(May 20, 2015 at 3:33 am)robvalue Wrote: The bible endorses slavery, it gives you instructions on where you're allowed to buy slaves from, how much you can beat them etc. It never once says it is wrong. And the bible is not shy about saying what it thinks is wrong.
Any civilised person would hopefully agree slavery is immoral. Therefor, the bible supports either immorality, or a bygone morality system of no relevance today. The only way to find out which bits are moral and which aren't, is to apply our own morality. Blindly accepting it would lead us to continue with slavery, so I think that's a very bad idea.
The result? People justify what they think is moral by finding bits of the bible they think sound similar. They find excuses for why the bible doesn't really mean what it seems to mean in all cases where they disagree. In other words, they are entirely ignoring the bible and using their own morality. They are saying they know better than God, and they are right, in most cases. But sometimes, a good person may do a bad thing because religion endorses it, that they wouldn't otherwise do.
I think that in biblical times, slavery was quite often the most obvious and practical alternative to something far worse. For example, when one tribe went to war against another tribe and all of the men of the losing tribe were killed-off in the fighting, the care of the women and children of the defeated tribe would probably have been deemed an unbearable burden by the victorious tribe. What should the victors do with them? Kill them too? Maybe they don't have to be killed. Speaking for myself, if I could remain alive by working as a slave rather than die because the absence of slavery means I'm nothing but a hindrance to the victorious tribe, I would wish that slavery existed for my own survival...unless my treatment as a slave was really brutal. So, although I wouldn't want to put a smiley face on slavery even in those days, I can understand that in ancient times there were often no good alternatives to slavery.
