Development of morality since Christianity

[_Stormy Waters]

You were providing examples in the Bible where people were treated equally, but in the instance of the Caanite woman she was not treated as an equal.

Yeah, I know. And according to the Christian canon, that issue was mooted by Peter's vision in Acts.

Whether or not it was just is an important question regardless of whether or not the practice has been discontinued.

I think it's comparable to the LDS priesthood ban in the sense that this action was never condemmed as wrong just as the LDS church has never condemmed the priesthood ban as wrong. That someone was treated as a lesser not because of their works, but because of their birth.

You appear to be reading the Bible like a Mormon. Not all Christians need a neat and tidy faith-promoting narrative where no institutional mistakes were made and no false doctrines were taught as revelations. A believing Christian can accept Jesus being a product of his time, including Jewish ethnocentrism. A believing Latter-day Saint, by contrast, cannot reconcile "the Church is true" with "the Church falsely taught for 150 years or so that God commanded that black men couldn't have the priesthood." A biblical Christian is not married to the institutional infallibility that a Latter-day Saint is.

I cannot speak to the claims of the OP, but I think here we have a biblical example of someone being treated unequally and where said action is portrayed as just.

You're inferring that, assuming this episode is a true story, Jesus actually believed that the Canaanites were inferior. It is also possible that he was being Socratic to test her faith, which he did to people on other occasions. E.g.,

John 6

5 When Jesus raised his eyes and saw that a large crowd was coming to him, he said to Philip, “Where can we buy enough food for them to eat?”
6 He said this to test him, because he himself knew what he was going to do.

I'd like to address the possibilities you've suggested as an explanation.

(1) Jesus was a product of his time
I submit that this puts the bar pretty low for the Son of God. Referring to one Israelites as children and the caanites as 'dogs'. While I'm aware that the usage of dog in this instance was not as harsh as it sounds it is still placing one group of people above another. If he wrongfully ignored a mother pleading for the well being of her daughter because the culture of the time had influenced him it sets a low standard. It would raise the question of what other of his teachings and actions were just a product of his time.
(2) It didn't happen
I think that raises the question how do we know which parts of the Bible did happen and which parts didn't and how can we tell the difference?
(3) It was a test
So Jesus ignored her and than referred to her as a dog as a test? What was the test? To see if she would admit that she was like a dog eating crumbs as they fell off of the children's table?

[_MrStakhanovite]

The holocaust was a direct result of anti-enlightenment backlash, the sort of conservative "blood and soil" rhetoric of critics of the enlightenment.

Who told you this?

[_Darth J]

I'd like to address the possibilities you've suggested as an explanation.

(1) Jesus was a product of his time
I submit that this puts the bar pretty low for the Son of God. Referring to one Israelites as children and the caanites as 'dogs'. While I'm aware that the usage of dog in this instance was not as harsh as it sounds it is still placing one group of people above another. If he wrongfully ignored a mother pleading for the well being of her daughter because the culture of the time had influenced him it sets a low standard. It would raise the question of what other of his teachings and actions were just a product of his time.

You're aware that there are numerous different Christologies that attempt to address this, right? And that's a different question than whether Christians have found grounds in the New Testament to oppose racism.

(2) It didn't happen
I think that raises the question how do we know which parts of the Bible did happen and which parts didn't and how can we tell the difference?

That's a different question than whether Christians have found grounds in the New Testament to oppose racism.

(3) It was a test
So Jesus ignored her and than referred to her as a dog as a test? What was the test? To see if she would admit that she was like a dog eating crumbs as they fell off of the children's table?

Or maybe if she had enough faith for a miracle to help her daughter, since the New Testament frequently talks about faith being necessary for Jesus to perform a miracle.

You remember there's a similar story about Jesus healing a centurion's servant, right? How Jesus had not seen such great faith among the House of Israel as in this Roman officer?

Jesus also called his followers "sheep." That probably wasn't mean to imply the gullibility or mindless following we associate with that metaphor today. Maybe, possibly, he was just using a metaphor, not actually calling her a dog as an insult.

[_brade]

Buffalo, I'm probably every bit as persuaded by Pinker's work on this as you, but it's important to be careful with his work. He hedges quite a lot and one thing he hammers on repeatedly is that we often have to take the best available data with a grain of salt because sometimes it's just not very good. Nevertheless, I think he does argue persuasively that the trend is down for several forms of violence.

Also, he's careful to point out over and over again that we can't be certain of the causes, though he does offer explanations based on research and experimental results in psychology and other fields. People who haven't read his work often are annoyed by folks like you and I because I think we sometimes speak for Pinker more dogmatically than he actually does. He's really very careful, I think, and he doesn't write off religion as a positive influence in some case, though most of the explanations he offers are secular and they're that way because, as he says over and over, he wants to look for plausible exogenous explanations.

People around me are probably so sick of hearing me talk about his book, but the topic comes up quite a bit in conversation because, for example, people do in fact infer from media stories that rates of violence are much, much higher than our best statistics show them to be.

For DarthJ, in most of the cases I can recall, Pinker takes care to get clear about what would count as a particular type of violence or not.

For Stak, we were having a little discussion about Pinker in chat the other night and by the time I authored a response you'd left. I saved it ;)

(23:21:30) MrStakhanovite: by the way Brade, this is a decent review of Pinker I thought: http://bedejournal.blogspot.com/​2011/11/steven-pinker-and-an-lush​an-revolt.html

(23:27:01) brade: Stak, I'm pretty sure I read that blog post when I was doing some of my own research while reading the book.

(23:27:57) brade: I wouldn't call that a book review. I think he does do a good job of pointing out how messy it is making estimates for things like this.

(23:28:10) brade: But, that's a point Pinker addresses in the book.

(23:31:30) brade: And he concedes that the numbers aren't exact, and may even be off by quite a lot for reasons that that blog poster points out. His response is that, nevertheless, even when we make adjustments to the data and use the highest possible estimates ('possible' given some reasonable constraints by things that we do know) for the recent past and the lowest possible estimates for times longer ago, the *trend* is still very clearly down.

(23:31:47) brade: Oh, well, damn, Stak is gone.

(23:32:12) brade: <whistling to himself>