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RE: 16 Bible verses that approve of slavery
He didn't approve or endorse slavery. God tolerated it but made very specific provisions as to how the Israelites were to treat their servant which stands in contrast to the very harsh conditions imposed by other ancient cultures of the time such as the Egyptians.
God has ideals which he knows fallen men are not going to follow them therefore He sets parameters to mitigate the harm. I know you probably think it's a load of baloney but I appreciate your through provoking posts in any case. Take care now
Well, here is 16 verses saying that slavery was at the very least tolerated. How many can you produce to say that it was ONLY tolerated AND was really odjectionable?
Would that not be implicit in the verses relating to the golden rule?
Galatians 5:13-14 KJVS
For, brethren, ye have been called unto liberty; only use not liberty for an occasion to the flesh, but by love serve one another. [14] For all the law is fulfilled in one word, even in this; Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.
There is also what I believe to be a related underlying principle in this verse. Note how marriage is the ideal in this instance
@anthonyadavisii
Hey thanks for the thought put into your response and the references. I gave you an upvote just for that.
The golden rule as I know it: "Do unto others, as you would have them do unto you" is not what you referenced from the KJVS. If you had, I might just give you this one.
As for what you did reference, it is certainly coherent with your position but also is coherent with the position that god is cool with slavery. I must admit that I am still digesting the verses you provided. This is a huge problem with the bible. The language becomes more and more archaic as you get translations closer and closer to the original Hebrew texts. So we are left with a huge language barrier but no translation bias or a huge translation bias with a low language barrier.
Anyway, what I focus on in the material you provided was love and neighbors. So here are a couple questions. Number 1, is a slave a neighbor. I think of a neighbor as someone who has a stake in the local area, the neighborhood, equivalent to my own stake. I think of them as a peer, someone who has ownership rights somewhat on par to my own, whether it is actual ownership or ownership through a rental agreement. Therefore it is unclear is a slave qualifies as a neighbor. Number 2, these verses seem to say that you can do anything to anybody as long as you love them. This reasoning has been abused many times in the past. Such as, burning possessed people, (aka the mentally ill) at the stake on the assumption that the demon would leave them because of the pain they would experience and then the soul would be able to go to heaven. So burning someone at the stake was an an act of love.
But that was getting of topic. So to come back to the business at hand, what you need to prove your point is a passage that is consistent with your stance while at the same time inconsistent with the stance of your opponent. To clarify matters, what I see as your stance is that god tolerated slavery because he had other issues that he wished to address about human behavior that was of higher priority and he could only get so far so fast with what he had to work with (ie humans). The opposing stance is that god is cool with slavery.
So with that clarification, you got anything?
Any yet "he" managed to come out against all kinds of other things he didn't want to tolerate, like kidnapping apparently. Sounds like complete indifference by an omnipotent deity to me. He could have just added an eleventh commandment "Thou shalt not own slaves". Apparently that was just to much effort, ran out of tablets I guess?
@0101010
I think your on to something here. Trying to reign in too much bad behavior all at once can be a futile action. I give that one to @anthonyadavisii. So, lets look at the priority given to the bad behaviors. Here is 3 of the commandments (taken from wikipedia):
So from this, we can assume prohibition of graven images and taking his name in vain, and the remembrance of the sabbath are all more important than the prohibition of owning another human. I guess It is nice that it seems that the slavery is limited to 6 years and the slave cannot be beaten to death, though.
BTW, @0101010, Do many people get the reference your name is making? I must admit that I missed it at first. I just noticed that it was a binary palindrome, nothing more. However, once I looked at your profile page and seen your tag line I had the sneaking suspension that it was binary for 42. A quick binary to decimal conversion confirmed it and I had a little chuckle.
Well spotted - I don't think many people realize it at all, maybe my geeky friends of a certain age. Anyway, congratulations, you win an upvote for sure. Can't give you 42 cents but I did my best.
And yes, it's amazing that a full 40% of all commandments are about sucking up to Him exclusively (you missed "Thou shalt have no other gods before me"). It's almost as if the all powerful, all knowing Yahweh is just a proxy for a bunch of insecure impotent old men.
While I have no doubt the many of these old men are insecure as well as impotent. I think the fact that 40% of the commandments, in fact the first 4 in the list, are about 'sucking up' is more significant than the egos of the priests.
IMHO, religion is a money making enterprise and like any other enterprise it has its business model. Religion's business model is to convince everyone to pay 10% of their income for some supernatural reason. The exact rationalization is not important. The method employed to do this is to create rewards for paying up and playing along with the delusion and punishments for not paying up and for discrediting the delusion. While the coughing up of that 10% is the ultimate goal, the maintenance of the delusion is more important and therefore maintaining a ubiquitous reverence for the god is the most important goal of the religion.
In the end, it is much easier to pass the plate around and collect your 10% when all the sheep are playing along than it would be with a loud mouthed skeptic questioning the very existence of your supernatural, omnipotent, omnipresent pal. Hence, the priority given to 'sucking up' or to protecting the image of the god.
Sorry I was thinking more like "insecure about people joining other religions instead of theirs" and "impotent in their power to control others". And as you point out the 10C are a pretty effective way to address those problems.
I'm actually surprised that the 10 commandments didn't include "raise you children to be good Christians" but maybe they assumed that was a given that parents would do that and the "honour your parents" bit makes indoctrination a slam dunk. If the first rule of Abrahamic god club was "Don't talk about the ten commandments" it would never have caught on.
Meanwhile its very notable that tithing and organised religion are nowhere to be seen in the commandments (and for the most part in the entire Bible if I recall). Ergo just more sheep controlling BS to build temples and enrich the few controlling elite in ways a Jesus would turn in his tomb for.
I may not be religious or believe in any God, but I'm sure that if the Jesus of the Bible had a second coming for sure I would be pretty far down the list of people he was going to kick the ass off. There's a huge line of fakers, fraudsters and criminals ahead of me for that.
#goodwithoutgod