Trainz said:
Grrreetings....
the thread title should freak my players out !
I was wondering if a society has to be inherently EVIL to be based on slaves.
To conclude such is to conclude that Judaism, Christianity, and Islam are inheritantly evil.
Read Exodus 21:7-9 - rules by God on how to sell women as slaves. Joel 3:8 - where God declares how Joel's family will be sold as slaves. 1 Timothy. 6:1-2 - how slaves should see their masters.
And the clincher for modern New-Testament-Jesus-Only thinkers: Matthew 10:24-25 - Jesus telling slaves to not presume over their masters.
http://home.inu.net/skeptic/slavery.html
--- Which you can cross reference with a bible for validity. Some modern translations have carefully removed the word slave for servent, but you can see through this when you find phrases about selling servents...
The idea that slavery is evil and amoral came out of a labor and economics issue in the 1800s. It came about that that it was cheaper to hire freemen for less than a living wage than it was to buy and maintain a slave. A product of the industrial revolution, slavery was now no longer economical. As such it was easier for abolitionists to make their case and no longer be seen as immoral lunatics. Slavery in the south persisted out of tradition and vested capital - a large portion of a slaver holder's wealth was actually the value of their slaves. Free them rather than sell them and you go bankrupt.
So the concept of universal emancipation is a secular and modern post-industrial one. It has no logical place in a pre-industrial society such as the average fantasy world.
Someone mentioned no sexual acts as a just rule for moral slavery. Consider this, where do you get new slaves from? If you don't breed them you have to engage in near constant warfare with the societies around you to capture people.
Less than 40 thousand people were ever brought from Africa into the United States, yet millions of people were taken and sent elsewhere. Most of them to the Carribean where they were worked for a few short years until they died in sugar plantations.
By the end of the Civil War there were around 4 million blacks in the USA... Where did they come from? Breeding. Many of them where paler of skin than the plantation owners - many with less than 1/64th of actual african ancestry. Because of breeding and sexual predation there was little need to actually capture and import people -unlike in the Carribean and Latin America.