(October 12, 2021 at 11:38 am)ayost Wrote: Fair enough to your first sentence. I can see that you're trying to have a standard and apply it objectively. That standard only works when people like you and I are policing each other. Once an crazy dictator comes along the system gets dicey. Obviously, your standards assume not a crazy dictator, haha. Unless you're actually Kim Jong-un and I don't know it, haha.
As I see it, there are two ways to get a dictator in control of a country: military might or voting.
I don't really know how the North Korean dictatorship began, but I guess it had something to do with WW2.
Speaking of, Hitler was voted in.
Mussolini too.
Salazar too.
Recently, in Afghanistan, we saw how military might does it.
Still, in most cases, there is the support (or at least the lack of hindrance) of the people. And the people have that societal morality I spoke of earlier.
(October 12, 2021 at 11:38 am)ayost Wrote: I think we can agree it's an abuse of the Bible in your second sentence. I don't think we should use this kind of argument because you and I know the difference. For example, I don't fault atheists because Jeffrey Dahmer used atheism to validate eating people. Clearly that's an abuse of atheism.
Abusive or not, the argument stuck around the US for a long long time. There was even a war about it, right?
If there is such potential for ambiguity built into the bible, perhaps it's best not to hold it up as the standard, don't you think?
(October 12, 2021 at 11:38 am)ayost Wrote: It was definitely limited by law to 6 years, so it could not be indefinite.
6 years...
Let's try to think about this in present-day terms...
The average US annual income is around $65k. 6 years of slavery represents $390k of wages that the person has no access to. Certainly, I hope the "law" would impose the "lords" to provide housing, feeding and hygiene to the slaves, right? So I guess we can subtract $10k/year and another $10k on food and stuff, making it a grand total of $390k - $120k = $270k.
What kind of debt can be worth that much???
Nowadays, I can only think of buying a home.
Even just a year of slavery would represent a debt of $45k. I can't believe that there would be so many people racking up that amount of debt that it would require regulation in the religious book.
The alternative is that the kind of slavery you don't like was being regulated too.
I don't like any kind of slavery and the idea of regulating it in a religious text only lowers any morality that the text may have. Like I said before, a god that allows slavery is not a god that I want to ever follow.
(October 12, 2021 at 12:16 pm)ayost Wrote: FWIW, bc I hate to see you guys waste your time, I scroll past every post except procaracas without even reading it.
Why?!!
You're in a forum, it's to get different opinions from strangers on the internet, is it not?
If you just wanted a one-on-one, why not start an email convo with someone like Bart Ehrman?
