Christians who are slaves should give their masters full respect so that the name of God and his teaching will not be shamed.  If your master is a Christian, that is no excuse for being disrespectful.  You should work all the harder because you are helping another believer by your efforts.  Teach these truths, Timothy, and encourage everyone to obey them.  (1 Timothy 6:1-2 NLT)

So God let them go ahead and do whatever shameful things their hearts desired.  As a result, they did vile and degrading things with each other’s bodies.  Instead of believing what they knew was the truth about God, they deliberately chose to believe lies.  So they worshiped the things God made but not the Creator himself, who is to be praised forever.  Amen.  That is why God abandoned them to their shameful desires.  Even the women turned against the natural way to have sex and instead indulged in sex with each other.  And the men, instead of having normal sexual relationships with women, burned with lust for each other.  Men did shameful things with other men and, as a result, suffered within themselves the penalty they so richly deserved.  When they refused to acknowledge God, he abandoned them to their evil minds and let them do things that should never be done.  Their lives became full of every kind of wickedness, sin, greed, hate, envy, murder, fighting, deception, malicious behavior, and gossip.  They are backstabbers, haters of God, insolent, proud, and boastful.  They are forever inventing new ways of sinning and are disobedient to their parents.  They refuse to understand, break their promises, and are heartless and unforgiving.  They are fully aware of God’s death penalty for those who do these things, yet they go right ahead and do them anyway.  And, worse yet, they encourage others to do them, too.  (Romans 1:24-32 NLT)

There was also a man named Ananias who, with his wife, Sapphira, sold some property.  He brought part of the money to the apostles, but he claimed it was the full amount.  His wife had agreed to this deception.  Then Peter said, “Ananias, why has Satan filled your heart?  You lied to the Holy Spirit, and you kept some of the money for yourself.  The property was yours to sell or not sell, as you wished.  And after selling it, the money was yours to give away.  How could you do a thing like this?  You weren’t lying to us but to God.”  As soon as Ananias heard these words, he fell to the floor and died.  Everyone who heard about it was terrified.  Then some young men wrapped him in a sheet and took him out and buried him.  About three hours later his wife came in, not knowing what had happened.  Peter asked her, “Was this the price you and your husband received for your land?”  “Yes,” she replied, “that was the price.”  And Peter said, “How could the two of you even think of doing a thing like this – conspiring together to test the Spirit of the Lord?  Just outside that door are the young men who buried your husband, and they will carry you out, too.”  Instantly, she fell to the floor and died.  When the young men came in and saw that she was dead, they carried her out and buried her beside her husband.  Great fear gripped the entire church and all others who heard what had happened.   (Acts 5:1-11 NLT)

These are given to show two things: 1) the bible is filled with all kinds of stuff, some of it sounds great still in the 21st century, others sound absolutely terrible and 2) it is actually a terrible means of deriving moral goods because, as the absolute version of the totalitarian state, it derives all value from Big Brother, rather than from the actual reality on the ground.

The main misunderstanding or difference in philosophy between us, which is very apparent here, is really the nature of reality and the movement of history. For you, the basis of the nature (and therefore value) of reality is that there is an immovable, pervasive and personal force which creates, destroys, gives edicts and decrees and decides based on it’s will, how the universe works, and what value can therefore be derived. For you, all value relates to God, or what you believe in your study of (I can’t say religion, because I don’t know if it’s religion in general) Christianity to be the nature and actions of God. But if that be true, are you not obligated to the verses above, as the immutable word of God and therefore, the absolute truth? I see this is problematic.

This view demands that the nature of humans beings is both unchanging (and unchangeable even with our best efforts) and bad. We are, through the sin of the first human woman, created sick, but commanded to be good. Humanity is forever doomed to be evil, cowardly and fearful. We are ignorant and have no value outside our obedience to God. This kind of thinking troubles me, because is smacks of servility, slavishness, and is direct contradiction to the advances we have made in science and technology since the good book was written in Bronze Age Palestine (or perhaps worse, in Imperial Rome). It relegates the universe and humanity to unchanging and essentially worthless play things for which the only value that can be had, is through the all powerful, all knowing master Judge who uses laws that he must know we can never achieve, and so (in bronze age form) sense a sacrifice to cleans us not of our nature as is, but of our deeds as imperfect (yet made in the image of God) beings.

For me, the nature of reality is the interaction of forces, usually two opposite forces which, in interacting, create a new force or substance, for which the process starts again. The value is derived from the advancement of nature, from the movement from simple to complex, from seemingly immovable conflict, to symmetry and harmony. This is directly related to humanity. We are not made in the image of God, we are mammals on a spec of dust in the vast cosmic ocean. But we are the most advanced, the most interesting and most successful (in terms of advancement beyond our genetics) species the planet (and the universe for all we know) has ever seen. To say nothing of the process of our evolutionary beginnings, our social relationships have always gone through the same dialectal process. We create societal structures, which have built within them, internal contradictions, or bits of irrationality that, in the course of dealing, are recognized and overcome.

It is easy to apply the ethic of a different time and a different place to the events of the past. It is even easier to do so when you reject the reasons for it, the intentions behind it, and the actual events and conditions on the ground at the time. Hindsight is 20/20, but foresight is often blind. Trotsky says very clearly in the letter that he had little more than an arms length relationship to the whole Kronstadt event. However, he rightfully takes responsibility for what he justly should as a member of the government, but is not, as so many (yourself included) often claim – without evidence – that Trotsky was himself, personally involved…which he simple as a matter of historical fact, was not.

It is again important to understand the context of his letter. Having been expelled from the Soviet Union and under fear of assassination, Trotsky was one of a small chorus trying to fight against the onslaught of disinformation coming from both the USSR and the USA about his actions, himself personally, and the intentions of a revolution he had fought his entire life to see through. As far as his use of the power of the state is concerned, the Russian state in October of 1917 and for years after, was in shambles, there was no absolute monopoly power of the state in 1917-1921. They were fighting a civil war to simply solidify the positions of power needed to facilitate the transition to a society they rightly saw as counteracting the excesses and irrationality of the Capitalist system. Again, it is important to realize how easy it is to judge the actions of others years from and totally divorced from the reality on the ground.

It’s easy to make wide sweeping judgments of those whose actions we don’t understand, or for whose causes we don’t understand or agree. It is even easier when you can claim to have the almighty, unmoving and eternally judgmental backing of God himself. My fear is that this allows one to sit on the highest of high horses, immune from any kind of criticism or argument against it, and claim that they, and they alone can be the ultimate judge of history.

I do not condone all of the actions of the Soviet Union, specifically after the rise of Stalin, neither does Trotsky, or Lenin for that matter. For them, and for me, history is not something to look back on and judge, it is something to understand and to learn from. For this, mistakes can almost be better than victories, because they allow us to evaluate more easily what to do next. This was lost after Trotsky was murdered, when Stalin became like God, unchanging, irrefutable and infallible. And there is where much of the trouble really began. Trotsky was not murdered because he was a murderer (himself admitting that although involved in many battles against the white army as a commander, can’t recall specifically seeing someone hit by his own bullet) but because he was self-critical and critical of the events in the Soviet Union. He was killed by an agent of a paranoid, power hungry monster, who was able to solidify and use the very “massive and dangerous tools of the state” to seek revenge against all those opposed, chiefly Trotsky himself, as well as the remaining members of the revolutionaries of 1917 – all of which were killed by Stalin as a means to stamp out those who carried on the banner of self-criticism, honest and sober evaluations of history, and the hope of creating a world free from the excesses and deficiencies of the modern, capitalist world.

It is Stalin who, albeit with historical understandings, deserves much of your criticism, but from a human, not godly, standpoint.

CHRISTIAN LIBERTARIAN:

You are running away from the argument.  That is the fallacy of changing the subject.  I can take out citations and the principles that Trotsky violated still stand.

You are attacking the Bible, not the argument.  Either way you lose, but you will have a much better chance attacking my argument than Gods Word.

As to citations below, so what?  So God doesnt find the concept of people owning other people necessarily morally abhorrent.  Whoopdy doo.  can it be?  no doubt yes.  Read all of Exodus.  if slaves and masters first serve God, they will both be happy and neither will abuse the other because both will recognize and respect the Eternal Spirit in the other.  Very possible for master slave relationship to please God.  If slaves serve God and masters dont, guess what?  God sets slaves free.   FYI, about 60 percent of Americans don’t care about pernicious, destructive non-consensual slavery.  IRS is living proof–ownership of people’s labor and use of proceeds to murder innocent pakistanis.  But it is even worse because IRS never obtains anyone’s consent.  In the old days a dad may be forced to sell himself or kid into slavery so at least there was something close to consent.   Not true in USA.