One of the problem i constantly face when I discuss is what I call catagorical confusion.
You see. There is no such word or concept as right in the bible. Right as a word is a not a theological concept. And salvation ( to be saved ) theologically is not about slavery to be precise. To be saved is to be saved from sin, not necessarily from tyrant. Its a free gift of God in Christ for anyone who loves to accept his son. Its not that i have a right for salvation, but God grant that out of mercy.
I don't know much about Haitian revolution. I Just read wiki article. It seems a just one. A forceful removal of a tryanical rule is just. That doesn't necessarily leads to a just society thought. Removing the tyrant is only half of the equation required for productive society.
That's fair. The Bible says nothing about rights. But to maintain the axiom of free will, we have to allow for people to accept or deny their salvation. In essence a right to accept or deny salvation. Would you say that's correct?
This isn't a hypothetical, conquistadors were reading a writ called El requiremento (an offer to accept salvation) read out to them, the people that later would become south Americans, in spanish perhaps even out of earshot of anyone before attacking and sacking a village. Technically, the people refused salvation so the conquistadors were in the clear to do as they wilt.
Also, tell me when you get to the indemnity for the revolution. It's very interesting
Not really.
Both the concept of free will and the values of individual are in what is called natural law, i.e. the order of God that doesn't require a personal salvation but are built on order of nature itself by. It doesn't matter if one is a christian or not. form a christian perspective, it's a universal thing extended to every man - even to those who oppose christianity.
I'm glad you clarified that. There are no exceptions. And for the record, when I was asking about salvation, I wasn't speaking about emancipation, but salvation. I'm sorry I didn't clarify earlier.
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Anyway, back to the Haitian revolution. I'll spare you some research and share some of the stuff I know.
When that new Haitian nation was formed they were forced, by on the one hand French warships and naval blockade and on the other international hostility and isolation , to pay an indemnity to French slaveholders for their lost property. The calculations explicitly included the former slaves themselves as property, as well as a miryad of war costs that the French incurred. It took Haiti until 1947, 122 years, to finish paying related debts tied to that indemnity. If people, by natural law, are free from slavery and from being another person's property, was it just that the Haitian people had to pay for their own freedom? Is it possible the French are instead the ones responsible for the stolen wages of the people they'd enslaved?
This is in contrast with the British development where the state paid off the slaveowners for this lost property. Is it correct that the those violators of natural law were compensated instead of being punished for violating these natural rights? Even if one were to claim that the ultimate judgement will only ever come in the next life ... Giving them money?
No. Its not right to pay off the slaveowners when emancipating the slaves. But it's better to do it that way even if it's not ideal.
You have to understand that it's better to do it that way than just to keep enslaving them. We don't exist in a perfect world, and things are accomplished with tradeoff and compromise is made inorder to achieve the higher goal.
We can assume real world case that are similar like that. For example, if you heard one of your family is kept hostage by a gang and you are unable to bring them home with any legal means and decided to contact them to pay as a ransom for hostage release, we consider that to be the right thing to do. It not ' just ' for you to pay, since it's your family that is being hurt but all things consider you will do the right thing if you pay and bring them home.
The world is unfair and there are areas where justice and rule of law and truth doesn't cover the territory and you will act with treadoff and compromise.
One of the things people who like to constantly remind us about colonization and the unjust treatment of there subject are very naive about the real world. They reject the Religious ethics of image of God that value individual that assume even weak people have value as much as the strong ones, but then retain their sense of injustice like in the case of slavery. Why is wrong to enslave weak people if there is no inherent value of man as such, let alone seeking appropriate repatriation?
Again this kind of confused argument are possible because people don't know the catagory of ideas and history.
If we take this metaphor seriously, are we saying that the slaveowners were holding the government hostage? That the government was powerless and simply had no choice but to pay the ransom?
There was a major financial interest in the slave trade and it produced financially powerful people who become prosperous from it. There was also, if I remember correctly, many parlament members that invested in the slave trade companies and are making made good money out of it.
The government is not abstract sovereign, it's easily influced by powerful people in the society. You can easily imagine the resistance this people will bring, for it's their whole identity and way of life that is being abolished. As the story goes that slave abolishment law was repeatedly revoked by this group of Parliament, year after year. Those on the abolishment side had to slowly convince the public on religious ground to gather enough petition and use some trick to finally pass the prohibition and stop the slave trade. Wilberforce worked his whole life and saw that particular law accepted and made it to effect just before he died. It was extremely difficult. It's exceedingly difficult to convince people who benefit from any particular thing and vote against themselves. (This is essentially how democracy falls.)
You can see it easily in Ethiopia. we have seen many laws recently easily passed by the Parliament who take away freedom and liberty for citizens. But you will never here a law that contrain the govt from abusing it's power passed with that ease. It's been more than 5 years on hold now for high officials to register there property before holding office. What happened to that law? It's still didn't passed. They can't be made to vote against themselves, while any kind of law against our freedom is passed with flying color everytime.
For them, The law is for population management, not for everyone - ofcourse excluding themselves.
If it requires several years for the west to enact legislation confirming that they do not own us, we shall remind them, by gunpoint, that they do not own our future either.
I have some doubts about your characterization of emancipation in great britan. There's a strong case to be made that since the rise of industrialization they didn't need their colonies as much as they used to and they also could benefit more by freeing their slaves. You don't have to pay for room and board and food for a wageworker, while you had those demands for slaves.
Nonetheless, I have a question. If the government of great britan is not abstractly sovereign, and we've established that people have free will and are made after the image of God, why is it that Ethiopia is the way it is? We had our own biblical traditions, and our governors also have their own individual concerns, our own wealthy elite. So I'm asking again, why? I remember you mentioned that the French and Soviet lineage we have has corrupted us somehow but that doesn't remove natural law, does it?
This why I don't like it when people say.. ኢትዮጵያ የሰው ዘር መገኛ ናት ... Not realizing you are swallowing Darwinism unconsciously. .... " ኢትዮጵያ ምድረገነት ናት " ዘፍጥረትን መነሻ ካደረገው ሀሳብ ጋር አብሮ ቢቀርብም ሁለቱም አብሮ አይሄድም...
You are absolutely right that it wasn't just the moral outrage or persistance. The industrial capacity was making human labor Less and less valuable. There were many people agitating about slavery in history but never made any material change. They were forced to accept it as unfortunate evil that happens like hunger of disease. Large scale social transformation or cultural evolution is never just about the right or good idea. Those ideas run on technological and material conditions.
Rational people assume Ideas drive history. pragmaric people assume conditions drive history. Both are wrong.
It's the combination of idea/ideology plus material/technological condition that brings sweeping transformation. Oftentimes the ideas comes first and just sit there for technology to catch up to become impactful in the social realm. There are great ideas that in some sense are still waiting for there material conditions to be fulfilled. There is also an inverse of this. The technology is already there but no one takes it to use it for different or better idea or recombine them creatively. Or someone made some invention in one field and it will take sometime for other field to see revelvance in their domain. The famous phrase ' an idea whose time has come ' means the idea couldn't be realized because the material condition/technology doesn't allow it yet.
Another way of looking at it is conditions/technology and ideas/ideologies gives birth to one another. Certain kind of ideas demand there own technology to be developed ( ex. ideas from fiction taken seriously incite people to develop those imagined technologies ) OR technologies made people to think in a certain way. ( ex. The invention of watch made working outside or in industrial capacity achievable by coordinating time in public )
There is also still another way of looking at it. Ideas and technology cascade one another and undermine each other. One idea create a technology that made the idea itself in questionable. Or
You can summerize it as Theory and Thecnology, or idea and ideology.
System of ideas, a theory, can be worked out towards a desire end to establishe the plusable argument and suggest ways of achieving it; it may be dormant in books and intellectual circles. This constitute advancement in theoretical form. What makes them gradually acceptable is through what we call opinion makers. This are types of people who provide ideas to the public, like radio stations, social media influencers, teachers, journalist, movies, entertainment and the like to put forward those sets of ideas in the public arena.
The second way ideas or theory become real is through technology. The theoretical idea now can find enabling environment to make it reality. The ideas doesn't have to be novel, they just need to be applicable through this new technology. Old ideas can now be made possible, the practice beneficial through this new technology.
The combination of the theoretical advancement and technological create a cultural revolution. Culture change but they change slowly. This works both for good and bad ideas.
That's a really interesting move. I like this far more than something as nebulous and polymorphic as 'western tradition.'I applaud your clarity.
In what way would you say the idea-influencer-technology triad can be adjusted to march toward prosperity (for the record I'm not a doctor lol) right now? We have all three. I won't bore you by enumerating the specifics of each, but I'd like to know what you think.
The issues of prosperity in material sense is really is not that complicated. You can read a few books that are dedicated to large scale sweeping story from medival time to recent years on how western nations become wealthy. You can easily see the pattern from there and compare those with our country and findout where we are lucking.
You will find out many points, but I can mention some of them. A lot of what they benefited from aren't in themselves what they did to be rich. It's was a by product of religious moral impulse and subsequent institutions and their impact that was later on secularized and modernized to become a general aspects of what a civilization is.
When you study the early development of this countries, You almost find no areas that doesn't start from a religious moral frame and a impulse.
Where Ethiopia failed was we did not produced a differentiated social moral teaching of the public life. That would have provided a moral basis that justify actions in the social realm whose consequences in themselves can't be seen beforehand. The best example would be literacy. If you search why historically the west had higher literacy, you will findout during the reformation, Luther and others insisted that the bible was not just for the elite and provided the German translation and made reading central in the spiritual life. He basically elevated bible reading as a marker of spirituality. Therefore, a good parent is good because he/she teach the children how to read the bible, where as a bad parent doesn't and the parents sin by not upholding there holy duty. He then extend that to the state, and lay moral burden on them as moral obligation and a sign of good state and statemen the worthy christian character favored by God. Gov't then instituted to show their generosity and honorable character.
Now this kind of thinking is applied to all dimensions of social life. Notice the formula here:
1- Knowlege (or benefit or moral bases ) is for the masses and not
The big BUT now is now in our language and divorced from any sense of our culture or our morals. Therefore, as soon as higher learning started, our elite figured out they can emport ideas from Russia to bring them into power, so we had a 60s revolution. They abanden that ethos of education for the communication of truth and the enoblement of the masses, and enculturation to education to secure power and resources and internationalism. It is still that way. That's why the elite are protective and defensive and prideful about their 'knowlege'.
This development means, there is no public intellectual in a genuine sense, or books people can read on the subject in there own language. There is no Architecture, Art, Chemistry, biology, Political theory, Maths, ... that developed with our language in a way people can easily access to. If you don't have words and concept in your language, then those things doesn't exist for you.
You asked previously why biblical tradition has not produced the 'image of God' and natural laws, simple put, why we are the way we are. This is extremely fruitful question and are of great puzzlement. You would think there might be serious books trying to figuring it out why. But there are none that I know of that sufficently address this.
I would like to investigate it more in the future, I can give you some tentative ideas I have.
If you pick up the pattern from the literacy revolution i provided early on, Knowledge for the mass is another way of saying ' Truth for all !'. ( That a good motto) This is indirect opposition to Nostic ideas that dominated our country that seek to restrain knowledge inside elit circles. That's why we like to hide our knowledge btw. The unwillingness of gov't to translate greate scientific text even to this day never cease to amaze me. What is our govt is doing with Ai now? Translating greate books to be make them available for public or institute Ai in public camera and bank account so that it's easy to do servi
You can see this has devastating impact now. No one is able to speak and face the govt even with truth, take it as his moral or religious duty and will not going to be celebrated like a hero in wider sense. For the classical protestant, the heroism is played out in the social realm and anybody can play that out from everywhere and even from small places. You can see how adventurous and active they eventually become. I recently found out the building for British bible society in Ethiopia. That was like from a 100 years old movement that created 500 voluntary association and it reverberated enough that the building is still here in Ethiopia. Except in Israel or where there are exiled orthodox christians, there is no initiation to expand and move beyond our territory either as a missionary or exploration or anything really. That's why Ethiopia kept contracting over the century and never once had a colony outside our country. Thats why UK almost ruled a quarter of the world, and it's exiled citizens form UK that form countries like USA and Australia from scratch. The thing that doesn't expand contract.
The mistake in the 1960 was, we are largly orthodox christian country, not like catholic/ protestant westerners so we go with Russia which was orthodox. Not realizing that the communism there wasn't the orthodox thing either. And it destroyed there churches. But people can't read ( remember), no one can check the facts and say wait a minute...
One of their books ( Leviathan) suggested that " the teaching of the classics should be suppressed, because it instilled a dangerous spirit of liberty."
Another related issues is that Protestant tend to based there faith on word rather than image. Therefore they tend to be bookish. They translated the bible in every language, develop vocabulary and dictionary and all that complicated language stuff that will serve as a base for other fields. I often say a nation is as civilized as their language can take them.
Unless we teac
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#Reflection
Ethiopia really needs a good narrative, akind of mythology but she is an example of how NOT to do mythology. Its very sad. Her motive and impulse is partially right but she make a lot of mistakes. I haven't read her books but men...not looking good.
She even mistakingly assumes the fictional catagory of Utopian litrature to mean Ethiopian. Utopian means no place, not Ethiopia. Come on she is a Dr ...😔