[nige1]

PhilKing, on 2015-January-20, 07:06, said:

Back to the original question: No = 10 points, other = 7 points, Yes = 1 point.

[mikeh]

nige1, on 2015-January-20, 03:35, said:

As usual, Mikeh is wrong about my motives and attacks me for opinions that I didn't express and don't hold.

Then what was the point of your post about the former slave being nostalgic about being a piece of property?

Either you lack some basic writing skills or you were being intentionally provocative. I make my living using the English language, and interpreting written statements. The natural meaning of your post was that you were asserting that slavery was not all bad. That stance is repugnant to me. While I hold to few moral absolutes, the ones to which I do hold deal with a mix of human obligations towards each other, and human integrity, which latter excludes the notion of any human being owned as a piece of property, even if one such person later had good things to say about being a slave.

You may not hold the opinions I inferred from your post but you most definitely implied that you do. Of course, I fully expected your response. Your 'debating' style is pretty obvious.

[WellSpyder]

PhilKing, on 2015-January-20, 07:06, said:

Back to the original question:

What??? Do you seriously expect us to remember what we are arguing about?

[kenberg]

The Godfather was on television last night. It's been a long time since I last saw it.

Perhaps the strongest feature of the movie (I never read the book) is its full portrayal of a way of life. Within the given culture, the actions were completely understandable, perhaps even, within their code, moral.

This does not mean that we cannot, ourselves, reject that way of life. Not just reject it for ourselves, but also assert that it is "wrong". I put "wrong" in quotes, as I am not at all prepared to write a treatise on moral choices. "Wrong", to me, basically means "wrong".
Side comment: Many years back I saw a Tom Stoppard play where the relativity of values was under discussion. The main character was adopting a similar attitude toward "better". His line was something like "It isn't better because some bearded judges decided it is better, it is better because it is better".

Anyway, I try to appreciate the vast array of possible human arrangements. Historically, tribal arrangements were common, the strong dominated the weak, and so on. Not that this has changed all that much when you come down to it. And it is just good sense to realize that however wrong or stupid or whatever the choice others make seem to be, there is often precious little we can do about it even if for some reason we think we are entitled to intervene. So butting out is often both proper and practical. This needn't keep us from declaring that some ways of life are better than others. Better because we say so? Well, yes. Or, otherwise put, better because it is better. But most often, we can just butt out.

Does all this generality actually apply to MT? Maybe. One can pursue a couple of different questions:

1. What is it she actually did?
2. What are our views about these actions?

I never paid much attention to her life at all. I can say with confidence that no matter how much study I gave the matter, I would not conclude that she performed miracles. As long as I stay away from LSD and certain mushrooms, I don't ever expect to see anything that would make me believe in miracles. That's me, it just is. On other aspects of her life I would have to do more of a study than I am prepared to do, but I think you could color me as skeptical of her goodness. I believe that some people are much better people than I am, and I also believe that some who are thought to be very good people are in fact charlatans. Sorting out which is which can be a task.

[barmar]

Vampyr, on 2015-January-19, 10:57, said:

When I first heard about FGM I was horrified and wished that something was being done about it. But that was about 30 years ago, and it was very fashionable to say "but it's their culture". Now, though, everyone cares and their are campaigns and activism etc. So I have been thinking that moral relativism is, thankfully, going out of fashion.

What I think is changing is that the word is getting smaller and smaller, due to technology.

A century and more ago, we didn't have very much interaction between very different cultures. We knew they existed, and that they had different customs, but most people didn't really know the details. Now the world is all connected, and travel to formerly "distant" lands is relatively easy. We see what's going on there, they see what's going on here, and we form strong opinions about how other cultures compare to us.

And as it becomes easier to communicate and travel, it's harder to consider them to be separate cultures. When we see a culture that appears to be "primitive" or "savage", I think there's a feeling that they just didn't know better (the "stuck in the middle ages" metaphor), and we hope they'll become enlightened through continued interaction with the rest of the world.

But cultures, like people, can be very resistant to change when it seems to be imposed by others.

[nige1]

mikeh, on 2015-January-20, 09:43, said:

Then what was the point of your post about the former slave being nostalgic about being a piece of property?

Either you lack some basic writing skills or you were being intentionally provocative. I make my living using the English language, and interpreting written statements. The natural meaning of your post was that you were asserting that slavery was not all bad. That stance is repugnant to me. While I hold to few moral absolutes, the ones to which I do hold deal with a mix of human obligations towards each other, and human integrity, which latter excludes the notion of any human being owned as a piece of property, even if one such person later had good things to say about being a slave.

You may not hold the opinions I inferred from your post but you most definitely implied that you do. Of course, I fully expected your response. Your 'debating' style is pretty obvious.

My style is straightforward and I rarely hold the bizarre opinions that Mikeh imputes to me. Also, In a legal context, when witnesses confront a lawyer with awkward facts or arguments, then impugning skills, motives, and character may be acceptable. In friendly discussion, however, I feel that such tactics are inappropriate.

[Vampyr]

nige1, on 2015-January-21, 05:20, said:

My style is straightforward and I rarely hold the bizarre opinions that Mikeh imputes to me. Also, In a legal context, when witnesses confront a lawyer with awkward facts or arguments, then impugning skills, motives, and character may be acceptable.

In friendly discussion, however, I feel that such tactics are inappropriate.

Could you maybe explain why you brought up the former slave?

[nige1]

Vampyr, on 2015-January-21, 05:26, said:

Could you maybe explain why you brought up the former slave?

I was endorsing Trinidad's point about morals changing slowly with time. I feel that bad old attitudes and practices (e.g. racism, FGM, slavery) are widespread and persistent. See my previous post #137.

More slavery examples

• A case-study from a conference on Human Trafficking, a few years ago: A girl was rescued from miserable sex-slavery in London. After treatment, she was set up with a new identity in the Midlands. Tragically, a year later, a follow-up study revealed that she had voluntarily returned to her pimp.
• More recently The government's "Tied Visa" legislation condemns foreigners to domestic slavery.

[diana_eva]

nige1, on 2015-January-21, 06:03, said:

I was endorsing Trinidad's point about morals changing slowly with time. I feel that bad old attitudes and practices (e.g. racism, FGM, slavery) are widespread and persistent. See my previous post #137.

More slavery examples

• A case-study from a conference on Human Trafficking, a few years ago: A girl was rescued from miserable sex-slavery in London. After treatment, she was set up with a new identity in the Midlands. Tragically, a year later, a follow-up study revealed that she had voluntarily returned to her pimp.
• More recently The government's "Tied Visa" legislation condemns foreigners to domestic slavery.

You're mixing separate issues IMO. There is a psychological trauma where victims voluntarily return to their abuser or develop some other emotional connection with them -> mental issue (individual perception), and there's society morals widely considered as "normal" which change over time (collective perception of "good" and "bad"). I wouldn't put these two in the same bag at all.

[mgoetze]

PhilKing, on 2015-January-20, 07:06, said:

Back to the original question:

No = 10 points, other = 7 points, Yes = 1 point.

nige1 would rate the answers like this: Yes = 10, other = 9, No = 8.

[nige1]

mgoetze, on 2015-January-21, 10:13, said:

nige1 would rate the answers like this: Yes = 10, other = 9, No = 8.

On the evidence, so far, mgoetze is right. Well... I might mark "No" = 6 or 7 but I don't think "Yes" is clearly demonstrable.

[nige1]

diana_eva, on 2015-January-21, 07:22, said:

You're mixing separate issues IMO. There is a psychological trauma where victims voluntarily return to their abuser or develop some other emotional connection with them -> mental issue (individual perception), and there's society morals widely considered as "normal" which change over time (collective perception of "good" and "bad"). I wouldn't put these two in the same bag at all.

Diana_Eva may well be right but I regard
Stockholm Syndrome
cases as evidence of the victims' habituation to slavery; and the UK "Tied visa" legislation as an example of society's tolerance and indifference.

More extreme examples of "bonded labour" still occur in the Middle-east. Millions of victims suffer in silence. Although it's usually illegal, governments turn a blind eye. And we in the West are delighted to buy cheap products

It's hard to know what to do. Simply closing down rogue firms might replace slavery with starvation.

Similar past problems
https://www.youtube....h?v=Joo90ZWrUkU

A future moral dilemma:
How to rent robots

[PassedOut]

Why, to many critics, Mother Teresa is still no saint

Quote

"It's good to work for a cause with selfless intentions. But Mother Teresa's work had ulterior motive, which was to convert the person who was being served to Christianity," RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat said at the opening of an orphanage in Rajasthan state on Monday, the Times of India reports. "In the name of service, religious conversions were made. This was followed by other institutes, too."

I suppose there are some who view those conversions positively, but a bait and switch operation seems to have been in play.

[nige1]

PassedOut, on 2015-February-26, 12:49, said:

Why, to many critics, Mother Teresa is still no saint

I suppose there are some who view those conversions positively, but a bait and switch operation seems to have been in play.

The study cited by PassedOut seems to be a summary of an interpretation of literature about Mother Teresa. Contributors to this topic have exposed us to some of those documents. I don't know whether Mother Teresa is of saintly calibre. I simply think she was a good person, according to what I've read.

I suspect that PassedOut's quotation from the Indian Times is true. Nevertheless, some of Mother Teresa's biographers say that she also encouraged patients to practice their own religions.

[Vampyr]

nige1, on 2015-February-26, 16:00, said:

I simply think she was a good person, according to what I've read.

Meanwhile she was wicked and twisted according to what I've read.

[barmar]

Hasn't conversion been the primary objective of Christian missionaries for most of history? What makes MT particularly evil in this regard? I guess it's the fact that she's often held up as a paragon, and is on the path to sainthood, while the rest have just pursued their work in total anonymity.

[mike777]

"We think of slavery as a practice of the past, an image from Roman colonies or 18th-century American plantations, but the practice of enslaving human beings as property still exists. There are 29.8 million people living as slaves right now, according to a comprehensive new report issued by the Australia-based Walk Free Foundation.

This is not some softened, by-modern-standards definition of slavery. These 30 million people are living as forced laborers, forced prostitutes, child soldiers, child brides in forced marriages and, in all ways that matter, as pieces of property, chattel in the servitude of absolute ownership. Walk Free investigated 162 countries and found slaves in every single one. But the practice is far worse in some countries than others."


This map shows where the world’s 30 million slaves live. There are 60,000 in the U.S.
http://www.washingto...0000-in-the-u-s

[mike777]

barmar, on 2015-February-27, 10:19, said:

Hasn't conversion been the primary objective of Christian missionaries for most of history? What makes MT particularly evil in this regard? I guess it's the fact that she's often held up as a paragon, and is on the path to sainthood, while the rest have just pursued their work in total anonymity.

Fair question.

In reading this thread I guess 2 objections from posters stand out about her:
1) She was a huge liar, she was a deceiver on a grand scale
2) She did not set up a modern medical hospital system

[nige1]

mike777, on 2015-February-27, 11:04, said:

She was a huge liar, she was a deceiver on a grand scale

Please provide some examples, mike.

[mike777]

nige1, on 2015-February-27, 12:44, said:

Please provide some examples, mike.

of what?

pls quote me in full that may answer your question