The Immorality of God - Slavery in the Old Testament

[downbeatplumb]

Free Will is all fine and good, until you realize that God allegedly drowned 99% of the planet to get them to act the way he wanted.  When people didn't act the way he wanted them to, he'd kill them.  At the very least he could have told them "END SLAVERY NOW" and if they didn't listen, put a blight on them or something.  Or I don't know, at the very least it'd be recorded that he said it.  Jesus could have easily said it.  Jesus could have talked about the evils of sexism and racism and slavery.  But he didn't.  Apparently they were less important than a fig tree.  He certainly could have said more than "Don't hit your slaves too bad now, you hear?"  I mean Jesus would have to be omniscient, or else he couldn't know that he was god.  Which means he'd have known about what slavery eventually becomes.  If Jesus was not omniscient, then how did he know he was god?

<sigh>

No, Cecelia, that isn't exactly what happened. 

God chose to reboot the planet because mankind had gone astray. It's His computer, He wrote the program, and He can ctrl-alt-del if He wants to. The fact that He wanted to shows just how bad things had become. Later, He used a different plan - sending His son - to redeem sinners. Why no second flood? Clearly, He thought the situation was salvageable.

Now, you ask why Jesus didn't give more specific instructions. Well, this would have required that he provide a clear guideline for every conceivable issue that mankind had or would ever face. Abortion? What did Jesus say? Gay marriage? What did Jesus say? Stem cell research? What did Jesus say? A gospel the size of a set of encyclopedias wouldn't have been sufficient to hold all the possible rules and regulations we'd need to cover every eventuality. And we'd still be arguing over what a particular verse meant, how it should be applied in modern society, and whether we could really be sure that the terabyte-length scriptures weren't just a bunch of corrupted fairy tales told by "bronze-age goat herders" anyway.

Instead, He gave us two rules to focus on:

1. Love God. 
   
2. Love your neighbor as yourself.
   

It's a good thing that Jesus didn't bury us with more specific rules as you demand. 

We seem to be having enough trouble following these two.

Enforced love, coz that always works[/sarcasm]