(December 19, 2014 at 4:34 pm)Drich Wrote: Mindless selfrighteous name calling, all of you!I didn't name call, I addressed your responses. As for your links, you are referring to exploitation of workers, which can be likened to slavery. But you imply that we support slavery directly by purchasing goods that may have been produced this way. For one, I don't see how this amounts to direct support for slavery. As you know, the USA abolished legal slavery, and many of the companies that seek to use cheap labor abroad (such as Nike) have faced repeated backlash for it, even after they have announced efforts to improve the conditions of workers.
You claim that slavery is okay as long as it is regulated, yet the regulations in the Bible are sparse. They do make a few things clear: slaves are property, and they can literally be beaten within a day of their lives, so long as the owner doesn't knock an eye or some teeth out. If they marry while a slave, their wives and offspring are the property of their owner. If the slave is a girl sold by her father, she can be returned for a refund or handed over to her master's son as a wife, but she has fewer options for freedom than a man does.
If the best you can come up with is "you guys also support slavery when you buy bananas" then you must realize how bad that looks, when you are comparing that to the actions and attitudes of god, who could have easily abolished slavery with a wave of his hand. But no, he "regulates" it. In other words, god doesn't sound much better than those exploitative human governments that keep slaves or force the poor into slave-like conditions. But his hands are clean because he doesn't buy bananas in the USA, I guess.
"Well, evolution is a theory. It is also a fact. And facts and theories are different things, not rungs in a hierarchy of increasing certainty. Facts are the world's data. Theories are structures of ideas that explain and interpret facts. Facts don't go away when scientists debate rival theories to explain them. Einstein's theory of gravitation replaced Newton's in this century, but apples didn't suspend themselves in midair, pending the outcome. And humans evolved from ape- like ancestors whether they did so by Darwin's proposed mechanism or by some other yet to be discovered."
-Stephen Jay Gould
-Stephen Jay Gould