(January 13, 2012 at 2:27 pm)organiccornflake Wrote: God is a perfect Creaure. Modern slavery is immoral. God supports slavery... Hmmm... two of those statements seem to contradict. Therefore; something must give. You cannot read 3000 year old text through the eyes of a modern culture; surely you must realize this? You must read it through the eyes of the culture that it was written for. I have given you scripture that shows that slaves get at least one mandatory day off, are sold (or sell themselves) into slavery as a means of survival, they aren't allowed to be forcibly taken into slavery, they shouldn't ever be killed over refusing to work, if they are blinded or harmed irreversibly as a result of a beating their contract is broken and are to be set free, and that they were to be no more than lightly punished for unwittingly making a mistake. Does that sound like your slavery? You laugh that this has turned into an argument of definitions; when really that is the most important aspect.
And you and others have completely missed the biggest point of all:
One thing I've been asked frequently is how can an atheist have morals without god. Theists have made the point that god is the ultimate arbitraitor of all morality. It's why humans go to hell at all. Without god, there are no morals.
Nowadays, humans view slavery as wrong.
In the bible, this was not the case.
There is a disconnect. That disconnect is that humans are more moral than god.
I need you to think and allow that statement to sink in because there are other things as well - like gender equality, views on rape and treatment of women, philosophy, the views on what is fair and justice, and many other things that humans have evolved to be better at than what is depicted in the bible.
According to you theists, god is omnipotent and omnicient (therefore, he can't be surprised because he is 100% aware of the future) and this book that makes no condemnation of slavery or rape and has a gross inequality between the genders and states of human sexuality and yet despite the fact that this book of ultimate moral authority was written by a being with what is supposed to be omnicience, our views on the above have changed. Our morals have changed. The bible has not and god's cannot.
Therefore, there is no god.
If today you can take a thing like evolution and make it a crime to teach in the public schools, tomorrow you can make it a crime to teach it in the private schools and next year you can make it a crime to teach it to the hustings or in the church. At the next session you may ban books and the newspapers...
Ignorance and fanaticism are ever busy and need feeding. Always feeding and gloating for more. Today it is the public school teachers; tomorrow the private. The next day the preachers and the lecturers, the magazines, the books, the newspapers. After a while, Your Honor, it is the setting of man against man and creed against creed until with flying banners and beating drums we are marching backward to the glorious ages of the sixteenth centry when bigots lighted fagots to burn the men who dared to bring any intelligence and enlightenment and culture to the human mind. ~Clarence Darrow, at the Scopes Monkey Trial, 1925
Politics is supposed to be the second-oldest profession. I have come to realize that it bears a very close resemblance to the first. ~Ronald Reagan
Ignorance and fanaticism are ever busy and need feeding. Always feeding and gloating for more. Today it is the public school teachers; tomorrow the private. The next day the preachers and the lecturers, the magazines, the books, the newspapers. After a while, Your Honor, it is the setting of man against man and creed against creed until with flying banners and beating drums we are marching backward to the glorious ages of the sixteenth centry when bigots lighted fagots to burn the men who dared to bring any intelligence and enlightenment and culture to the human mind. ~Clarence Darrow, at the Scopes Monkey Trial, 1925
Politics is supposed to be the second-oldest profession. I have come to realize that it bears a very close resemblance to the first. ~Ronald Reagan
