This is hardly news and surely isn’t limited to Southern Baptists. When children of any age are indoctrinated, that indoctrination stays with them, often for life. I’ve consciously rejected most of the stuff I was force fed as a child by the Southern Baptists but I still believe I will go to hell when I die just for rejecting the crap I was taught. I don’t defend my father or his mistaken beliefs; I am sure, though, that he sincerely believed what he did and went to his grave believing he was right and that his beliefs were justified. It’s a shame, in my opinion, that children are ever exposed to organized religion, no mater its stripe.
Personally, I don’t believe Jimmy Carter was all that smart, for whatever that’s worth.
Interesting. I hadn’t heard that spin. That attempts to fix it, but it just shifts the problem down a generation. She was his wife before the flood, and before the curse. God never punished Ham for his miscegenation then. In fact, he’s considered good enough to be on the Ark that delivers the righteous from evil. Heck, his wife was good enough, and she’s supposedly black. Nope, it still doesn’t work.
While homophobia is also a problem in the church, it at least is based on a few Scriptures that really do seem to say that homosexuality is wrong. But this? I have never in my life understood why people believed this, and cited the Bible as evidence.
I think you’re mixing two completely notions of “who makes a proper slave” there. On one hand, American (as in the whole continent, not only the USA) notions that blacks were born to be the slaves of whites; on the other hand, the situation in the ancient Middle East (and in ancient Europe, and medieval Europe, and… in other words, before the western world chose to fixate on blacks as slaves) where there was little or no relationship between ethnicity and slavery; pre-1500 or so, laws along the lines of “thee shalt not enslave someone from thine own tribe” weren’t the norm, much less “use as slaves only those from a completely different color”. The notion that blacks were the ones to be slaves made no sense to the ancient Israelites simply because going all the way to subsaharian Africa to hunt your slaves made no economic sense at the time.
I have reviewed this answer from all possible points of view; I have meditated about and I have gone to the Lord in prayer about it. I have to say, you nailed it in one. Short and concise and the only answer possible. Thank you from the bottom of my heart.
I dislike the meaning of life question because there are so many things people can mean by it:
Why does anything exist, how did I come to exist, what should I spend my life doing, is there a plan for me, is there a plan for this whole reality, what’s my function, what’s the function of living organisms in general…
And I’m sure I’ve missed lots of common interpretations. Given that, I’m happy with the answer 42.
Nope - I was commenting on those who, like the OP’s dad, think that this Bible bit somehow supports the ‘modern’ racial notions of slavery. Obviously, the Israelites had no such ideas in mind - I’m simply pointing out yet another reason why the racist interpretation makes no sense.
:rolleyes: Carter is hardly an anti-Semite. Criticizing the actions of the Israeli government and suggesting that the whole creation of the modern state of Israel could have been handled better is by no means the same as denigrating Jews or Judaism.
People cite the Bible as evidence because people need something to support the odious notion that millions of humans ought to belong to another bunch of humans. You can torture the Bible into supporting pretty much anything you want it to; when you’re already using the Bible as your primary handbook on “how things ought to be,” you’re going to go looking there for new explanations and justifications as the need arises.
It’s one thing to criticize, but it’s something else to defame. He called Israel an apartheid state in his book, and he repeated that on TV. Admittedly, on one talk show he confessed that when he said Israel was an apartheid state, he did not really mean she is an apartheid state.
Yeah, well he’s not going to say anything expressly about inborn characteristics of Israel or Jews, but his biases are implied in what he has said about Israel. He sees Israel through the prism of his upbringing.
to expand on this notion of curse of Canaan and slavery of blacks being unrelated, I will note that the curse neither pronounces descendants of Canaan to be in any way inferior nor, in historical practice, has resulted in descendants of Canaan being anybody’s slaves. They may have suffered a great deal from being kicked out by Jews in Palestine and conquered by Hittites in Anatolia (not sure if anything of note happened to the Phoenician branch, unless Phoenicians were actually subsequent invaders like Jews). So yeah, maybe they became “servants” and underdogs on occasion, but slaves they were not. They were a bunch of contemporary civilized nations (granted, with some nasty religious customs) that happened to get the short end of the stick at some point.
In terms of “justice” of the curse, it actually fits in well with the notion of cursing the descendants for the actions of an individual. Only in the case of Ham apparently instead of all four of his sons and their descendants getting cursed just one of them did. Maybe the rest were amnestied
Mocking/exposing his drunken naked father to his brothers
Same as above but also attempting to steal Noah’s “robe of authority”- the garment of skins God gave Adam & Eve & passed down thru the Antediluvian Patriarchs of Genesis 5
Having sex with Noah’s wife (Ham’s Mom or Step-Mom), the result of which was the conception of Canaan
Sexual abuse or castration of Noah
I go with the first & put this spin on the Canaan curse…
Now, I have no idea if this is defensible in the Hebrew, but I wonder if Canaan could have been derived from Cain & thus, Noah could be calling Ham a new Cain for his treachery. Ham took the cursed name as a badge of pride & put it on his son.
I’ve taken the liberty, Ted, of numbering the four ‘interpretations’ (for lack of a better term) you cite, presumably from conservative-Christian Bible studies and such.
It’s my understanding that the Hebrew explicitly says #1; that this is seen by many scholars as euphemistic for #3 or, less commonly, for the molestation aspect of #4 (remember Noah was passed-out drunk at the time). I know of no Scriptural authority or scholarly inference for #2 or the castration aspect of #4 and had never heard of them until your post.
