their ideas about non violence, and charity and womens rights are straight up Christian ideas
Not quite, no. Those are all in Plato, extensively developed. In fact, his views about women right were so advanced that only now society is slowly getting to the point of reaching it, but still not quite there. Christianity brought a few additions to that basic framework, but by no means introduced it.
The rest of your answer is just pop pseudo-Nietzschean nonsense, so I won't dwell on it. Now, if you do know something of Nietzsche's actual thought, then there's something useful to be talked about on that front.
A multitude of scriptures mention God knowing someone while they were in the womb
So? A few mention God knowing someone before they were conceived, and last I checked most Christians don't believe in the soul existing before conception. It's called omniscience among those who consider the Biblical God to possess it.
Also, read my other answer in this subthread for more details.
I like it very much when apparent atheistts try to speak for all Christians. In other words, you're making it up.
Not at all. And I'm not an Atheist, I'm a pagan.:-)
You're good at taking things out of context.
No. The Hebrew word we translate as "soul" and "spirit" are "nephesh" for soul, and "ruash" and "neshamah" for spirit, the three of which mean "breathe". Those are the words used in the Old Testament. Similarly, the Greek words used in the New Testament that we translate as "soul" and "spirit" are "psuche" for soul, and "pnoe" and "pneuma" for spirit, the three of which also mean "breathe".
The meaning all thorough the Bible is that soul/spirit are connected to a breathing body. That's the criteria. And anything that isn't breathing has no soul. Including fetuses.
You stopped at the first verse of that group.
No, I didn't. Those verses refer to the death of the would-be mother and/or of the would-be father. The miscarriage caused by the assailant is punished by a fine. It's considered an aggression against the mother, and a loss of property against the father. Search any Biblical dictionary and you'll see this explained in excruciating details.
You agree with the misinterpretation you've created.
No, I agree with the traditional understanding of this topic in multiple cultures. Some take a more careful approach and suggest temperance when it comes to abortion, saying it's better to avoid it than to indulge in it, but very few believed mere conception entailed soul-body linking. In fact, even American evangelicals only began believing this during the 1970's. Before that it was considered by most as a specifically Catholic (and Orthodox) belief, not a proper, general Christian one.
And, guess what? Evangelicals were the correct ones in that debate. Were. Now they aren't anymore.
If you're a giver who wants to help babies--the MOD's ostensible justification for existence--go find the most orthodox church in your area. You know, the one where they believe abortion is straight up murder.
Being a pagan myself, I heartily approve of taking a pagan Philosopher's opinions more seriously than whatever is in the Biblical myths. But Aristotle wouldn't be my first choice. His ideas about the soul are very off. Plotinus and Proclus' are better. Be as it may, a paganized Christianity is better than a non-paganized one, and therefore kudos on ignoring what the Bible say on the matter, even though in this case I myself agree with the Bible! (y)
You do know psychology was developed as a method of "playing doctor" and manipulating women for personal sexual gain?
Oh, look, found one!
I guess it's time for you to up your game. How about converting into a Jehova's Witness and begin denouncing blood transfusions? That way you can mix your already existing anti-psychological rant with a good dosage of anti-medicine, and then even combine it all of that with anti-vax and anti-GMO for the perfect mix of conspiracy nuttiness!
While there have always been book burning morons among the Christians like in any other religion they never dominated for any length of time and were fiercely opposed by scholastically minded people within the church.
The problem is that they didn't need to dominate for long. Just long enough to destroy a library here, a temple there, slaughter an important "demon worshiper" over there etc. The length of time required for those was sometimes a single night, with the requirement just an overzealous bishop and a properly worked up illiterate mob under the illusion they were sticking it to the man. That was pretty common even when the authorities attempted to stop it.
I think you need a little bit of being killed in an European war of yore to gain some perspective. On the bright side, war builds character! I mean, someone would write your name on a plaque alongside thousands of other names or something, so you'd at the very least become a character afterwards, even if kinda blurred while a tourist glanced over it in between your war and theirs. But, hey! At least your genes would carry on in the form as the child of a prostitute or the child of the raped wife of a fallen Enemy, so there's that too!
Gods. Plural. At least according Plato's ontological realism, in which every number is a god, as is the demiurge and many other stuff. Or, alternatively, according Aristotle's and his unmovable movers (yes, more than one). Or even according Neoplatonism's polycentric henology.
Monotheists like to try and bring the Biblical notion of the one single god into this, but that's actually just one alternative between many. And that's not even counting Eastern meontologies, which move one step beyond the above ontologies up into non-being/ground-of-being territory.
I understand where you're coming from, but I'd wager that far more knew than didn't.
I think people knew Jews and other people were being imprisoned by the government, and many were most certainly in favor of this given how prevalent antisemitism was. What I don't think they knew, though, was that some of the concentration camps those prisoners were being sent to were actually extermination camps. Given most concentration camps were "just" that, not having a focus on extermination, that also meant that, while those living near them knew of them, and of how badly prisoners were treated, they didn't know of the few mass extermination ones.
Take your US example: while most Americans were certainly aware people of Japanese ancestry were being rounded up and sent to concentration camps, few, if any, thought the US government was exterminating those prisoners, and they were correct in that assumption. In the case of the Nazi government, most Germans were certainly taken by surprise when they came to know, from the Allies, what had been happening.
Had the Nazis been victorious, or at the very minimum had they signed a peace treaty instead of having had to surrender unconditionally, and kept governing Germany and Nazi-occupied areas, and the extermination camps would have continued to operate until all the people the Nazis wanted exterminated had been exterminated, then destroyed so as to erase any evidence, and news about that would have been uncovered only several decades later.
"I was shocked... all of these Germans everywhere and not a single nazi! Everyone of them claimed they'd never known what was going on and never agreed with what the nazis did. They insisted they were never part of the party. Hell, you could smell the camps from town. There was no way they couldn't know they were there".
Ah! But that's easy to understand. My great-aunt told me that when it became clear to the population the Allies would win, everyone began rushing to destroy any evidence they themselves had had anything to do with Nazi activities. Some due to fear. Some because they had genuinely had been forced to. My great-aunt, for example, despite her family having been anti-Nazi, had had to collect an album of articles about Hitler as an ongoing school project. She, others like her, and even her actually-Nazi colleagues, all hastily burned theirs down even before news of US troops arriving had been divulged.
And the fear was fear of any military occupation. Men and boys were afraid the occupation forces would kill them for any reason whatsoever, so they hoped that by erasing any trace of Nazi-support they'd slightly increase their chance of survival. Women and girls were afraid the men in their lives would be killed and that afterwards they would be raped and then killed, so they did it with even more intensity than men. When the US occupation forces actually arrived and then acted with honor and nobility, abuse incidents being minimal, that was perceived in shock and then in gratitude, which coupled with all the monetary help explains why Germany got so pro-US in the following years. (By the way, that this was a legitimate fear can be seen in the fact Germans who had had the bad luck of being URSS-occupied suffered exactly those things, including the expected mass rapes.)
And that explains why everyone had "never" been a Nazi.
Kinda. My great-aunt was a German Red Cross nurse during WW2, and had occasion to help one or two Jews who were being transported in trains to concentration camps. She knew they were being rounded and were being taken to a prison somewhere, but she didn't know of what was being done to them. From her perspective they were all POWs, and very hungry and sick, but that was it.
I should point out her family was anti-Nazi. Her father, my great-great-father, had ordered her to enter the Red Cross so that she wouldn't be forced to attend Nazi Youth, and insisted she kept her knowledge of Portuguese. They were late 1920's German immigrants to Brazil who really liked it here, and they were visiting Germany when the war broke out, being forced to stay there. That was so effective that, once the Americans took over, she began working for the US military base set up closest to their home.
So, yeah. Some might have know, probably those who lived closest to concentration camps, but for the majority, including the most antisemitic among them, it was all a huge question mark.
What? Replying to your glancing over Simple Wikipedia's article on Belloc and, for lack of a better word, "concluding" he or any true conservative are in favor of central-anything? Sure! Here's the polite reply: "Read the book then come back."
It’s all the obese layabout welfare -abusers- that will be watching this content.
Sorry, child. You too will lose your job to automation and AI, and won't have any alternative because all jobs up to your IQ level will have been automated away before you ever had the chance to try doing them. When that happens, just do as all the people whose IQ levels are below AI and become a beggar. It's what you'll deserve for "choosing" to not increase your IQ at the pace required by automation.
For me the most awesome change Gmail added, other than storage, was organizing messages into single, collapsible conversations. Nowadays everyone does that, but before, as far as I remember at least, all we had were folders, threaded conversations of individual emails, or individual emails organized by date, author, subject etc. That completely changed how I used email, and for the better.
I also remember how many people deeply disliked the Gmail way of organizing emails and complained to no end about it, so different it was from basically every other email and webmail option out there.
In a rational world, you don't fire your fucking star sales guy!
I have an example of that happening, and it isn't even age related. Years ago a young friend of mine was hired to do telemarketing. The first months he sold within the average. The second month he beat expectations, received a bonus, and was named employee of the month. The third month he was fired.
The reason he was fired? He noticed the script telemarketers were provided and had to read aloud was BS and could in no way convince anyone to purchase the company's products. So he threw it away and began doing it his way. That caused his sales to skyrocket. But it was company policy that entry level telemarketing drones must follow the script. And so he was fired for not following that rule.
My wife and most of her friends call iPads "computers".
Technically they're correct. iPads do a lot of computations, so they're computers.
But if we're going to be pedantic, then the correct term is "digital computer", so as to distinguish it from "analog computers", and these two, taken together under the single umbrella term "electronic computers", from the original, human computers, since "computing" used to be a profession. In fact, the word "computer" in particular refers to a male professional, a female one being called a computress.
Did you just make an argument centered around The Phantom Menace having a coherent story line?
It had. Jar Jar Bink was supposed to be revealed to be Darth Plagueis in the following movies, and the "phantom menace" of the title, hidden in plain sight. It would have worked weren't for Jar Jar having been written in such an exaggerated goofy way, with his Sith powers so subtly shown (you can actually notice them if you pay extreme attention to minor details of his acting, such as him moving his mouth and speaking the phrases of other mind-tricked characters a split second before they actually speak), that people absolutely hated it all. So Lucas scrapped that idea and went somewhere else with the prequel trilogy, which made it even worse than it would have been otherwise.
when there isn't as big an asymmetry in violence between sexes...
Women suffer less violence than men, at least as objectively measured in terms of deaths per 100k inhabitants. As such, reducing the asymmetry can mean either decreasing violence against men until it reaches the same level women enjoy, or increasing violence against women until it reaches the same level men endure. I guess you're proposing the former, right?
Killing isn't the problem. The problem is causing pain for long periods. US factory farms are particularly cruel endeavors on that side of the equation, and on the other ethical constraints on animal research provide hardly better living conditions for those used in them. That pain, and the brutality that goes into producing and maintaining it, are the aspects that need corrected, specially because it isn't uncommon for both to "overflow" into how humans themselves get treated by other humans.
Someone already mentioned the Nazis, so I give you Unit 731. Experimenting on American POWs helped save human lives!!!, so it was not only perfectly okay, pardoning the researchers was even more so, right? Right?
Copyright laws refer to licensing, which in turn stems from contract law
No. When it comes to contract law, intellectual property worked like this: person A with money contracts person B with skill to make a book/song/art/whatever; B makes it and delivers it to A; it's now A's to do with it as he pleases. A then contracts C to copy it, and gives/sells/whatever the copy to D. The copy is now D's to do with as he pleases. Wash, rinse, repeat.
Now, it's evident that in the past B could put as an additional restriction in his contract with A that A wouldn't make copies and wouldn't allow others to make copies. Insofar as both A and B signed that contract, then yes, it'd be enforceable by B upon A. But it was a contract between B and A only. If C entered A's house, made a copy, then passed it forward, B might have cause to sue A for not protecting B's creation. And A would have cause to ask for C to be imprisoned. But the copy out in the wild? No claim over it by anyone, at all. And whoever wanted to copy it further could, as they had no contract with anyone, much less B, about it.
Copyright law subverts that traditional system by inventing a "right to copy" that was actually an enforced restriction on the original, unlimited natural right to make copies every able-bodied human being always had. That was the fairly recent novelty it introduced.
held up by the legal framework of the past few thousand years
Hundreds. There were a few earlier precedents, but the earliest laws resembling modern copyright come from the 17th century. See Wikipedia's History of copyright law.
Slashdot Mirror
their ideas about non violence, and charity and womens rights are straight up Christian ideas
Not quite, no. Those are all in Plato, extensively developed. In fact, his views about women right were so advanced that only now society is slowly getting to the point of reaching it, but still not quite there. Christianity brought a few additions to that basic framework, but by no means introduced it.
The rest of your answer is just pop pseudo-Nietzschean nonsense, so I won't dwell on it. Now, if you do know something of Nietzsche's actual thought, then there's something useful to be talked about on that front.
A multitude of scriptures mention God knowing someone while they were in the womb
So? A few mention God knowing someone before they were conceived, and last I checked most Christians don't believe in the soul existing before conception. It's called omniscience among those who consider the Biblical God to possess it.
Also, read my other answer in this subthread for more details.
I like it very much when apparent atheistts try to speak for all Christians. In other words, you're making it up.
Not at all. And I'm not an Atheist, I'm a pagan. :-)
You're good at taking things out of context.
No. The Hebrew word we translate as "soul" and "spirit" are "nephesh" for soul, and "ruash" and "neshamah" for spirit, the three of which mean "breathe". Those are the words used in the Old Testament. Similarly, the Greek words used in the New Testament that we translate as "soul" and "spirit" are "psuche" for soul, and "pnoe" and "pneuma" for spirit, the three of which also mean "breathe".
The meaning all thorough the Bible is that soul/spirit are connected to a breathing body. That's the criteria. And anything that isn't breathing has no soul. Including fetuses.
You stopped at the first verse of that group.
No, I didn't. Those verses refer to the death of the would-be mother and/or of the would-be father. The miscarriage caused by the assailant is punished by a fine. It's considered an aggression against the mother, and a loss of property against the father. Search any Biblical dictionary and you'll see this explained in excruciating details.
You agree with the misinterpretation you've created.
No, I agree with the traditional understanding of this topic in multiple cultures. Some take a more careful approach and suggest temperance when it comes to abortion, saying it's better to avoid it than to indulge in it, but very few believed mere conception entailed soul-body linking. In fact, even American evangelicals only began believing this during the 1970's. Before that it was considered by most as a specifically Catholic (and Orthodox) belief, not a proper, general Christian one.
And, guess what? Evangelicals were the correct ones in that debate. Were. Now they aren't anymore.
If you're a giver who wants to help babies--the MOD's ostensible justification for existence--go find the most orthodox church in your area. You know, the one where they believe abortion is straight up murder.
I like it very much how modern day Christians take their notion of what is murder or not from Aristotle, the pagan philosopher who first stated souls are the form of the body, therefore fetuses have souls since conception, therefore abortion is murder, rather than from the Bible, which clearly states the soul enters the body when the person first breathes and that abortion is a misdemeanor punishable by a fine to be paid to the would be father.
Being a pagan myself, I heartily approve of taking a pagan Philosopher's opinions more seriously than whatever is in the Biblical myths. But Aristotle wouldn't be my first choice. His ideas about the soul are very off. Plotinus and Proclus' are better. Be as it may, a paganized Christianity is better than a non-paganized one, and therefore kudos on ignoring what the Bible say on the matter, even though in this case I myself agree with the Bible! (y)
Lets play a game of find the shill.... (...) Found one!
Dear, you don't know half of it! :-x
Let's play a game of find the Scientologist?
You do know psychology was developed as a method of "playing doctor" and manipulating women for personal sexual gain?
Oh, look, found one!
I guess it's time for you to up your game. How about converting into a Jehova's Witness and begin denouncing blood transfusions? That way you can mix your already existing anti-psychological rant with a good dosage of anti-medicine, and then even combine it all of that with anti-vax and anti-GMO for the perfect mix of conspiracy nuttiness!
Careful with your body thetans though. They bite!
While there have always been book burning morons among the Christians like in any other religion they never dominated for any length of time and were fiercely opposed by scholastically minded people within the church.
The problem is that they didn't need to dominate for long. Just long enough to destroy a library here, a temple there, slaughter an important "demon worshiper" over there etc. The length of time required for those was sometimes a single night, with the requirement just an overzealous bishop and a properly worked up illiterate mob under the illusion they were sticking it to the man. That was pretty common even when the authorities attempted to stop it.
VICTOIRE A NOUS!
I think you need a little bit of being killed in an European war of yore to gain some perspective. On the bright side, war builds character! I mean, someone would write your name on a plaque alongside thousands of other names or something, so you'd at the very least become a character afterwards, even if kinda blurred while a tourist glanced over it in between your war and theirs. But, hey! At least your genes would carry on in the form as the child of a prostitute or the child of the raped wife of a fallen Enemy, so there's that too!
logically for math to work, God must exist
Gods. Plural. At least according Plato's ontological realism, in which every number is a god, as is the demiurge and many other stuff. Or, alternatively, according Aristotle's and his unmovable movers (yes, more than one). Or even according Neoplatonism's polycentric henology.
Monotheists like to try and bring the Biblical notion of the one single god into this, but that's actually just one alternative between many. And that's not even counting Eastern meontologies, which move one step beyond the above ontologies up into non-being/ground-of-being territory.
I understand where you're coming from, but I'd wager that far more knew than didn't.
I think people knew Jews and other people were being imprisoned by the government, and many were most certainly in favor of this given how prevalent antisemitism was. What I don't think they knew, though, was that some of the concentration camps those prisoners were being sent to were actually extermination camps. Given most concentration camps were "just" that, not having a focus on extermination, that also meant that, while those living near them knew of them, and of how badly prisoners were treated, they didn't know of the few mass extermination ones.
Take your US example: while most Americans were certainly aware people of Japanese ancestry were being rounded up and sent to concentration camps, few, if any, thought the US government was exterminating those prisoners, and they were correct in that assumption. In the case of the Nazi government, most Germans were certainly taken by surprise when they came to know, from the Allies, what had been happening.
Had the Nazis been victorious, or at the very minimum had they signed a peace treaty instead of having had to surrender unconditionally, and kept governing Germany and Nazi-occupied areas, and the extermination camps would have continued to operate until all the people the Nazis wanted exterminated had been exterminated, then destroyed so as to erase any evidence, and news about that would have been uncovered only several decades later.
"I was shocked... all of these Germans everywhere and not a single nazi! Everyone of them claimed they'd never known what was going on and never agreed with what the nazis did. They insisted they were never part of the party. Hell, you could smell the camps from town. There was no way they couldn't know they were there".
Ah! But that's easy to understand. My great-aunt told me that when it became clear to the population the Allies would win, everyone began rushing to destroy any evidence they themselves had had anything to do with Nazi activities. Some due to fear. Some because they had genuinely had been forced to. My great-aunt, for example, despite her family having been anti-Nazi, had had to collect an album of articles about Hitler as an ongoing school project. She, others like her, and even her actually-Nazi colleagues, all hastily burned theirs down even before news of US troops arriving had been divulged.
And the fear was fear of any military occupation. Men and boys were afraid the occupation forces would kill them for any reason whatsoever, so they hoped that by erasing any trace of Nazi-support they'd slightly increase their chance of survival. Women and girls were afraid the men in their lives would be killed and that afterwards they would be raped and then killed, so they did it with even more intensity than men. When the US occupation forces actually arrived and then acted with honor and nobility, abuse incidents being minimal, that was perceived in shock and then in gratitude, which coupled with all the monetary help explains why Germany got so pro-US in the following years. (By the way, that this was a legitimate fear can be seen in the fact Germans who had had the bad luck of being URSS-occupied suffered exactly those things, including the expected mass rapes.)
And that explains why everyone had "never" been a Nazi.
Kinda. My great-aunt was a German Red Cross nurse during WW2, and had occasion to help one or two Jews who were being transported in trains to concentration camps. She knew they were being rounded and were being taken to a prison somewhere, but she didn't know of what was being done to them. From her perspective they were all POWs, and very hungry and sick, but that was it.
I should point out her family was anti-Nazi. Her father, my great-great-father, had ordered her to enter the Red Cross so that she wouldn't be forced to attend Nazi Youth, and insisted she kept her knowledge of Portuguese. They were late 1920's German immigrants to Brazil who really liked it here, and they were visiting Germany when the war broke out, being forced to stay there. That was so effective that, once the Americans took over, she began working for the US military base set up closest to their home.
So, yeah. Some might have know, probably those who lived closest to concentration camps, but for the majority, including the most antisemitic among them, it was all a huge question mark.
What? Replying to your glancing over Simple Wikipedia's article on Belloc and, for lack of a better word, "concluding" he or any true conservative are in favor of central-anything? Sure! Here's the polite reply: "Read the book then come back."
You don't want to know the impolite one. ;)
Aww, how cute! It's a kindergarten-level discussion now!
Me: "You're X."
You: "No! You are X! And ugly and stupid and I'm not your friend anymore!" (shows the tongue)
Begone, little troll. I've dealt with much stronger opponents. You're not up to the task. :D
It’s all the obese layabout welfare -abusers- that will be watching this content.
Sorry, child. You too will lose your job to automation and AI, and won't have any alternative because all jobs up to your IQ level will have been automated away before you ever had the chance to try doing them. When that happens, just do as all the people whose IQ levels are below AI and become a beggar. It's what you'll deserve for "choosing" to not increase your IQ at the pace required by automation.
Listen sweetcheeks - Megamergers aren't good or bad - they ARE.
Thus talked the pseudo-conservative who wouldn't be able to distinguish his Russell Kirk from his Eric Voegelin from his G. K. Chesterton.
Here, little fake-conservative, read some real ones for a change, will you? You may begin with Hilaire Belloc and proceed from there.
For me the most awesome change Gmail added, other than storage, was organizing messages into single, collapsible conversations. Nowadays everyone does that, but before, as far as I remember at least, all we had were folders, threaded conversations of individual emails, or individual emails organized by date, author, subject etc. That completely changed how I used email, and for the better.
I also remember how many people deeply disliked the Gmail way of organizing emails and complained to no end about it, so different it was from basically every other email and webmail option out there.
In a rational world, you don't fire your fucking star sales guy!
I have an example of that happening, and it isn't even age related. Years ago a young friend of mine was hired to do telemarketing. The first months he sold within the average. The second month he beat expectations, received a bonus, and was named employee of the month. The third month he was fired.
The reason he was fired? He noticed the script telemarketers were provided and had to read aloud was BS and could in no way convince anyone to purchase the company's products. So he threw it away and began doing it his way. That caused his sales to skyrocket. But it was company policy that entry level telemarketing drones must follow the script. And so he was fired for not following that rule.
My wife and most of her friends call iPads "computers".
Technically they're correct. iPads do a lot of computations, so they're computers.
But if we're going to be pedantic, then the correct term is "digital computer", so as to distinguish it from "analog computers", and these two, taken together under the single umbrella term "electronic computers", from the original, human computers, since "computing" used to be a profession. In fact, the word "computer" in particular refers to a male professional, a female one being called a computress.
did Lucas (or someone else in the know) state this was the original intent?
Almost. Jar Jar's voice actor hinted strongly that the story was moving in that direction, see here: Star Wars: The Darth Jar Jar Binks theory is partially true, says actor.
Did you just make an argument centered around The Phantom Menace having a coherent story line?
It had. Jar Jar Bink was supposed to be revealed to be Darth Plagueis in the following movies, and the "phantom menace" of the title, hidden in plain sight. It would have worked weren't for Jar Jar having been written in such an exaggerated goofy way, with his Sith powers so subtly shown (you can actually notice them if you pay extreme attention to minor details of his acting, such as him moving his mouth and speaking the phrases of other mind-tricked characters a split second before they actually speak), that people absolutely hated it all. So Lucas scrapped that idea and went somewhere else with the prequel trilogy, which made it even worse than it would have been otherwise.
when there isn't as big an asymmetry in violence between sexes...
Women suffer less violence than men, at least as objectively measured in terms of deaths per 100k inhabitants. As such, reducing the asymmetry can mean either decreasing violence against men until it reaches the same level women enjoy, or increasing violence against women until it reaches the same level men endure. I guess you're proposing the former, right?
We routinely kill pigs.
Killing isn't the problem. The problem is causing pain for long periods. US factory farms are particularly cruel endeavors on that side of the equation, and on the other ethical constraints on animal research provide hardly better living conditions for those used in them. That pain, and the brutality that goes into producing and maintaining it, are the aspects that need corrected, specially because it isn't uncommon for both to "overflow" into how humans themselves get treated by other humans.
save human lives
Someone already mentioned the Nazis, so I give you Unit 731. Experimenting on American POWs helped save human lives!!!, so it was not only perfectly okay, pardoning the researchers was even more so, right? Right?
Copyright laws refer to licensing, which in turn stems from contract law
No. When it comes to contract law, intellectual property worked like this: person A with money contracts person B with skill to make a book/song/art/whatever; B makes it and delivers it to A; it's now A's to do with it as he pleases. A then contracts C to copy it, and gives/sells/whatever the copy to D. The copy is now D's to do with as he pleases. Wash, rinse, repeat.
Now, it's evident that in the past B could put as an additional restriction in his contract with A that A wouldn't make copies and wouldn't allow others to make copies. Insofar as both A and B signed that contract, then yes, it'd be enforceable by B upon A. But it was a contract between B and A only. If C entered A's house, made a copy, then passed it forward, B might have cause to sue A for not protecting B's creation. And A would have cause to ask for C to be imprisoned. But the copy out in the wild? No claim over it by anyone, at all. And whoever wanted to copy it further could, as they had no contract with anyone, much less B, about it.
Copyright law subverts that traditional system by inventing a "right to copy" that was actually an enforced restriction on the original, unlimited natural right to make copies every able-bodied human being always had. That was the fairly recent novelty it introduced.
held up by the legal framework of the past few thousand years
Hundreds. There were a few earlier precedents, but the earliest laws resembling modern copyright come from the 17th century. See Wikipedia's History of copyright law.