Right, and the Ammonites. So remember, if you sleep with one of your parents, your kids will look like this:
So that wasn’t exactly condoned. However, God blessed the union of Abraham and Sarah, who both had the same father.
So Lot’s story doesn’t condone incest after all; only the offering up of your own daughters for gang rape.
I guess it’s just a perk of having blind faith. They don’t need to “deal” with it at all. It can be just written off as god’s will or they can just selectively ignore it and just focus on the warm fuzzy parts they like.
I agree with DrFidelius. The Bible may allow slavery but it doesn’t require it. So we’re free to ban slavery for secular reasons without there being any religious issue.
If instead of the word allow we use the word condone, it changes things a lot, doesn’t it? And it’s a little more accurate too.
All the various sects/denominations have simply been picking and choosing for 2000 years, so you’ll have to ask a specific denomination that question to get an answer that is only definitive for that denomination, alone. If you’re looking for a Christianity-wide answer, the answer is ‘there ain’t one’. Sorry. Consistency isn’t Christianity’s strong suit.
It seems like a huge issue to us because we consider slavery to be such a major sin and we question the morality of any religion that allows it. But theologically, it’s essentially a non-issue. Because Christian dogma doesn’t require slavery, there’s no need to “explain” it away. It’s worth remembering that this only became a moral issue in the historically recent past - nobody felt a need to explain how Christianity allowed slavery a couple of hundred years ago.
Sharing is Caring.
Well, I really don’t want this to get into a bash the Christians thread, I really wanted to just find out how some Christians rationalized it.
Apparently, that means almost just ignoring it for some people. If that works for you, more power to you. It certainly doesn’t help sell me on the religion when many of its adherents will take great pains to use the book as a way to demonize certain people or actions, but are able to ignore - I guess through cognitive dissonance? - that the Bible screwed up on one of the easiest, slam dunk issues of morality you could imagine.
There ain’t no thou shalt not enslave people. And that’s messed up.
No wonder Ralph Waldo Emerson, who encouraged people to build their own religious system, was an abolitionist. If you filter things through your own critical thinking framework you may find truth - but if your efforts focus on justifying why others have/haven’t made certain statements you’ll wind up defending a dogma with little (if any) spiritual gain.
Well, jeez, if that’s all you wanted to know, you sure took the long way around. Instead of asking about slavery, and dealing with all the hairsplitting about whether the Bible allows or condones it, why not ask about the stuff it mandates, like executing homosexuals, or executing wives who can’t prove, an unspecified time after the fact, that they were virgins when they married, or executing women who get raped within the city limits?
Those issues are cut and dried, black and white. And they have to do with morality, not diet or ceremony, so presumably they are still part of God’s eternal wisdom. Christians claim they are free of Jewish Law (an idea of Paul’s that directly contradicts what Jesus said, but never mind), so I guess they are no longer obligated to execute rape victims, but if they believe in an absolute standard of morality, then they have to believe it’s the right thing to do.
If not, if they can just pick and choose which of Yaweh’s moral commandments they are comfortable with, then where is their absolute morality? How are they any different than an atheist who thinks murder and stealing is wrong, but that premarital sex should not be a capital offense?
The examples you give aren’t moral laws so much as they are criminal/civil laws. Every organized society, including certainly ours, has a law code. A Christian literalist can, without inconsistency, believe that the OT Law was given by God to the society of the ancient Israelites without believing that we are, or are meant to be, living under it
today, as individuals or as a society.
Where the inconsistency or the picking-and-choosing comes in is when they start trying to enforce parts of the OT Law while ignoring others.
This is not true.Deuteronomy 22:23 If a man happens to meet in a town a virgin pledged to be married and he sleeps with her, 24 you shall take both of them to the gate of that town and stone them to death—the young woman because she was in a town and did not scream for help, and the man because he violated another man’s wife. You must purge the evil from among you.
This is talking about consensual sex. The point about screaming for help is that if she says “OH, no, I didn’t consent, he forced me” the reply would be- “why didn’t you scream for help?” And note the seduced gets stoned also. Not just the seducee.
Correct. If you rape a betrothed woman, only the rapist gets punshed:
25 But if a man finds the betrothed maiden in the open country and the man seizes her and lies with her, then only the man who lay with her shall die.
That’s why it’s always best to find totally single women that has been saving herself when looking for a rape victim. Especially if she can cook.
*28 If a man finds a girl who is a virgin, who is not betrothed, and he seizes her and lies with her and they are found,
29 Then the man who lay with her shall give to the girl’s father fifty shekels of silver, and she shall be his wife, because he has violated her; he may not divorce her all his days.*
Well, it’s the good book, not the * great* book.
Right. If she didn’t scream for help, the little slut wanted it. Because it is absolutely impossible to choke, or gag, or knock unconscious, or threaten with a knife, or otherwise prevent a woman from screaming.
ETA: Does your interpretation really fix things? Is it really that much better to execute someone for adult consensual sex?
He can evidently believe it, but not without inconsistency. IMO.
^ Especially given that everything the NT says about slavery seems to condone it.
Ephesians 6:5
Slaves, obey your earthly masters with respect and fear, and with sincerity of heart, just as you would obey Christ.
1 Timothy 6:1-2
All who are under the yoke of slavery should consider their masters worthy of full respect, so that God’s name and our teaching may not be slandered. 2 Those who have believing masters should not show them disrespect just because they are fellow believers. Instead, they should serve them even better because their masters are dear to them as fellow believers and are devoted to the welfare[a] of their slaves.
Luke 12:47-48
“The servant who knows the master’s will and does not get ready or does not do what the master wants will be beaten with many blows. 48 But the one who does not know and does things deserving punishment will be beaten with few blows. From everyone who has been given much, much will be demanded; and from the one who has been entrusted with much, much more will be asked.
Okay, I’ll bite: where’s the inconsistency?
Well, the first two are credited to Paul, and I believe we have already established that he was a bit of an ass who let his personal prejudices overrule anything written by anyone who actually, you know, *heard *Jesus during His earthly ministry.
The third is clearly a metaphor - “You know how you don’t beat up your servant who screws up because you didn’t give him clear instructions? Well, I’m giving you clear instructions here, and if you still screw up I will be all over you like wouldn’t believe.”
IMO it’s bogus to distinguish between criminal law and moral law, in the context of the Mosaic Law. I have no problem distinguishing ceremonial and dietary laws from moral laws, but criminal acts are, in general, immoral. I realize that we can both think of examples of stupid laws from modern idiots who went overboard, but I doubt that a devout Christian will be putting God Almighty in that category. Presumably, if God made laws against certain sexual acts, then by definition, he deemed them immoral. If he made them capital crimes, then either they were very immoral, or he is grossly unjust.