RE: 16 Bible verses that approve of slavery
Would that not be implicit in the verses relating to the golden rule?
Matthew 22:37-39 KJVS
Jesus said unto him, Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. [38] This is the first and great commandment. [39] And the second is like unto it, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.
Romans 13:10 KJVS
Love worketh NO ILL to his neighbour: therefore love is the fulfilling of the law.
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
Matthew 19:8 KJVS
He saith unto them, Moses because of the hardness of your hearts suffered you to put away your wives: but from the beginning it was not so.
@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?