(January 10, 2015 at 9:05 am)abaris Wrote:(January 10, 2015 at 8:52 am)fr0d0 Wrote: In the Bible God is promoting fairness towards slaves. Slavery as practiced was the cultural norm. The ruling classes abuse everyone as much as they can get away with.
Let's go there for a second and assume that god and not men promoted something. His take on slavery is bad enough. You were allowed to beat your slaves within an inch of their lives and only if they died immediately some form of punishment were to take place. If the slave survived for another couple of days and died afterwards, it's no big deal.
There are also several verses about slaves having to obey their masters no matter how cruel they turned out to be.
Yes, we're all aware that slavery was part of the game in these days, but we're talking about divine commands by a supposedly supreme being, which should be above human morality. The fact that this being simply acts in a very human way, according to the time in question points to human creating these guidelines without a divine will guiding their hands.
Gods people weren't doing what God wanted. They consulted him on what they should do, and his advice as they saw it was to treat those in your care better. If God wanted to write slavery out if reality, like many other evils, he could have. But without choice to do good or evil there is no choice. Just robots. Not sentient beings.