My Family's Slave

[Anakin McFly]

but this thread is going to the extreme in the other direction, saying that culture and upbringing are so all-consuming

I'm not saying that. Personality is also a factor. If you'd been born less predisposed to empathy, to being less sensitive, more self-centred, less intelligent, less inflamed by injustice, your perspectives would have been different. Likewise If you were raised sheltered from others' suffering and never had reason to question your privilege (be it from witnessing gross injustices or otherwise).

Plus this and many similar studies on biological predispositions to crime: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/8862870

Genetic factors, but not the common environment, significantly influenced whether subjects were ever arrested after age 15, whether subjects were arrested more than once after age 15, and later criminal behaviour. The common environment, but not genetic factors, significantly influenced early criminal behaviour. ... Genes are likely to influence the occurrence of criminal behaviour in a probabalistic manner by contributing to individual dispositions that make a given individual more or less likely to behave in a criminal manner.

I'm curious what you think is left of a person after you strip away upbringing, culture, experiences and personality traits, especially coming from an atheistic perspective that does not believe in the existence of a soul. Because it's usually theists whom I end up debating this sort of thing with - particularly those who believe that all non-Christians will go to hell, and disagree with my argument that that's a terribly unjust system because things like the religion one is born into or exposed to is almost entirely contingent on upbringing and culture, with one's susceptibility to conversion likewise affected by that and one's personality (level of scepticism, proneness to persuasion, adaptability, acceptance of new worldviews, etc) and experiences.

[maz89]

I've rejected pretty much everything about my society simply because I thought I should. It wasn't even that hard.

Wasn't hard because you're an American living in the 21st century where rejecting norms is what every second or third open-minded, educated person does nowadays.

If you think your wholesale 'rejection' of society's norms has nothing to do with your upbringing and your unrestricted exposure to a wide variety of differing mindsets and opinions in your own country, then I don't know what to tell ya.

[Anakin McFly]

^That too; it's no coincidence that across countries, the most educated people are the least likely to adhere to their culture's dominant religion. In the US, this translates to education level correlating inversely with Christianity, while over here it's the opposite - the more educated someone is, the more likely they are to be Christian, because they're the ones who are more fluent in English and would have been exposed to Christianity in the first place; to the point that being a Christian is ironically a status symbol and a marker of social class.

Similar phenomena with more educated/intelligent people tending towards liberal worldviews due to that greater exposure to alternate viewpoints and people from different cultures, which predisposes them to valuing diversity and inclusion. But this too is just one factor of many. Someone might just as easily grow up in a liberal and very diverse environment and conclude from this that we live in a post-racial world where gender equality has been achieved and SJWs need to stop whining.

[Derived Absurdity]

Lol, I'm not that educated. I'm not all that open-minded either. I'm actually extremely close-minded. But thanks anyway.

But I get your point. My larger point is that people use this idea that "you can't criticize someone's actions if they're acculturated far different than you" way, way too liberally. It's a good general principle, to make you check your privilege and prevent you from being a self-centered cultural imperialist and whatnot, but like everything else it has limits. Slavery is, generally speaking, one of those limits. I mean, you have people saying you can't judge the Founding Father for owning slaves because it was a different time while there were literally tens of thousands of people living at the exact same time in the exact same country fighting against slavery while Thomas Jefferson was continuously raping Sally Hemings. (And these are also the exact same people who get mad at SJWs for being "multiculturalists" and saying you can't judge all cultures by the same standard. Go figure.)

[Anakin McFly]

I take the extreme end of that view where I don't think you can judge anyone (as a person; you can and should certainly judge their actions, and very often you should do things to prevent those people from committing further evil). But to invoke Godwin's Law, my basic argument is that if you had been Hitler, you would have done exactly what Hitler did.

[maz89]

^Same.

[BruceSmith78]

I think I would have been an atheist no matter when or where I was born and raised. I came to the conclusion that religion, God, and an afterlife were all bullshit without reading any books, reading anything on the internet, or talking to other atheists. I dunno if I'd have rejected slavery though. I've made too many morally wrong decisions in my life to be sure what my humanity would look like in a world where the evil in me was enabled.

Also, I think free will is bullshit, and in spite of that I think we still need to hold people accountable for their actions. And I didn't read the article, idiot.

[Anakin McFly]

From Filipino media, an interview with Eudocia's niece. It sheds some light on the other side of the story:
http://www.rappler.com/nation/170741-eu ... eams-fears