While your insistence that I use colloquial rather than technical terms is cute, it’s also despicably ignorant and you’re not making strong arguments against the wider view of history I’m presenting.
It’s a pretty basic principle of debate that you have to dispute things that people actually said. When “we” say that modern people are better than past people, that doesn’t count the 1800s as modern, never mind the 1600s. If you don’t want to call that “modern people”, you can call it something else, but then your dispute is about the something else. The claim about your kind of modern is not one that people have been making; addressing it as though it is is addressing a straw man.
When I said that medieval Christians held a taboo against slavery and did not practice it, and explain the process by which secularization and early proto-sciences justified the creation of history’s most vicious form of slavery, medieval slavery in the Islamic world is not a counterexample in some kind of logical trap you’ve sprung.
You’re equivocating between “religious” people and Christians specifically.
Rather, there are many mistaken and misunderstood aspects about the time and especially the role religion played
We may associate religion with the past in some vague way, an irrational set of beliefs that have been superseded by science.
Modern people are the ones who made religion a tool of harm,
If you’re going to say things about “religion”, Islam is relevant.
(You also brought up Jefferson claiming his religious misgivings were against slavery. Thomas Jefferson believed in God, but wasn’t a Christian.)
While Liberal human rights tell you not to “keep serfs,” a stupid phrase meant to insist upon your false narrative of equivalence, remember that the most hard-headed Liberal of the early US, Thomas Jefferson, ensured that the institution of slavery would continue while owning slaves himself.
And the same goes for the things that your religion is supposedly doing—I can find prominent, influential, religious believers who thought that slavery or whatever is good. You just say that they don’t count because they’re “really” the state.
It’s a pretty basic principle of debate that you have to dispute things that people actually said. When “we” say that modern people are better than past people, that doesn’t count the 1800s as modern, never mind the 1600s. If you don’t want to call that “modern people”, you can call it something else, but then your dispute is about the something else. The claim about your kind of modern is not one that people have been making; addressing it as though it is is addressing a straw man.
You’re equivocating between “religious” people and Christians specifically.
If you’re going to say things about “religion”, Islam is relevant.
(You also brought up Jefferson claiming his religious misgivings were against slavery. Thomas Jefferson believed in God, but wasn’t a Christian.)
And the same goes for the things that your religion is supposedly doing—I can find prominent, influential, religious believers who thought that slavery or whatever is good. You just say that they don’t count because they’re “really” the state.
(Also, I’d appreciate a reference for Jefferson.)