The question that makes fundies hostile

[MitchBenn]

Please define slavery.

Work for nothing more than is needed to keep you alive.

Pretty much what the greedy Western money worshippers force upon slum dwellers in India and Bangladesh and China. Work or die.

Same as in ancient times when rich powerful countries dominated the weak.
Sounds just like Darwinian natural selection.

Perhaps we should be asking atheists to explain slavery to US instead of the other way around.

The biblical context of slavery is "harm minimisation" of an EXISTING practical reality - not an endorsement of it.

To say that the bible supports slavery is like saying that government funded safe injecting rooms for heroin users amounts to...encouraging ppl to use heroin.

So wait, GOD is powerless to alter "existing practical realities", merely to suggest ways to ameliorate them?

God, who by his word created the universe and all things in it, who can bend the laws of time and space to hold the sun still in the sky, who can raise the dead and part the seas, GOD, when confronted with the human institution of slavery, thinks "Well there's nothing I can do about that. Better just issue some guidelines as to how to do it nicely."

What's that? Free will, you say?

Fine, then couldn't he at least have condemned it? Even if it's against his "rules" (and we'll overlook for now the ridiculousness of the being who can bend reality to his will being bound by "rules") to actually change the MINDS of men to understand the immorality of slavery, he could have said something - ANYTHING - to express his disapproval?

You're not going to tell me that God's reluctant to say so when he disapproves of something? That this also contravenes his rules?

Have the integrity to admit that the Bible is at least passively pro-slavery, and the REASON it's pro-slavery is that it is NOT the work of a morally perfect God, but the work of MEN. Morally fallible men, who, well-meaning as they may have been, WERE a product of the mores and standards of their time, and could no more conceive of a world without slavery than they could conceive of air conditioning.