Morality changes, and we shake our heads in disbelief at the conditions that Western society tolerated just a century or two ago—slavery, child labor, mental hospitals as warehouses, voting for white men only, and so on. But let’s not pretend that we’ve now got it all figured out. A century in our future, society might look back on our world in disbelief at the moral errors (from their standpoint) that we found acceptable. Raising animals and then killing and eating them may be one of these moral errors.

There is a solution: cultured meat.

The moral issue

How many of us know someone who studied where meat comes from or took a tour of a slaughterhouse and became a vegetarian as a result? Some cows, chickens, and pigs live fairly natural lives before they are killed for meat, but millions don’t.

I eat meat. What’s my moral excuse? If pressed, I’d argue with a combination of “I enjoy eating meat” and “Yeah, but everyone else is doing it.” There is a health benefit—getting the right amino acid mix is easy from meat, but from plants it requires some effort—but that is easily resolved. By eating meat, I’m taking the easy route, but I don’t have much of a moral defense.

Five years ago, I listened to a Sam Harris interview with Uma Valeti of Memphis Meats, one of the first companies working on cultured meat. I’ll review that interview and summarize what’s happened since.

The environmental issues

The magnitude of the environmental problem is as shocking as the moral one.

• Land use. Pastureland (land used for open grazing as well as that used to raise crops for livestock) is one quarter of the earth’s land area (Annenberg). “Only about 20 percent of the planet’s agricultural land is used to produce food that is eaten directly by people, while about four times as much is used to feed livestock” (Union of Concerned Scientists). Cultured meat may use 98% less land.
• Greenhouse gases. Cows produce a lot of methane. The agriculture contribution to worldwide greenhouse gases is 15% (UN FAO). Cultured meat may reduce that by 95%.
• Deforestation. The need for more pastureland is a major driver of deforestation (Union of Concerned Scientists).
• Water use. “The consumption of animal products contributes to more than one-quarter of the water footprint of humanity.” Source
• The environmental impact of beef is especially large: “Nearly 60% of the world’s agricultural land is used for beef production, yet beef accounts for less than 2% of the calories that are consumed throughout the world. Beef makes up 24% of the world’s meat consumption, yet requires 30 million square kilometres of land to produce. In contrast, poultry accounts for 34% of global meat consumption and pork accounts for 40%. Poultry and pork production each use less than two million square kilometres of land.” Source

These problems also touch on political tensions caused by scarce fresh water and climate change. There’s also the energy used and the pollution caused by raising livestock.

Could cultured meat be the answer?

A 2013 article titled, “A quarter-million pounder and fries” documented the taste test of a €250,000 hamburger, the first made from cultured beef. We have a long way to go, but, as Sam Harris noted, the cost to sequence a human genome is now around $1000, while the first one, sequenced in 2003, cost $3 billion. There is room for optimism.

Valeti of Memphis Meats cites the problems with the status quo, both moral and environmental, as the motivation for cultured meat.

• No antibiotics would be needed with cultured meat (70% of antibiotics used in the U.S. today are for livestock).
• The amount and kind of fat in cultured meat can be tuned.
• There are more than 2 million illnesses every year from eating meat and poultry in the U.S.
• Eliminating animal breeders would reduce the likelihood of pandemics.
• Prion disease such as BSE (mad cow disease) would be eliminated.
• The cultured process is more efficient. It now takes 23 calories to make 1 calorie of beef, while Valeti’s process should require just 3 calories.

How will the public respond?

Harris said that his own informal Twitter poll reported that, while most people would switch if the cost and taste were identical to conventional meat, the creepiness factor was a problem to some. I suppose they imagine peacefully grazing cows tenderly managed by hay-chewing cowboys on horseback replaced by bubbling vats of chemicals monitored by white-coated technicians. So they’re grossed out by vats but okay with a slaughterhouse?

“Natural” as a trait of food is in vogue, and there will be pushback against cultured meat. But how natural is our food today? Jason Matheny, a director of a nonprofit that funds research on cultured meat, said:

Cultured meat isn’t natural, but neither is yogurt. And neither, for that matter, is most of the meat we eat. Cramming 10,000 chickens in a metal shed and dosing them full of antibiotics isn’t natural. I view cultured meat like hydroponic vegetables. The end product is the same, but the process used to make it is different. Consumers accept hydroponic vegetables. Would they accept hydroponic meat?

We’re not there yet

We must hold off on the celebrations. Hamburgers and sausage may happen soon, but complex structures like steak will take longer. A technology maxim that we often forget is that you can’t schedule a breakthrough. And the politically powerful ranching industry might put up regulatory roadblocks to defend the status quo.

But cultured meat seems inevitable. Memphis Meats has raised the most funding so far (nearly $180 million), and there are about 30 cultured meat startups worldwide.

The switch to a diet with meat has been credited with changing our genus and permitting our large human brain. Maybe we’ll soon be able to eat that diet with a clear conscience.

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(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 5/11/16.)

Image from IQRemix (license CC BY-SA 2.0)

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Did Jesus make a clear anti-slavery statement? Christian apologist Tom Gilson says yes (part 1).

I disagree. Let’s wrap up with Gilson’s attempt to show my logical errors and some concluding remarks.

My errors brought to light

Gilson tried to expose my logical errors. Let C = the claim “Jesus was the Son of God whose primary mission on earth was to die for our sins and reconcile us to God.” My “huge” error, Gilson tells us, is

1. Assume C is false.
2. Conclude C is false.

In other words, I’m charged with circular reasoning.

Nope. I do conclude that Jesus wasn’t a god, and my argument is this entire blog. But I’m pretty much on board with the various reasons Christians give for Jesus’s visit to earth, according to the Bible. So no, no circular reasoning.

I am confused, though. The idea of Jesus coming to earth “to die for our sins and reconcile us to God” is popular, so I’ll accept that. But then what does that do to Gilson’s reference to “[Jesus’s] mission of revolution at the level of the heart”? He needs to get his own story straight before scolding me for not understanding Jesus’s mission. Those two missions don’t sound synonymous.

And if Gilson is saying that Jesus’s “primary mission was to . . . reconcile us to God,” it sounds like he’s agreeing with me. He’s saying that Jesus had more important matters to deal with than attacking slavery. Fine—then stop saying that he attacked slavery.

[Jesus] proved by demonstration that all persons are of equal worth. He taught love for all.

Jesus did hang out with prostitutes and tax collectors. But he also emphasized that he “was sent only to the lost sheep of Israel” (Matthew 15:24). He dismissed non-Jews as dogs (Matt. 15:26) and pigs (Matt. 7:6). The social hierarchy was clear in Jesus’s mind.

[Teaching love for all] was insurrection enough on its own to get himself executed for it.

Huh? Do you really not know why Jesus was executed? All four gospels agree on few things, but they all report that the accusation against Jesus was written on the cross: “King of the Jews.” Setting yourself up in opposition to Rome’s king—that was insurrection.

Still, he didn’t use the word slavery, though, so, hey, “How good was he?”

Dismiss the sarcasm, and Gilson is on target here. The Son of Man was given an easy pitch, and he swung and missed. Gilson wants to dismiss that as unimportant, but what does it mean that Jesus gets a trivial moral test wrong? This is how outsiders test Christianity’s claims. Jesus can’t be a god and get “Is slavery morally okay?” wrong.

Summary points

Gilson tries to summarize my fourth post with two points. That sounds like an easy job since my arguments are simple, but he fails. Is it that hard to read an atheist without bias?

1. A lot of Christians have either misunderstood or failed to follow Jesus’ teachings.

Here, Gilson throws imperfect Christians under the bus, but this isn’t my point. I argued that an objective, unbiased reading of the Bible gives far more support for the slave-owner than the abolitionist.

2. Jesus didn’t use the word “slavery,” so therefore he wasn’t against it.

Does Gilson actually think this is an accurate summary, or is this a deliberate strawman? My position is simply that slavery is a test of Christian claims for Jesus. Is Jesus an omni-benevolent being? Then surely he would make at least a tiny fraction of his message a clear rejection of slavery. The Golden Rule, a vague condemnation of greed, or rules of sexual morality aren’t the same thing.

To state the obvious, I will be the judge of this test. Gilson always has the fallback that Jesus’s lack of an obvious anti-slavery message might make some sort of sense in God’s mind, but then his argument degrades to, “Sure, I realize that Jesus appears to not be particularly benevolent, but—who knows?—maybe we just can’t understand.” (More on what this argument imposes on the Christian here.)

Let’s take a step back

Why is this hard?

I’m kidding of course—I know why it’s hard. By addressing the slavery question, Gilson shows that he understands that it’s an Achilles heel. He’s a product of Western morality, and he’s surely as horrified by slavery as any of us. But the best he can come up with is weak arguments like, “The principles Jesus taught cut every leg out from under slavery” when the simple and obvious explanation is that Jesus was just an ordinary person (or literary figure) of his time who couldn’t imagine a society where slavery was both dispensable and dispensed with.

Jesus sounds like a product of his time. His story isn’t that of a timeless god sharing wisdom with no expiration date. He was just another prophet or mythological god-man like countless others from the Ancient Near East. If he were an omni-benevolent god, he’d sound like it.

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Image from Kevin Jarrett (free-use license)
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Did Jesus make a clear anti-slavery statement? Christian apologist Tom Gilson insists that he did. In part 1, we got into Gilson’s rebuttal to my argument that Jesus didn’t say anything of note about slavery.

By the way, did I mention that Gilson has a new book out? He could talk about little else in his rebuttal, which made for a confused foundation. Let’s be clear: I’m interested only in the question of the morality of Jesus as evidenced by his stance on slavery.

We’ll continue with Gilson’s attacks to my argument.

A literal approach to the Bible?

Gilson said:

[Jesus’s morality] cuts the legs out from any possible motive for slavery. It takes a special kind of wooden fundamentalism to notice that [and] yet think Jesus failed to say anything about slavery.

I never said Jesus said nothing. Jesus did mention slavery but only in passing. He never criticized it. And from the standpoint of the twenty-first century West, that silence is deafening.

Jesus had no problem redefining Old Testament rules about murder, adultery, divorce, and more in the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5). If he cared about slavery, he could’ve changed its rules, too. Imagine this brief statement added to the list:

You have heard it said that you may own people as slaves for life. But I tell you, a person is not a beast that may be owned by another person. Nor are people Jew or Gentile such that one can own the other. All are equal in the eyes of the Lord.

Just in case it’s not obvious, that’s not in the Bible. It was my invention.

An imperfect person can figure this out, but this morality is apparently beyond Jesus.

“Barker’s and Seidensticker’s Silly Simile”

I end most posts with a quote that might be relevant to the topic of the post, or maybe I thought it funny or witty. My second post ended with a quote that had Gilson wrapped around the axle for a dozen paragraphs:

Asking, “If there is no god, what is the purpose of life?”
is like asking, “If there is no master, whose slave will I be?”
— Dan Barker

Gilson was clutching his pearls as he imagined Barker setting “god” and “slave-owning master” as equivalent. Gilson said, “Now, if there is a god for whom that’s true, I don’t believe in it either. It’s certainly not the God I believe in.”

Barker wasn’t referring to Yahweh (that is, God with a capital-G) but rather “god.” This wasn’t specific to Christianity. And doesn’t the Christian God assign a purpose? Christians celebrate this and even try to use this as a bragging point against atheists: they have an objective purpose, and those poor atheists don’t.

Explaining something so straightforward feels like explaining a joke, but since Gilson seemed confused, let me try. “God” and “slave master” in the aphorism are used as purpose-defining beings. You aren’t a slave, so don’t look to a master to define your purpose. You do that yourself.

And by the same logic, the lack of a god (or pope or pastor) to constrain you is freeing—you’re an adult, and you can ignore them and define your own purpose for your life.

Finally, given that Gilson got Dan Barker’s job title wrong (Barker is co-president of the Freedom From Religion Foundation), let me add a little color that I imagine was also lost on him. Barker’s quote echoes “No Gods, No Masters,” the slogan of a newsletter launched in 1914 by feminist Margaret Sanger. It is also the subtitle of Women Without Superstition by Annie Laurie Gaylor, the other co-president of the FFRF.

So no, not a “silly simile” but a thought-provoking comparison.

Let’s return to Gilson, horrified at any suggestion of equivalence between Yahweh and a slave master.

Our God is not like any slave-holder they’ve encountered.

Here’s what God World is like. Think of sleeping children who startle awake at a noise and wonder in terror if this is the Armageddon their parents have said is imminent. Or the children taught to hate the classmate with two mommies. Or parents who treat their sick children with prayer instead of medicine. Or Christians bullied on how to vote to keep Jesus from crying. Or gays driven to suicide after Christian bullying. Or Catholic bureaucrats who put the church’s reputation over the mental health of children and shuffle around pedophile priests. Or Jim Jones.

To this, I expect a cheerful, “Well, I also don’t believe in a god who would have anything to do with that!” This misses the point. These are the consequences of a god that some believe in, and they built that belief on your Bible. I agree that God is different in important ways from a slave master, but Christians are still chained by their beliefs.

I do get a bit perplexed when [skeptics] take question-begging approach like Seidensticker does, for example assuming that Jesus’ primary mission to seek and save the lost couldn’t possibly take precedence over stopping slavery.

I never assumed that. There are 85,000 words in the gospels, and no one is saying that that should be one long diatribe against slavery. I’m just asking for a couple of sentences making clear his rejection of the institution and what his followers should do about it. Not finding this, I conclude that Jesus isn’t the benevolent god Christianity claims.

And if you’re explaining why Jesus didn’t attack slavery, you’re just undercutting the central point of your argument. It doesn’t matter why he didn’t attack slavery; I’m simply pointing out that he didn’t.

Concluded in part 3.

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Image from Zulmaury Saavedra (free-use license)
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We’ve read ten points in Tom Gilson’s argument that Jesus was ardently anti-slavery despite not saying a word against it in the Bible. Let’s wrap up some loose ends in this final post in the series, looking at what the American Civil War can teach us about which side made the stronger biblical case for its position, the reason you wouldn’t expect Jesus to care about slavery, and some final thoughts. (Part 1 of this series is here.)

American Civil War: which side had the stronger biblical case?

I’ll agree that we can do the Gilson two-step and select only Bible verses that reject slavery (or, given that there are none, verses that speak of peripheral issues like brotherly love or sexual morality). Christians did this in the lead-up to the American Civil War. But of course their pro-slavery opponents did the same thing, making their own argument necklace by stringing a very different set of beads.

Here is a comparison of the Northern and Southern biblical arguments from a modern American historian. Not only did Jesus not make a clear anti-slavery statement, but the Bible was the more effective weapon in the hands of the pro-slavery South.

Professor Eugene Genovese, who has studied these biblical debates over slavery in minute detail, concludes that the pro-slavery faction clearly emerged victorious over the abolitionists except for one specious argument based on the so-called Curse of Ham (Gen 9:18-27). For our purposes, it is important to realize that the South won this crucial contest with the North by using the prevailing hermeneutic, or method of interpretation, on which both sides agreed. So decisive was its triumph that the South mounted a vigorous counterattack on the abolitionists as infidels who had abandoned the plain words of Scripture for the secular ideology of the Enlightenment.

Why Jesus didn’t reject slavery

Jesus didn’t end slavery because the harm it caused in society wasn’t important to him.

Life for the common people was hard, and for more reasons than just slavery. There were taxes, droughts, famines, war, highway bandits, disease, and more. Life wasn’t easy in first-century Palestine.

Jesus cured a few people to prove that he was supernatural (see John 5:36), but he didn’t eliminate any diseases. He magically fed crowds a few times, but he didn’t end hunger. He didn’t free Judea from Roman rule. Improving this life wasn’t his goal—why tidy your cabin if the ship is sinking?

Jesus was an Apocalypticist. He felt that the current corrupt Age, ruled by an evil being, was soon to end. This would usher in a new Age with a benevolent ruler. Under this thinking, even the problem of Jesus the god who failed to end slavery goes away because Jesus was just the messenger.

Jesus made clear his short-term focus when he said, “This generation will certainly not pass away until all these things have happened” (Matt. 24:34). A few verses earlier he identified “these things” as the sun and moon darkening and the stars falling to earth.

Jesus didn’t end slavery because, in his mind, the end of this Age was at hand. Slavery would end at the same time. (I explore the consequences of Jesus’s short-term focus in more depth here.)

Now I’ll undercut my own defense of the logic of Jesus’s position. If the end were nigh, why worry about any social ill? If you’re not going to bother with slavery, why worry about the poor? The near-term future held, not simply a decent meal each day, but life with every pain removed.

And how anti-slavery can the New Testament be when Paul uses the idea in a positive way when he calls himself a “slave of Christ Jesus” (Romans 1:1)?

Concluding thoughts

Seeing Jesus as a failed Apocalypticist doesn’t help Gilson. Jesus as a failed anything won’t do, and Gilson is left handwaving why Jesus was the Great Emancipator but the Not-So-Great Communicator. And we come back to the fact that if Jesus wanted no slavery, he would have said so or poofed it out of existence. The simplest explanation is that Jesus didn’t care.

Compare that with something that Jesus very much did care about—compassion for the disadvantaged, to take one example. Here is what that looks like in the Bible.

Religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless is this: to look after orphans and widows in their distress and to keep oneself from being polluted by the world (James 1:27).

If anyone has material possessions and sees a brother or sister in need but has no pity on them, how can the love of God be in that person? (1 John 3:17).

We see Jesus’s compassion for the disadvantaged in:

• the story of the widow’s mite: “Truly I tell you, this poor widow has put in more than all the others.”
• the story about the rich young ruler: “If you want to be perfect, go, sell your possessions and give to the poor.”
• the parable of the sheep and the goats: “Whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.”
• the Beatitudes: “Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God.”

You want to know what Jesus would say about something he cared for deeply? Like that. And that’s what you don’t see for slavery.

Tom Gilson has replied to these posts. I respond here.

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Image from muammerokumus (license CC BY-SA 2.0)
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Tom Gilson is an apologist and editor with the conservative Christian website The Stream. Lately, he’s been flogging his new book, Too Good to be False, which appears to be a book-length treatment of an article to which I responded six years ago. (That article in brief: when you compare Jesus to other great figures in history and fiction, Jesus is so powerful and so good that he stands alone and so must be real. Or something.)

Gilson says he’s gotten pushback to his thesis. What about slavery? If Jesus was so great, how could he have left slavery untouched to hobble humanity for 2000 years?

He responded to that challenge with a recent article, “Christianity and Slavery: Does It Mean Jesus Isn’t Good After All?” Let’s take a look. Does Jesus actually take a strong anti-slavery position?

TL;DR: nope.

If you’re still with me and want to know why, let’s consider Gilson’s argument point by point. Remember that the atheist challenge was that Jesus never condemned slavery, so we’re looking in his rebuttals for examples where Jesus demanded that every slave be set free and the institution of slavery to be permanently discarded. I assume that the King of Kings and Light of the World would’ve been able to clearly convey this simple message.

1. Jesus came “to set the captives free”

Jesus proclaimed freedom for prisoners. More broadly, he came “to lead a revolution of the human heart.”

(Sentences in italics are supporting points from Gilson’s argument.)

In this first point, Gilson is quoting Luke 4:18, where Jesus reads from Isaiah 61:1–2. Through these verses, Jesus proclaimed good news to the poor, support for the brokenhearted, freedom for captives and prisoners, and sight for the blind.

Where’s the rejection of slavery? “Captives” suggests people taken captive during battle, and “prisoners” suggests criminals in prison. There are several words for slave in Hebrew (remember we’re talking about Isaiah, which was written in Hebrew), but none are used here. If overturning slavery was what Jesus meant, he would’ve stated that plainly, he wouldn’t have diluted the message by mixed it with other promises, and he would’ve made clear that this wasn’t just a day of amnesty but a society-wide, perpetual rejection of the institution of slavery.

As for Jesus’s goal on earth being to lead a “revolution of the human heart,” I wonder why we don’t see that throughout the Bible. There’s a lot of godly violence in the Old Testament that must be explain away, so the heart he should start with is Yahweh’s.

2. Jesus’s resurrection means we’re reconciled with God

What does this have to do with slavery? All I can imagine is that this is supposed to be a credit on the nice side of Jesus’s moral balance. (And don’t get me started on how the crucifixion and resurrection make no sense.)

As far as we read in the Bible, slavery wasn’t a moral problem to wrestle with. Sure, it was bad when the Israelites were captive in Egypt (for which there is scant evidence), but it’s not like they left Egypt fired up to eliminate that hated institution from the world. In fact, they began enslaving people as soon as they returned to Palestine (see Joshua 9:22–3). The Bible message is that slavery is only bad when it’s done to you.

3. “[Jesus] taught the Golden Rule, which necessarily leads to the end of slavery”

Here’s the verse with the Golden Rule:

So in everything, do to others what you would have them do to you, for this sums up the Law and the Prophets (Matthew 7:12).

“The Law” is the Torah, the first five books of the Bible, and “the Prophets” is the five books of the major prophets (like Isaiah and Ezekiel) plus the twelve books of the minor prophets. These are Jewish books, and Jesus was grounding the Golden Rule as a Jewish requirement. Judaism was focused on the Chosen People, not the entire world, which makes the Golden Rule applicable to just Jews. And the “others” in “do to others” was also likely interpreted to mean only fellow Jews.

No, this doesn’t “necessarily [lead] to the end of slavery.” This claim is ridiculous since slavery obviously didn’t end in Jesus’s time or in the time of his disciples. It continues today, and slavery worldwide in absolute numbers is the highest it’s ever been. Roughly 40 million people are slaves of some sort right now.

Yet again, if Jesus had something to say about ending slavery, he would’ve unambiguously done so.

4. “[Jesus] condemned greed and self-centeredness, the root of the enslaving spirit”

Greed and self-centeredness? Now we’re really getting far afield.

How hard is this?! Show me where Jesus (or God) says, “Yea, thou shalt not make a slave of any person, neither Jew nor Gentile, for it is an abomination.” If Jesus didn’t say this or anything equivalent, admit that he didn’t condemn slavery.

Gilson is in a tough spot. He knows that slavery is wrong, and yet neither God nor Jesus reject slavery. He must shoehorn that into the 2000-year-old Jesus story, but by doing so he’s turned Jesus into a sock puppet, speaking the lines that Gilson feeds him. Jesus has become a slave to a message that’s plainly not in the Bible.

UPDATE: Tom Gilson replied to this post here.

Continue with part 2.

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Image from Denny Müller (free-use license)
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