Christian ethics vs. Roman values

Cypress said:
You have a substantial amount of work to do in improving your reading comprehension of the English language. You need to respond to what I actually wrote, not to what you wish I wrote.
Click to expand...

He's just trolling from his basement again. A completely harmless, gutless idiot most useful as the driver of a delivery truck to a Federal daycare center.
 
Dutch Uncle said:
He's just trolling from his basement again. A completely harmless, gutless idiot most useful as the driver of a delivery truck to a Federal daycare center.
Click to expand...

Must be from the Saint Petersburg troll farm. Probably explains the lack of comprehension of standard English.

I believe it was crystal clear from what I wrote that it was the nature and practice of public charity which changed during the transition from pagan imperial Rome, to Christian Rome.

Not that charity was not being practiced at all in the early Roman Empire.
 
Cypress said:
The New Testament is the first piece of literature in the western tradition that writes directly about the poor and destitute with dignity and empathy.

There is nothing remotely similar in Greek literature of antiquity. To the extent the destitute and impoverished even show up in ancient Greek literature, they are treated as subjects of comedy or caricature.

So, I think Greek concepts of public distributions were probably not dissimilar to pagan Roman practices.


The moral of the story is the very idea that almsgiving should primarily benefit the destitute and poor is something all of us in the west inherited, knowingly or unknowingly, from the Judeo-Christian tradition. It just seems like a perfectly natural and self evident ethical imperative because that ethical tradition has been with us for 1,800 years.


A downside of Christian ethical tradition is that it left us as a legacy the burden of unnecessary guilt, particularly about sexuality.
Click to expand...

While I agree Christianity flipped-the-script on charitable giving...and American capitalists have flipped it back to the Roman way.....it's not early Christians who invented charity. As you pointed out, they certainly changed Western ideology on the subject.

Agreed on the sex thing. That's pure Paul. It's one reason why I like Gospels but feel the rest of the New Testament is not in keeping with the philosophy of Jesus.
 
Dutch Uncle said:
While I agree Christianity flipped-the-script on charitable giving...and American capitalists have flipped it back to the Roman way.....it's not early Christians who invented charity. As you pointed out, they certainly changed Western ideology on the subject.

Agreed on the sex thing. That's pure Paul. It's one reason why I like Gospels but feel the rest of the New Testament is not in keeping with the philosophy of Jesus.
Click to expand...

The doctrine that sex was corrupting, and that the ideal Christian ascetic life involved celibacy probably contributed to the legacy of guilt and neurosis western society, and particularly American society has had about sex.
 
Dutch Uncle said:
While I agree Christianity flipped-the-script on charitable giving...and American capitalists have flipped it back to the Roman way.....it's not early Christians who invented charity. As you pointed out, they certainly changed Western ideology on the subject.

Agreed on the sex thing. That's pure Paul. It's one reason why I like Gospels but feel the rest of the New Testament is not in keeping with the philosophy of Jesus.
Click to expand...

SO you partially agree.

I really helped focus the discussion.
 
Dutch Uncle said:
While I agree Christianity flipped-the-script on charitable giving...and American capitalists have flipped it back to the Roman way.....it's not early Christians who invented charity. As you pointed out, they certainly changed Western ideology on the subject.

Agreed on the sex thing. That's pure Paul. It's one reason why I like Gospels but feel the rest of the New Testament is not in keeping with the philosophy of Jesus.
Click to expand...

Let me dispel a common myth: no, Christianity did not bring the idea of charity to the Western world.

The concept of charity and concern for the poor was already fully developed before the Christians borrowed the notion from their pagan and Jewish peers. It’s evident in Jewish wisdom literature, Cynic discourses, Stoic and even Epicurean moral theory, Aristotelian generosity and magnanimity, and the Greco-Roman institutions of philanthropia and euergetism. (On the role of influences on Christianity explaining its features generally, see On the Historicity of Jesus, Element 30, pp. 164-68). The idea of charity, welfare, the common good, sharing wealth, helping the poor was heavily ingrained throughout all ancient societies before Christianity. The Christians added nothing new. All they did was boast of being better at it. Which may have been as dubious a claim then as now. The data show poverty only increased under the Christians. For almost a thousand years.

In fact social welfare in antiquity was extensive, often including subsidized and sometimes free medical care, food supplies, educational scholarships, income subsidies for the poor, and disaster relief (on some of this, see Chapter 8, and index, “charities,” in my Science Education in the Early Roman Empire); as well as access to fresh water (which required massive outlays for aqueducts and associated delivery and storage systems), and other urban infrastructure, like roads and libraries, which were free to the public. Public baths and toilets were not free, but heavily subsidized for the benefit of the poor, and sometimes indeed free (on holy days). Private charities were likewise everywhere, from burial and dinner clubs, to guilds and religious fraternities, to secular and sacred hospices. Advanced hospitals with hygienic arrangements, scientific medical staff, medicinal gardens, baths, latrines, and libraries were free to slaves and soldiers—and may have been available to the public for a fee, just as today (Science Education in the Early Roman Empire, p. 109, n. 286); otherwise, healing temples provided scaled-fee services with all the same features (Asclepius, 2.173-80; Charity & Social Aid in Greece and Rome, pp. 132 & 172, n. 156), with a big dose of fake “miracle medicine” of course; but that’s also what the Christians sold, so again, little difference.

Christians were no different from the pagans. Within just a few centuries the Christians became defenders of continuing material and social stratification, rather than champions for ending poverty. In other words, they became pretty much just like the pagans they claimed to be superior to. And they never really had anything better to offer as models for benefaction and charitable action.

The Philosophy of Charity
The notion of charitable giving and support for the poor was already built into the social system and ideology of pagan antiquity. See Poverty in the Roman World, pp. 60-82 (published by the Cambridge University Press in 2006). The sharing of civic resources was a standard moral assumption of every nation-state, including public mining proceeds, food production and supply, and beyond, with many kinds of private and public philanthropic food and cash charities (ibid., pp. 6-8 and 45), implemented on a scale far beyond anything the Christians could achieve—until they took over the government and continued what the pagans started. All of this was the physical realization of ancient pagan thought.

Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics 4.1 is entirely devoted to the virtue of “generosity” (eleutheriotês), and in section 1155a19-22 of NE 8, Aristotle outright says friendship ought to be “felt mutually by members of the same species, especially among human beings, for which reason we praise philanthropists.” Indeed, Aristotle’s views were more sophisticated and practical than any promoted by early Christians: see Judith Swanson, “Aristotle on Liberality: Its Relation to Justice and Its Public and Private Practice,” in Polity 27.1 (Autumn 1994): 3-23.

The Christians had the obscure tale of the widow’s mite. The pagans had a fully intelligible philosophy of it:

The word ‘generosity’ is used relatively to someone’s means; for generosity resides not in how much one gives, but in the moral character of the giver, and this is relative to the giver’s means. There is therefore nothing to prevent the man who gives less from being the more generous man, if he has less to give than those who are thought to be more generous, yet who have not made their wealth but inherited it; for in the first place, the latter sort of man has no experience of want, and secondly all men are fonder of what they themselves have achieved, as are parents and poets. It is not easy for the generous man to be rich, since he is not apt either at taking or at keeping, but at giving it away, and he does not value wealth for its own sake, but as a means to giving. (Aristotle, NE 4.1)

Gosh. It’s as if the Christian notion of charity was invented by Aristotle. Hmmm.

Aristotle goes on to praise this model of generosity as definitive of the good person and the good life, and denounces its contrary extremes: meanness (not giving anything to charity, or giving too little) and prodigality (giving too much, e.g. risking bankruptcy, or to the wrong people, e.g. criminals and flatterers, or for the wrong reasons, e.g. for praise rather than the good it produces). So here we have charity and giving as principles at the foundation of Western philosophy. (See T.H. Irwin, “Generosity and Property in Aristotle’s Politics,” Social Philosophy and Policy 4.2 [April 1987]: 37-54.)

The Epicureans, likewise, promoted frugality and generosity, and accepted the poor and illiterate into their schools and clubs. The Cynics even more so. And the Stoics developed an extensive philosophy of the moral duty to be giving and generous and to help the poor. Eclectics who cobbled together personal philosophies from all the schools of thought did likewise.

Cicero extensively advocated giving surpluses to the needy and helping the poor (On Duties 2). Seneca, the famous Stoic and quintessential philosopher of the Roman Empire, likewise argued that we should readily give alms even to anonymous beggars, and ever be ready to help the needy, and not because of pity, but rationally, as an expression of our good nature (see: On Anger 1.9.2; On Clemency 2.6.2; On Benefits 3.8.3, 4.10-11, 4.29.2-3, 5.11.5; and Moral Epistles 120.2). Musonius Rufus, the most revered philosopher of the Roman Empire, was even more adamant on this virtue of charity, to the point of arguing men should not even own slaves, so as to steal the labor of others, but do their own work or pay for it like everyone else. A point nowhere made by Jesus, anywhere in the New Testament. Altogether, Rufus preached that “to help many people” is “much more commendable than living a life of luxury,” and that “evil consists in injustice and cruelty and indifference to a neighbor’s trouble, while virtue is brotherly love and goodness and justice and beneficence and concern for the welfare of one’s neighbor.” So none of that was invented by Jesus.

Even before Christianity came along to steal those ideas, Seneca’s father famously wrote that “among those laws that are unwritten, and yet set in stone…are the obligations on all to give alms to a beggar and throw earth on a corpse” (Seneca the Elder, Controversies 1.1.14). That statement alone demonstrates how ubiquitous was the common agreement on this point, before Christianity even existed, in the very empire they inhabited. Clearly, the Christians did not introduce it. Generosity had always been a virtue. Greek eleutheriotês was emulated by Roman liberalitas. Greek euergetês was emulated by Roman beneficentia. The Romans even introduced the virtue of mercy (clementia), acting on which also produced charity. And these three Latin virtues, mercy, beneficence, and generosity, together constituted humanitas, producing what we now call “humanitarianism” (see, for example, Cicero’s, Tusculan Disputations 4.43-57 and Academica 2.44.135).

As Seneca himself wrote to posterity, and his friend Lucilius:

It is indeed worthy of great praise, when man treats man with kindness! Shall we advise stretching forth the hand to the shipwrecked sailor, or pointing out the way to the wanderer, or sharing a crust with the starving? … Nature produced us related to one another, since she created us from the same source and to the same end. She engendered in us mutual affection, and made us prone to friendships. She established fairness and justice; according to her ruling, it is more wretched to commit than to suffer injury. Through her orders, let our hands be ready for all that needs to be helped. (Seneca, Moral Epistles 95.51.)

https://www.richardcarrier.info/archives/12453
 
AssHatZombie said:
Morality is rational, not necessarily religious only, and definitely not christian only.

do you agree?
Click to expand...
Yes, morality is arbitrary and relative. It is whatever you want it to be. If you believe it's "moral" to blow up a Federal daycare center, then you will.
 
Dutch Uncle said:
Yes, morality is arbitrary and relative. It is whatever you want it to be. If you believe it's "moral" to blow up a Federal daycare center, then you will.
Click to expand...

no. it's not that either.

It's the golden rule.

read my sig.

read the great philosophers, including jesus.
 
AssHatZombie said:
no. it's not that either.

It's the golden rule.....
Click to expand...
Says who besides you? Who deems "the Golden Rule" to be a universal law besides dumbfucks like you, Fredo?

Thanks for backpedaling though. It's interesting to watch your mind work; kinda like watching First Graders play with a Rubik's cube.
 
Cypress said:
The doctrine that sex was corrupting, and that the ideal Christian ascetic life involved celibacy probably contributed to the legacy of guilt and neurosis western society, and particularly American society has had about sex.
Click to expand...

Agreed on the influence. Still, the fact such attitudes have been around for 2000 years coupled with the fact of human "Free Will" tells me our ancestors are good with it.
 
Dutch Uncle said:
Says who besides you? Who deems "the Golden Rule" to be a universal law besides dumbfucks like you, Fredo?

Thanks for backpedaling though. It's interesting to watch your mind work; kinda like watching First Graders play with a Rubik's cube.
Click to expand...

It's a succinct way of describing morality.

Jesus is one in a long line of moral philosophers, secular and otherwise, who basically agree.

see, the corrupt powerful persecute moral truth. that's who you have pledged allegiance to, deep state fucko.

socrates, seneca, jesus.
 
Dutch Uncle said:
Agreed on the influence. Still, the fact such attitudes have been around for 2000 years coupled with the fact of human "Free Will" tells me our ancestors are good with it.
Click to expand...
Let's just agree that the Hindus had a healthier attitude about sex than the Christians. The Kama Sutra would have never passed muster in the Christian west!
 
Dutch Uncle said:
Dipshit, no one said they did. Like Cypress already told you, try to read and understand a post before you waste you time going off into the tulies.
Click to expand...

I think his KGB handlers need to send that Saint Petersburg troll back for some remedial English comprehension lessons.
 
Cypress said:
Let's just agree that the Hindus had a healthier attitude about sex than the Christians. The Kama Sutra would have never passed muster in the Christian west!
Click to expand...

That's a shame too. Not just because repression of natural feelings can produce negative results but because it weaponizes sex by subjugating women.

Another legacy of Paul is making all women second class citizens.
 
AssHatZombie said:
It's a succinct way of describing morality.

Jesus is one in a long line of moral philosophers, secular and otherwise, who basically agree.

see, the corrupt powerful persecute moral truth. that's who you have pledged allegiance to, deep state fucko.

socrates, seneca, jesus.
Click to expand...

Nice bullshit, kid, but you just look stupid trying it on intelligent adults. Try sticking to bullshitting your loser friends, son.

The fact remains the "Golden Rule" is arbitrary. It's a philosophy just like Jesus or Buddha taught, not a universal law like you are pushing.
 
Dutch Uncle said:
Nice bullshit, kid, but you just look stupid trying it on intelligent adults. Try sticking to bullshitting your loser friends, son.

The fact remains the "Golden Rule" is arbitrary. It's a philosophy just like Jesus or Buddha taught, not a universal law like you are pushing.
Click to expand...



oh, but it is.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top