Most Americans in Abraham Lincoln's day were Christians. (Christians who didnt own slaves.) Prove me wrong.

[pood]

And you can read about the attitude of northern theologians to the war and slavery here. Nothing like Lion’s fantasy world, and, as the article emphasizes, Christians in the north supported the war to preserve the union, not end slavery. Later on, as I explained earlier, attitudes began to shift, after devastating northern losses, to punishing the confederacy by freeing the slaves.

 

[TomC]

Christians in the north supported the war to preserve the union, not end slavery.

Don't you wonder why anyone cared enough about the union to rack up 700,000 casualties?
Tom

 

[pood]

Christians in the north supported the war to preserve the union, not end slavery.

Don't you wonder why anyone cared enough about the union to rack up 700,000 casualties?
Tom

Sure, but it wasn’t to end slavery. Their preachers were telling them that the Union was Gawd’s Chosen Land, the New Jerusalem, and must be preserved no matter what the cost. Religious belief was a HUGE influence on both sides. A huge, POISONOUS influence, of course.

A rational course of action might indeed have been for the Union to accede to Southern secession, thereby avoiding those casualties of which you speak, while anticipating or at least hoping that slavery in the south would dissolve of its own accord because of economic shifts. But it must also be understood that at the outset of the war, both sides, inebriated with religious-fueled political zealotry and uber-patriotism, anticipated the the war would end quickly with minimum casualties. As Lincoln so eloquently noted in his second inaugural address, “each looked for an easier triumph, and a result less fundamental and astounding.”

 

[TomC]

Sure, but it wasn’t to end slavery.

Which I have been saying throughout the thread.
Nor do I think that preservation of the Union was a big deal to the vast bulk of the cannon fodder.

It was mostly about the interests of the elite at the time.

Similarly, Bush II sold the American people on the Invasion of Iraq by claiming it was to fight terrorists and democratize the Middle East. I thought that was bullshit from the beginning. It was to get rid of Saddam Hussein and replace him with someone who could effectively destroy Iran. The real goal was control over the Gulf oil fields.
Tom

 

[hyzer]

I shall hijack this thread to ask an (interesting?) question about the proper construction of English prose.

Two things my post is NOT about are

(1) What the Civil War was about. The answer to this is well-known and already uttered by several thread participants. The South seceded to protect their institution of slavery. The North rejected the secession to preserve the Union. After a year and a half of horrendous casualties, the North adopted the cause of Emancipation to keep their morale up.

(2) Whether Mr. Lion intentionally took Mr. pood's sentence out of context. (If he did, he reminds us of two other posters, one of whom flaunts his spelling expertise whenever he has no better rejoinder to make, the other mindlessly rants about President Biden but is apparently unable to spell that surname. I think I'm not the only one who has NOT added those two to my Ignore list, simply because their sophomoric conceits often offer insights into Ilkish "cognition.")

The war was entirely about slavery ..

That's what I thought

Wow, what pathetic weaseling, repeating the rotten tactic you’ve used before of taking a quote out of contest ...

Without taking sides in this dispute, I have a basic question about English sentences! Are they expected to be self-contained?
FoxNews has taken Hillary Clinton's words out of context, but in the example I remember they quoted just one CLAUSE or even partial clause, a clause which was contradicted by the complete sentence. Misconstruction of a PARTIAL sentence is easy, particularly if conjunction ("If") or adverb ("Counterfactually") is omitted.

My question is: Should sentences be constructed so that they remain valid in isolation?
I honestly don't know the answer. I call on all Infidels to look for examples of complete sentences which have an unintended meaning when quoted in isolation.

In the example above, Lion actually truncated pood's complete sentence but I'm not sure that matters.

The war was entirely about slavery and had nothing to do with states’ rights vs. federal rights.

pood COULD (and should?) have written something like "The South's secession was entirely about slavery."

I wonder how often a complete but slightly careless sentence can be taken out of context as we saw here. Do I write such sentences? Examples, please!

What Lion has done is to mine a quote to misrepresent what the author meant by taking it completely out of context. This is considered a form of lying. And it is reprehensible when done on purpose to distort the author’s point of view.

 

[Swammerdami]

I wonder how often a complete but slightly careless sentence can be taken out of context as we saw here. Do I write such sentences? Examples, please!

What Lion has done is to mine a quote to misrepresent what the author meant by taking it completely out of context. This is considered a form of lying. And it is reprehensible when done on purpose to distort the author’s point of view.

I understand.

But my question -- unrelated to the posters or posts in this thread -- is still sincere. I wonder how often such out-of-contextable sentences occur inadvertently in ordinary English. As someone pointed out, they arise more commonly in conversational language than in written language.

 

[hyzer]

I’m not a linguist so I can’t answer your question. However, quote mining is a creationist tactic, done neither innocently nor in good faith.

 

[TomC]

I’m not a linguist so I can’t answer your question. However, quote mining is a creationist tactic, done neither innocently nor in good faith.

"creationist"?
Lots of people use it, not just creationists by any stretch.
I do think Lion did, in this particular case. But so do lots of people on this forum and elsewhere.
Tom

 

[pood]

I wonder how often a complete but slightly careless sentence can be taken out of context as we saw here. Do I write such sentences? Examples, please!

What Lion has done is to mine a quote to misrepresent what the author meant by taking it completely out of context. This is considered a form of lying. And it is reprehensible when done on purpose to distort the author’s point of view.

I understand.

But my question -- unrelated to the posters or posts in this thread -- is still sincere. I wonder how often such out-of-contextable sentences occur inadvertently in ordinary English. As someone pointed out, they arise more commonly in conversational language than in written language.

You can wrench anything, no matter how well written, out of context, stick in some ellipses, and presto! Totally change the meaning of the bowdlerized text.

 

[bilby]

You can ... stick ... the meaning of the ... text.

... all that matters is that I can make it say what fits my prejudices.

 

[laughing dog]

I shall hijack this thread to ask an (interesting?) question about the proper construction of English prose.

Two things my post is NOT about are

(1) What the Civil War was about. The answer to this is well-known and already uttered by several thread participants. The South seceded to protect their institution of slavery. The North rejected the secession to preserve the Union. After a year and a half of horrendous casualties, the North adopted the cause of Emancipation to keep their morale up.

(2) Whether Mr. Lion intentionally took Mr. pood's sentence out of context. (If he did, he reminds us of two other posters, one of whom flaunts his spelling expertise whenever he has no better rejoinder to make, the other mindlessly rants about President Biden but is apparently unable to spell that surname. I think I'm not the only one who has NOT added those two to my Ignore list, simply because their sophomoric conceits often offer insights into Ilkish "cognition.")

The war was entirely about slavery ..

That's what I thought

Wow, what pathetic weaseling, repeating the rotten tactic you’ve used before of taking a quote out of contest ...

Without taking sides in this dispute, I have a basic question about English sentences! Are they expected to be self-contained?
FoxNews has taken Hillary Clinton's words out of context, but in the example I remember they quoted just one CLAUSE or even partial clause, a clause which was contradicted by the complete sentence. Misconstruction of a PARTIAL sentence is easy, particularly if conjunction ("If") or adverb ("Counterfactually") is omitted.

My question is: Should sentences be constructed so that they remain valid in isolation?
I honestly don't know the answer. I call on all Infidels to look for examples of complete sentences which have an unintended meaning when quoted in isolation.

In the example above, Lion actually truncated pood's complete sentence but I'm not sure that matters.

The war was entirely about slavery and had nothing to do with states’ rights vs. federal rights.

pood COULD (and should?) have written something like "The South's secession was entirely about slavery."

I wonder how often a complete but slightly careless sentence can be taken out of context as we saw here. Do I write such sentences? Examples, please!

What Lion has done is to mine a quote to misrepresent what the author meant by taking it completely out of context. This is considered a form of lying. And it is reprehensible when done on purpose to distort the author’s point of view.

And it is not the first time he has done it in this thread.

 

[BH]

There is nothing written in the bible that condemns slavery, but there are verses that support it.

Slavery is wage theft.
The bible says thou shalt not steal.

No it isn't. The slave is the property of his master and any work the slave does for someone else belongs to the master.

 

[BH]

I was reading a book about reconstruction. Fun fact. Confederate general and later governor of Alabama Adelbert Ames was shipping cotton from his southern plantation to Britain to sell to.
.
.
.
.
.
.
representativies of thread and garment makers back in the United States.

A lot of Confederate wealthy and leadership sold stuff to their enemy when it made it to Europe after getting it through the embargo. Confederate leaders and wealthy plantation owners had a good strong sense of morality and sense of sacrifice. There is something about the South that breeds such noble and morally pure leaders, in fact, I have it on good authority one of the wealthiest men in my hometown started a scrap business and sent his brother to Mexico to receive the scrap. The USA and Germany were at war, but it didn't matter. Mexico was not. The rich man sent the scrap to Mexico and the brother sold it to Germany.

Pffft. No, people like Ames wanted to make sure they feathered their nest regardless of which way the war went.

 

[BH]

No, Lion.

Respectfully, legally speaking a slave owner could make a slave work for someone and the money was paid to the owner of the slave, not the slave himself. By law, the slave had no right to the money and it was never his to steal it from.

A lot of pretty black slaves, especially part black part white slaves were taken to the cities and forced into prostitution. It was a very big business and made a lot of wealth for the slave owners engaged in it.

 

[Lion IRC]

I'm sorry, I accidentally posted in this thread forgetting that I'd decided to avoid doing so until there's a mod note clarification re. the TOU lawyering derail.

 

[T.G.G. Moogly]

What Lion has done is to mine a quote to misrepresent what the author meant by taking it completely out of context. This is considered a form of lying. And it is reprehensible when done on purpose to distort the author’s point of view.

Isn't that standard religious practice?