part about Paul telling the masters to do the same to his servants. I never laid claim to Jesus saying any part of that. That was you who took Paul's writings and attributed them to the words of Jesus found in the Gospels.

God the Father. Wow. Talk about an odd autocorrect.

@ Putin
''Yes you can imagine all sorts of hypotheticals where the mechanisms of evolution would once again come into play for humans, but that still doesn't mean that races are proto-species.''

This is a significant concession. So if one were to define race as being based on genotype difference which codes for the advantage displayed by the phenotype, then why the heck to you bulk so much at the word proto-species.

Incidentally Draug's comment about this being but a short step from Master Race Ideals is absolutely correct. This is the dark heart at the core of Darwinism/Evolutionism.

Darwinism does not necessarily lead to racism. Races are biologically fictive concepts. We see certain characteristics and lump people together according to them, but this quite emphatically does not mean that genetically they have any kind of validity. Putin is quite right to balk at the idea of classifying "races" as proto-species. They are not. Yes, certain genetic properties distribute based on geographic origin, BUT and this is the key point here, different genetic properties do not distribute within the same boundaries! Yes skin colour distributes in certain ways, but other properties distribute in other ways.

Obviously that is the key and most important point here, however a secondary point still stands to be made. Even if, for the sake of argument, evolution could be used to support or lead to racist beliefs (which it absolutely cannot) you're engaging in a logical fallacy if you use this point to argue against it. You can't say that just because you dislike the (in this case, completely non-existent) implications of an argument that it must be false.

Ah, fulhamish I believe I owe you an apology. I completely misinterpreted the argument you were making. I do admit my mistake and again, apologize for it.

Let me now respond more accurately to what you actually said. First off, the gene flow you assert exists today due to the conveniences of modern travel, is thought to have always existed throughout human history. Granted modern technology has made the process more convenient, and certainly quicker, but no human population has ever been so isolated from the rest for any period of time as is enough to allow for even the remotest beginnings of speciation to occur. However, it must also be stressed that this does not mean that humans are immune to genetic change. As the conditions of human existence continue to change, natural selection will continue to work on the entire human population. At no point will a person from, say, China be unable to produce fertile offspring with a person from Brazil, but given enough time (say hundreds of thousands of years) the decedents of modern humans may not be able to produce fertile offspring with modern humans. In this case time itself has become the barrier, which is so crucial to speciation events.

And on the question of Darwin as a racist or non racist, I think there's two answers to that. Since race is a socially constructed concept, it follows that racism must also be. And since racism is socially constructed, racism is a relative thing. Relative to his own time, Darwin's views were in fact quite progressive. And in that sense Putin is correct. Darwin's views were among the most anti-racist that existed at the time. However, relative to modern standards, to you and I, Darwin is remarkably racist. Many of the things he wrote and said regarding race would have been absolutely appalling and offensive in this day and age. So yes, while Darwin in all honesty did believe some races were more advanced than others which is, according to some, the very definition of racism, (I think in order to effectively tackle the modern problems of race, we need to adopt a much wider definition of the concept, but never mind), the degree to which he believed that to be the case, as well as the ways in which it influenced his political beliefs made him actually quite progressive. At any rate, it is almost completely irrelevant.

"This is a significant concession."

No, it is not. Only in your mind is saying evolution will work if the mechanisms once again are relevant to humans (which they won't be), a "concession".

"then why the heck to you bulk so much at the word proto-species."

Because humans belong to the same sub/"proto" species - homo sapiens sapiens. Races do not really exist. Skin color is not enough to divide humans into races. Genetic variation within racial groups is often greater than between racial groups, or at the very least it is roughly the same.

"Incidentally Draug's comment about this being but a short step from Master Race Ideals is absolutely correct. This is the dark heart at the core of Darwinism/Evolutionism."

Typical theist. Slandering people by assertion, damn the evidence.

Darwin said: "[T]he distinctive characters of all the races [are] highly variable. ... It may be doubted whether any character can be named which is distinctive of a race and is constant."

"This diversity of judgment ... shews that they [races] graduate into each other, and that it is hardly possible to discover clear distinctive characters between them.
- Charles Darwin; The Descent of Man, 1871"

Darwin disproved Hitler's ideas about racial purity and racial interbreeding. He was saying the exact opposite of the National Socialists, which is probably why Hitler not once ever cited Darwin in any speech he ever made. Instead, Hitler justified his fear of interracial mixing on religion. In particular, he said intermixing would be a sin against the will of the creator.

"You carry in your blood the holy inheritance of your fathers and forefathers. You do not know those who have vanished in endless ranks into the darkness of the past. But they all live in you and walk in your blood upon the earth that consumed them in battle and toil and in which their bodies have long decayed. Your blood is therefore something holy. ... But if your blood has traits that will make your children unhappy and burdens to the state, then you have the heroic duty to be the last. The blood is the carrier of life. You carry in it the secret of creation itself. Your blood is holy, for in it God's will lives.:


"Thus men without exception wander about in the garden of Nature; they imagine that they know practically everything and yet with few exceptions pass blindly by one of the most patent principles of Nature's rule: the inner segregation of the species of all living beings on this earth.

Even the most superficial observation shows that Nature's restricted form of propagation and increase is an almost rigid basic law of all the innumerable forms of expression of her vital urge. Every animal mates only with a member of the same species. The titmouse seeks the titmouse, the finch the finch, the stork the stork, the field mouse the field mouse, the dormouse the dormouse, the wolf the she-wolf, etc.

...

This is only too natural.

Any crossing of two beings not at exactly the same level produces a medium between the level of the two parents. This means: the offspring will probably stand higher than the racially lower parent, but not as high as the higher one. Consequently, it will later succumb in the struggle against the higher level. Such mating is contrary to the will of Nature for a higher breeding of all life. The precondition for this does not lie in associating superior and inferior, but in the total victory of the former. The stronger must dominate and not blend with the weaker, thus sacrificing his own greatness. Only the born weakling can view this as cruel, but he after all is only a weak and limited man; for if this law did not prevail, any conceivable higher development of organic living beings would be unthinkable.

The consequence of this racial purity, universally valid in Nature, is not only the sharp outward delimitation of the various races, but their uniform character in themselves. The fox is always a fox, the goose a goose, the tiger a tiger, etc., and the difference can lie at most in the varying measure of force, strength, intelligence, dexterity, endurance, etc., of the individual specimens. But you will never find a fox who in his inner attitude might, for example, show humanitarian tendencies toward geese, as similarly there is no cat with a friendly inclination toward mice.

...

The result of all racial crossing is therefore in brief always the following:
Lowering of the level of the higher race;
Physical and intellectual regression and hence the beginning of a slowly but surely progressing sickness.
To bring about such a development is, then, nothing else but to sin against the will of the eternal creator."

Then we have Christians who advocated for forced sterilization, because it was "blasphemy" that the "degenerate" should breed.

"In England too, eugenics have already been recognized by a part of the Church. A comprehensive work has been published by Hinton. We consider it a sin against the idea of personality and conscience "to insist upon the propagation of degenerate and sick life, if means are available to oppose such a calamity. It seems blasphemy to imagine that the birth of sick children could be at all God's will and Divine providence"."

Hitler swore to stamp out atheism.

""We were convinced that the people needs and requires this faith. We have therefore undertaken the fight against the atheistic movement, and that not merely with a few theoretical declarations: we have stamped it out."
-Adolph Hitler, 1933 Berlin Speech

"Life comes from God and returns to God. All life and all races follow God's ordinances. No people and no race can ignore them. We want the German youth to again recognize the religious nature of life. They must realize that God wants the individual as well as the whole people, and that they lose contact with life when they lose contact with God! God and nation are the two foundations of the life of the individual and the community. We want no shallow and superficial piety, but rather a deep faith that God guides the world, that he controls it, and a consciousness of the relationship between God and each individual, and between God and the live of the people and the fatherland. The National Socialist state will promote such a deeply religious educational system. We want parents to support and strengthen this by honesty and by good example."

http://rationalrevolution.net/articles/darwin_nazism.htm

More on the Master Race & Christianity

"1. Monogenism and Christian Fundamentalism
Much of the substance and rhetoric of anti-miscegenation law reflected a theory
of race rooted in Christian fundamentalism. Substantively, the language of the statutes
themselves manifested the deeply held religious conviction that racial commingling was
sinful, “to the dishonor of God and shame of Christians”

The political debate .
surrounding the issue of segregation of the races in general was suffused with the rhetoric of religion. Keeping races separate was thought to be “following the order of Divine Providence” and the white man’s “desire to preserve in its purity the race to which [he] belongs” was “not prejudice, but . . . the implantation of the Divine Author of our being . To resist anti-miscegenation law was to “defy[] the Almighty and any people who shall do so may certainly expect His curse.”.As authority for these convictions, anti-miscegenation proponents cited the Bible, specifically the Old Testament, employing a literal interpretation of its text. The theory of monogenism—origin from a single source—held that all humans descended from a single pair of ancestors, Adam and Eve, and were therefore of the same species.Despite this initial unity, according to the monogenists, the races had degenerated in arious degrees from their original state of perfection—whites had degenerated the least and were thought to be closer to the original divine plan.

The monogenist argument relied heavily on Biblical genealogy, particularly that of Noah and his three sons—Ham, Shem, and Japheth. Adhering to a fundamentalist interpretation of the Biblical story of the great flood destroying all of humanity save Noah, his wife, their three sons and their wives, the monogenists reasoned that all modern humans are descended from these three sons.
Asians and Africans were classified as Hamitic, Arabs and Jews as Shemitic, and
Caucasians as Japhethitic.These racial classifications, grounded as they were in the Bible, were thought to reflect God’s divine order and any mixing of the races, consequently, was a violation of divine law. This religious conviction was stridently asserted by the Louisiana Supreme
Court in Ex Parte Plessy(a case that would be affirmed by the U.S. Supreme Court in
one of its most infamous opinions, Plessy v. Ferguson “[F]ollowing the order of
Divine Providence, human authority ought not to compel [] widely-separated races to
intermix.”.
The fundamentalist Christian argument for keeping races from
intermingling has proven to be one of the most durable: Present-day defenders of schoolimposed bans on interracial dating and marrying, for example, continue to base their arguments on a fundamentalist interpretation of the Bible.

Comment, Interracial Marriage: A Survey of Statutes and Their Interpretation, 1 MERCER L. REV. 83, 83–84 (1949).
26
11 Va. (1 Hen. & M.) 71, 74 (1806) (Roane, J., concurring) (emphasis omitted).
27
Wadlington, supra note 15, at 1191.
28
West Chester and Philadelphia R.R. Co. v. Miles, 55 PA 209, 213 (1867).
29
Steven A. Bank, Anti-Miscegenation Laws and the Dilemma of Symmetry: The Understanding of Equality in the Civil Rights Act of
1875, 2 U. CHI. L. SCH. ROUNDTABLE 303, 305 (1995) (citing 2 Cong Rec 4160 (1874) (Sen. Eli Saulsbury debating the Civil Rights
Act of 1875)).
30
Id. at 307 (citing 2 Cong Rec App 316 (1874) (Sen. Merriman debating the Civil Rights Act of 1875)).
31
Sealing, supra note 12, at 562.
http://law.bepress.com/expresso/eps/4589
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