(May 20, 2015 at 1:50 pm)Freedom4me Wrote: 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?Bad example. When the Israelites attack the Midianites (Numbers 31) they are ordered to kill the men, women, and boys and take the virgin girls "for [them]selves." Which means rape or slavery or both. So I think they covered all of the possible alternatives to slavery. I don't think it's that the old testament treats slavery as less wicked than other actions; I think that the view was that certain things (mass-slaughter, pillage, rape, slavery, etc) were only really bad when they happened to other tribes. And hey, if their gods couldn't stop our god, then they deserved whatever they got.
"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
