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You're committing the same form of equivocation I specifically addressed earlier. I made my definition of slavery absolutely clear:
Where in the Bible do they wrestle with it?
I'm not judging the culture that created the Bible, I'm judging the Bible as touted as an inerrent source of absolute morality.
Again, these aren't beliefs I'm ascribing to you. They are beliefs held by some people, and even people who don't necessarily hold those beliefs still try to defend the Bible in its depiction of slavery in ways that I find morally repellent and downplays the obvious immorality of slavery as a whole.
I agree with all of this. The issue I take is with people who are unable or unwilling to accept this nastiness in the Bible, or attempt to downplay it. I see it as no different to trying to justify slavery. The slavery depicted in the Bible isn't justified simply because it's "not as bad as other historical examples of slavery", it's still morally reprehensible, and I would like to think that we've reached that point as a society where we can say, unfalteringly, that this part of the Bible is morally wrong without having to cushion it with weak justifications and appeals to history.
But many people do, and I think it's important to challenge that notion and not enable it by making appeals to try and justify the morally reprehensible parts or passages in the Bible.
I believe it is. I think it's positive only if you choose to ignore the negative parts. You're at risk of committing cognitive dissonance.
Problem is that when you stop looking at it through the eyes of its intended audience you see that it also justifies genocide, rape, slavery and subjugation.
Which is what makes it practically useless - for most counts - when applied to a far more moral society that we have now, and why defending or ignoring the more morally reprehensible parts of it is both a misrepresentation of the text and a potential misuse of the text as a handbook for modern morality.
Actually, with debt-slavery, the one holding the slave did not own that person. Just as companies do not literally "own" their employees. My point was that, in that culture, it was sometimes necessary for a person to "give themselves over" to the one to whom they owed a debt. A better term than "debt-slave" is probably "bond-servant."
Take a look at this excerpt from arguably oone of the most scholarly bible commentaries:
Noted. Thanks for the clarification. I agree.
Again: thanks for the clarification. I agree.
Well... I'm not trying to justify it, so much as explain it, so as to enlighten people to the fact that the bible is not a cut-and-dried proposition. If we can't justify it totally on its humanitarian merits, neither can we totally condemn it for its struggles with slavery. As you noted above (and which I'll paraphrase here) we have to hold the texts gently, and not subject them to some absolute authority or standard. Yes, the bible "condones slavery." But it's not a complete or all-encompassing rubber-stamp for all times, people and places. It's clear that the people who wrote the bible wrestled with the morality of slavery, and I think that's what the texts bring out. So, we can't just make a generalized, blanket statement that "the bible condones slavery," and have that mean something other than what the biblical culture was dealing with.
Right. but again, the temptation is to just write the whole bible off as "useless." We don't want to do that, either, anymore than we want to write off all Muslims as "evil," just because some radical Muslims make life difficult for everyone.
Not really. Because the theological thrust is not that "God kills people." That's mythic imagery to foster the idea that "God is good to us." You're reading mythic, literary devices as either factual history, or cosmological truths. The cosmological truth the bible fosters is that "God loves us."
I don't think so, for the reasons listed above. And, again, as I quoted in my post above, the Jews have always understood the texts through a rabbinic lens -- the texts do not stand on their own, as you're suggesting here.That's precisely why the exegetical process teaches us to constantly police our biases and to practice the art of not looking through our own filters.
For the first part of your statement, I disagree. The truth of love, compassion, mercy, etc. are most useful -- especially in a world where humanity has the technology to completely destroy the earth. For the second part of your statement, I think I agree, with a proviso. While defending and ignoring does misrepresent the text (I think we have to wrestle with the texts in all aspects), I'm not at all convinced that weighing the merits of certain parts over certain other parts represents a "misuse." We weigh texts all the time. Jesus weighed the texts (again, against his rabbinic lens). We need to do the same, in order to glean from them what is best for us. In that way, the "potential misuse of the the text as a handbook for modern morality" is averted.
Then by your standards there are no "true Christians". A Christian is simply someone that says that they believe in the Jesus story and claims to be a Christian. Either one has to include all that say they are Christians or deny that anyone is a Christian.
God, by participating in this world, should be studied, yes? He gives our lives meaning, yes?
But people think it's history, and it shows the ideological lesson that people will bend over backwards to make people like them innocent and "others" guilty, even if the truth is the exact opposite.
Yeah, I mean, Hebrews/Jews weren't big fans of the idea when THEY were the slaves. This is similar to what I just said: justify cruelty to others and give your own peeps some slack. It's wrong. This is why we have MAGA today!
It reminds me of the threads where certain cultures are evil for doing this and that but we aren't because we're awesome.
Unwise people can't hold onto wisdom. My mom can't figure out how to use a basic cellphone. It doesn't mean no one can figure it out. I mean, I'm the one who put in her contact list she never reads.
If it can fit on a bumper sticker, it didn't require much thought. *goes to check if this fits on a bumper sticker LOL*
What if you hate yourself?
Sounds more often like apathy, not mercy.
They wouldn't have slaves since they didn't particularly care for being slaves themselves. How come no one who thinks slavery was fine and dandy ever signs up for the "pleasure"?
How about not having slaves in the first place? The Hebrews were supposedly slaves in Egypt and lived in the most plush, epic landscape in the region, hence all the whining when some murderous religious terrorist drags them out into the desert and keeps them there on what should've been a three hour tour, a three hour ... no, wait, wrong stupid plot...
One wonders if this conversation with the Canaanites would've been more effective:
And what we learn is that xenophobia and quests for religious "purity" will lead to the downfall of a nation within a few generations. Yaaaay?
We have this little genre called SCIFI where we can envision futuristic societies all the time. Hell, most of our modern conveniences were only invented by geeks and nerds who read scifi in the first place. If we can tell of a time when we have electric lighting and cars and trips to outer space (and which became reality), how come God can't give them a heads-up on how to act?
Remember, the kids aren't in concentration camps, just summer camps with chain link fences inside the building.
Calling it divinely inspired is such an unrealistic expectation since God is dumber than most humans (at least as characterized). Fortunately, I believe God is a real entity and not just a literary character so I'm not enslaved to how He's written by a bunch of idiots who just want to make sure people are buying their books.
Exactly. I'm not an atheist and I see the very same problems as you do.
I agree, but c'mon, don't they read like the MAGA folks? No brains and enough nationalism as to qualify for idolatry?
And in those ancient times, they were terrified of slave revolts. Revolts only happen if people are unhappy. Why would they be unhappy, you think?
Some people is not most people. Most people do not think the Bible is historically accurate. And anyway, people will use any sort of reasoning to puff themselves up by putting others down if that's what they need to do to feel better about themselves. I don't see how this has anything to do with the Bible, particularly. Self-righteous biblical interpretation is just one of many warped bits of reasoning that people use to do this.
Do you understand that slavery means "owning another human being as personal property to be bough, sold, traded and inherited"?
But you are not literally owned as legal property by another human, cannot be bought, sold, traded or inherited. You and your family can legally be beaten, raped or forced to marry by your owners. The Bible specifies that all of these things were permitted, and laid down ground rules for how they work.
Your definition just agreed with mine, and yet you keep saying that slavery is equivalent to being a "wage slave". This isn't the slavery talked about in the Bible. The Bible specifically depicts (and endorses) slavery as the owning of another human being as property.
Do you or do you not acknowledge that the Bible specifically instructs people in how they can own, sell, trade, rape and marry slaves - including within it a loophole designed so that the Hebrew people can enslave their fellow Hebrews indefinitely?
Selectively quoting the Bible is dishonest. Here are the next few verses: