Why would any woman want to be Christian?

[Esquilax]

This is objectionable against the modern understanding of marriage. How do you know this is wrong. I see this verse as regulating slavery and providing protections for females who are sold as slaves. While this may not be appetizing to people who are used to living in a society in which this is no longer necessary, the intention of the scripture is clearly not to exacerbate the conditions of female slavery but to regulate them and make them easier to endure. In the ancient world, people would be sold into slavery because of war or famine, it was common in all cultures. It took many, many centuries for slavery to be illegal.

The burden is on the atheist to show how slavery could have been abolished in the ancient world.

Okay, I'm going to try not to put words in your mouth, so before I go any further with this I'm going to ask you: do you believe that your god's morality is unchanging and correct?

Obviously your answer to the latter part will be yes, but what of the former? I assume- for now- a yes too, because if you say no you're venturing into moral relativism and your position isn't as strong as you keep claiming it is. But if it's a yes, and god's morality is unchanging, then you're left with two unfortunate options: either god endorses slavery, in which case he is despicable and I am more moral than he, or you're left with this strange scenario in which god is against slavery but doesn't do anything about it at all, which seems to be where you're going.

You rationalize this by saying that since it was a thing already happening then god's guidelines are moral because they limit damage, but that makes no sense, does it? I mean, not only is your god powerful enough to do things about it, and has written a book of moral guidelines that could, if he so wished, have included a blanket prohibition on slavery like it does the worship of graven images, but even within the context of the biblical canon god has no problems with extending his power to deal with immorality. He struck down Sodom and Gommorah, as anti-gay bigots are so fond of pointing out. And didn't he flood the world for immorality too?

On the one hand you're saying slavery is bad, but you're making excuses that make no sense for the god who outright endorses it. How do you deal with a contradiction in actions like this?

Speaking of Sodom and Gomorrah, can we talk about Lot offering up his virgin daughters for gang rape in this conversation on biblical sexism? Wasn't that all sort of cool with god, since he allowed Lot to leave Sodom alive?

In addition, when you add to the fact that slavery is not a concept that emerges out of the atheist understanding of the natural world or from a trivial appreciation of ethics, you see that the way that the slavery objection typical functions is more to an appeal of the moral authority that abolitionists have in Christian societies. Atheists rely on the fact that slavery has been abolished in Christian countries to justify their absolutist views about morality. This is of course preposterous, why should the moral norms of Christian societies at an advanced stage be used as evidence to condemn theistic societies of the past in a different economic and social stage.

So, is god's morality unchanging or not? Are you saying slavery was moral in the past? Or just that human development wasn't sufficient yet? If it's the latter... seriously, you have a fucking omnipotent and apparently omnibenevolent god: why is he so serious about the graven images and the gay people, but apparently he's willing to be lax about this whole slavery thing?

The atheist has no evidence to universalize their rejection of slavery but instead makes a pathetic appeal to peoples deep seated sense of national pride. The argument fails because it was never a real philosophical argument to begin with, it is mere propaganda.

Have you not been listening to a single answer people give you when you question secular morality? I believe this canard has been answered: empathy and mutual agreement. Slavery does not aid society as a whole, and we as humans are capable of being compassionate because we can empathize. Now, are you just ignoring our answers in order to perpetuate your ignorant strawmen, or are you just not reading this stuff?

This is a total misreading of scripture. This shows that you are just cut and pasting difficult passages without even considering the context or what scripture intends to say. The Old Testament condemns rape with the death penalty, see Deut 28.

It also says that a woman must marry her rapist... and, oh yeah: god the smiter was pretty forgiving on the men who gang raped a helpless woman in that passage, yet he'll (to stick with Lot) kill his wife just for looking back. Bleat about context all you want, it changes nothing.

None of this proves the point you are trying to make. You are appealing to a sense of cultural uneasiness with a male dominated society. I would say this sense of uneasiness is well placed. History has shown that men are constantly willing to use their positions of influence to abuse women.

Which, oddly enough, god allows. Nice guy, that one.

That said, this does not prove that there is no natural order that tends to exalt men to leadership positions. Biology would tend to say that there is. The atheist approach to feminism, of course, is not based on biology, or really even based on feminism, it is a crude mix of appeals to political propaganda while cynically promoting pornography and sensuality while ignoring the scientific evidence that is used elsewhere to discredit religious belief. The atheist thrives where demands for consistency are relaxed and he/she is permitted to pick and choose what is desirable to make the point. Biology and history, however, would seem to say that men and women are different and almost always occupy different roles. I do not think this means that God necessarily binds all women to certain positions in all societies, but this is the way that it has played out.

I am beginning to have second thoughts about rebutting someone as deranged as you...

The Old Testament punishes adultery with death, as it punishes many crimes with death. This does not prove anything about a misogynistic bias in scripture, it is true that the Old Testament punishes some crimes more severely than the modern world does. How do you intend to say that this is wrong, let alone that it is biased against women?

Oh! Oh! I know this one!

Because in that passage the woman is being put to death for not screaming loud enough as she is being raped, you blithering sociopath.

And, once again, would not a god cool with making blanket demands to worship nobody but him, who murders people for immorality all the time, be able to stop this kind of punishment if he found it to be immoral? So either he thinks it's moral, or he's uninterested. Neither is a good outcome for your supposedly good god.

I could keep going, but... well, your casual sexism and apologetics over immorality disgust me.