Then God is by your own description of him evil. There is no moral justification for endorsing slavery under any circumstances.
It’s called “hypocrisy” and “willful blindness”. It was obvious, and still is; but if people don’t want to see the obvious then they won’t.
Which is simply not true. HGs took slaves routinely in battle.
My personal thoughts are that you are a teenager with many years left to learn the ways of the world from others, and that one day you may combine what you have learned from others with your own personal experiences and develop conclusions.
I don’t see it as hypocrisy at all, I just think there was a time when the majority of human thought didn’t consider the context of your actions outside of how they directly affected you or your kin/clansmen/etc.
There’s no real hypocrisy in a slave breaking free only to enslave others. Even while a slave they presumably had no problem with the concept of slavery. To them it was just a matter of power, at one point they had less power than another and were enslaved, but later on they were in a situation where they had more power and used it to enslave others.
It’d be hypocrisy for the idealized Spartacus as portrayed by Kirk Douglas to go around enslaving people, because that guy was advocating the concept of freedom as a universal human good.
However, in reality most slaves weren’t thinking that way.
My personal thoughts are that he should answer questions asked in one thread before abandoning it and opening another, else people conclude his is incapable of answering those questions.
This.
I don’t know if it was hypocrisy or even willful blindness. This isn’t biblical but I keep thinking about that scene in the Iliad with Hector, having just come back from battle, standing on the walls with his wife Adromache and their son Astyanax. Hector voices his concerns about the fate of wife and child should he be slain and the city of Ilium fall to the invaders. He’s worried that his wife will work the looms of another man and that his son will be killed but he doesn’t wish a peaceful life for Astyanax. He wishes that Astyanax grow up to be a warrior even greater than Hector himself. Presumably so that Astyanax can then go out and make the wives of his enemies work his loom and kill their sons. I don’t think it’s so much hypocrisy as it was about how people in the past believed the world worked.
The Bible (by which I mean the OT) was, inter alia, the legal code of a Bronze Age society, and as such was fairly liberal for its time and place. On paper at least, slaves had far more rights in Israel of 1000 BC than they had in Rome one thousand years later, or in Virginia 1800 years after that.
Taking the Bible out of context is a favorite sport of its most ardent proponents *and *opponents.
The Bible endorses slavery, accepts it as normal, tells slaves to obey their masters, tells the Hebrews to take slaves and legally treats the murder of slaves as property crimes. As has been said, the Bible says these things because it represents the prevailing view of the ancient world.
It’s not even the most repugnant, backwards worldview expressed in the Bible. The worst stuff is reserved for women.
Cite? Rome actually had a pretty liberal slave practice. What rights does the Bible give to slaves that Rome did not?
The chattel slave system in the Americas was far more brutal than most of what existed in the ancient world.
How is a Bronze age, or a pre industrial society supposed to function than unless you send over a couple of engineers from today?
No, Hell No, Fuck No, By God No, NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO I hope you get thepoint
Early Christianity was an apocalyptic cult (I don’t use cult in the pejorative sense here). They weren’t really concerned with what was going to happen in the physical world so much as they were concerned with the state of your soul as the end was nigh.
Pay people to do the job instead of using slaves. The slave owners would have been a little poorer, but the ancient society in question would be richer; slavery is economically inefficient. Slaves do inferior work (IIRC one of the first clues that the Egyptian Pyramids weren’t actually built by slaves was that their construction quality was unexpectedly high for slave labor).
Sure, but only a small part of the Bible reflects an early Christian perspective. The bulk of it long predates Christianity.
To the extent that the Bible condones slavery, it is wrong. And it is wrong because it was written by fallible humans, who may have been inspired by God, but were certainly not themselves God.
True, although the pyramids weren’t built by employees, either - their construction was a form of tax payment. I don’t think the concept of employer-employee relationships, in the modern sense, really existed in the ancient world.
Perhaps he’s referring to the practice of freeing Hebrews owned by other Hebrews after 7 years.
In most places the Bible accepts slavery as normal. It never forbids it. However in at least one place God Himself permits soldiers to take female virgins as unwilling wives or concubines so long as they shave the woman’s head and clip her nails (which really why wouldn’t you?) and give her a month to mourn before raping her.
I wrote:
> The only societies that (as a strict rule) never had slavery were hunter-gatherer
> societies.
In reply, Blake wrote:
> Which is simply not true. HGs took slaves routinely in battle.
I was quoting from the Wikipedia entry on the history of slavery:
> Slavery is rare among hunter–gatherer populations, as slavery is a system of
> social stratification.
The Wikipedia entry was quoting (as you can see in footnote 16) from the Britannica entry on slavery:
> It was rare among primitive peoples, such as the hunter-gatherer societies,
> because for slavery to flourish, social differentiation or stratification was
> essential.
You say that you know more about this than Wikipedia or the Britannica. Fine. Give us some examples and some citations.
Those same fallible people also were the one’s who declared it to be inspired by God, it is a human action, and thought. I do not think a Supreme Being who knew and knows all things,and is supposed to be all loving and fair, would inspire a lot of what the Bible teaches, nor would a Good Father (that is supposed to be) treat some of his children any differently than the rest. Nor would that same being pick out certain people to favor. When one can only look at it through the eyes or mind of another human. The writers were themselves trying to make people slaves through guilt! It still goes on today. Many of the religions use guilt, or fear to control people,making mental slaves out of them!
This same God should be able to inspire each person (who he is said to have created), with out the need to have one or 2 people tell them how to act, or what to do.
Paul tells slaves to obey their masters and his writngs are supposed to be inspired!