How can a book that tells you how to treat slaves possibly be valid moral guide

[WesOlsen]

3.slavery pretty awful shit? Compared to what exactly. Genocide? Famine? Anarchy? Against what moral yardstick. A society which has lost its way as badly as ours?

We live in a world where we drone bomb civilians be the thousand and call it war. Where tens of thousands die of starvation while we die from over consumption. Where we spend £30 on a kids cuddly toy which would feed a family in the third world for a month. Where warlords carry out genocides which would warm the cockles of the OT Yahweh's heart, and we ignore it. Where teenagers commit suicide because people say unkind things to them. Yeah, slavery is not a nice idea but considering how fucked and immoral our society is I'm afraid I can't get that worked up about it. So no, I don't particularly have a problem with the Bible not matching up to modern morality because modern morality ain't that special. It just seems that way to us because we're so inordinately proud of the horror we've created. It's like a paedophile taking a morally high stance over wife beating. Neither are moral. Both are funked.

Interesting. So tell me, Jacob: since when did two wrongs make a right?

Seriously, pointing out the problems of the past are how we avoid making them again in the future, and I submit to you that convincing people that this specific book is not a moral guide would be a net good, to begin with.

This basically. Modern morality is as varied as the mixed morality in the bible. You're simply comparing different things that 'have been' rather than things that we can all agree 'should be'. By making these distinctions in your post, you're basically highlighting things that you think are bad, and I completely agree with all of them. Like you I think that wars and famine are terrible terrible things, so as Esquillax points out, the only way we can improve shared morality is by making sure we don't repeat the mistakes of old.