Find a Roman senator that does that and I will validate both your point and your parking voucher. Then I will steal your time machine and wreak havoc on causality.
The point was they wouldn't, except in fiction. A more apt example might be the entire movie "A Knight's Tale." which was full of amiable anachronism.
Okay, so if it is anachronistic, is it wrong to do so, or does it then just have a label. I'm comfortable in criticising past standards because I think it's one of the few ways we can get some perspective on where we might need to improve what we're doing now. And it's not as if the criticism is doing the past any harm. Slave traders were douches. Societal context doesn't alter that they bought and sold people and that those people were worse off for the slave traders' actions. If this constitutes defamation, bring on the test case. The past v. WLB.
It is not wrong to say that the things done in the past are, by our standards, immoral. It is, however, a mistake to expect them to be moral by our standards. The cultural evolution is as much a flaw in fundamentalism as organic evolution. One of the values of the Bible is that is captures a history of part of that evolution. The people who wrote it over a millennia had different, changing moralities, some of which were markedly deficient to us. That does not make the book immoral- it is just text. Treating the book as an absolute guide to modern behavior would, I agree, result in immorality.
That must be why they had so much trouble getting people to join the party. Oh, wait. They didn't.
Actually the Nazis were starting the wane in popularity when Hitler was brought into political office by Hindenberg. They thought they could co-opt him, and they needed his minority base in the Reichstag for a coalition government. After they were in power, people joined, but they also had gangs of thugs in the street making it difficult for those who objected.
There were people who justified the Final Solution, but the world clearly recoiled from it. A better example of something horrific and unjustifiable that was not seen by people in the Allied cause as particularly bad is the Bengal Famine. Churchill, for basically nationalistic, racist reasons, allowed perhaps a million Indians to starve. It was one of the reasons they lost the Jewel in the Crown.
Except the ones who didn't think they'd done anything wrong. That the international community had no legislation or legal body in place to prosecute the war crimes committed by National Socialism doesn't show us that the world was unprepared for the scale on which they acted, but reflects the fact that until the twentieth century, killing civilians indiscriminately wasn't considered a crime.
That the Russians and Brits weren't held accountable for their own war crimes sheds further light on the fact that until the second world war, humans didn't have much of a problem with sending their soldiers to kill people who weren't like themselves. Things have changed a lot and I am glad we can look back on the strategic bombing campaign of Bomber Harris with horror. You can argue the context card all you want, but the horror is undiminished and that's a good thing. It means we can hope that Steven Pinker is on the money and that we may yet avoid falling into old traps.
We don't really disagree.
So what? The Aztecs were jerks. The Nazis were jerks. More people have personal contact with the aftermath of the Nazis, so I chose the example that seemed more pertinent. The Conquistadors were jerks with steel, while you're at it. Any example of a morality that we would find abhorent in a modern context will serve to make the point. We can and should judge them by our standards.
We inevitably judge them by our standards. That does not make, say, Diaz de Castillo's history of the conquest an immoral book. There is an interesting article in the NYTimes this weekend taking the very Jewish view that the Bible is really about confronting authority, questioning power. Abraham never talks to God again after the Isaac incident. Job calls him out in the whirlwind, after which God never talks to anyone at all. The book if more complex, or at least can be read as more complex, than the path taken by the Fundies who worship it- or the atheist who despise it.
Do you mean the same JWJH alleged to mandate that Jews still shouldn't be eating shellfish? If so, that's their anachronism, not mine. If Jesus came to enforce the old law, and no word has been given to rescind his statement on the matter, then Christians should also be avoiding the tasty, tasty invertebrates. Plenty of Christians do push old testament law, so again, the biggest anachronism elephant in the room is not my own.
As a side point, the exemption of Gentiles from Jewish dietary and penis-trimming law is covered in the NT, although post-crucifixion.
And of course, when the fundamentalist Woolly Mammoth is in the room, your tiny pachyderm is dwarfed.
