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RE: 16 Bible verses that approve of slavery
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