Isn’t pantheism the same thing as atheism?

[Angrboda]

The same kind of dispensation that beating them as long as they didn't immediately die was.  Every axial religion has posited that there's nothing wrong with slavery, the belief that there could be good or bad slave owners, and a system of laws to standardize that, is a comment on them as people, not on the institution.  

There is absolutely no point in trying to sanitize our slaving gods history.  Each and every tale served as a way to explain and justify and enshrine the current state of political affairs and authority, and insomuch as slavery was the norm in the axial shift, slavery is a norm to regulate in axial religions - not an evil to eliminate.

It would be a rookie mistake....or an apologists lifeline... to refer to what a culture believed about the appropriate treatment of their own ingroup (or buy-in group) as their position on the institution of slavery.  Just as it would be a rookie mistake or an apologists lifeline to assume that a suggestion born out of virtue seeking establishes the evil of it's content.  It's good to treat your slaves well and to free slaves not because slavery is bad, but because doing either of those things was perceived to be detrimental to the owner.  The virtue is sacrifice and inconvenience, not kindness or freedom granting.  The hilarity is compounded when we begin to consider a religion that made an appeal to slaves as a lever of social and political control over their betters.

Nonetheless, there's more nuance than he acknowledged, and even ingroup exception shows that they knew that being a slave was undesirable and were taking that into account.