Angrillori

Who said anything about impossible?

God included laws against man on man sex, on wearing poly blend clothing, on eating lobster, but not once (not once) writes a law agianst slavery? i think we have a great idea of his sense of priorities.

Moreover, the explicit listings of whom the hebrews may and may not take for slaves, and who may and may not be beaten as a slave, and exactly how hard Hebrews could beat their slaves (quite hard indeed, it turns out) go a long way towards calling into question your assertion of god's opposition to slavery.

God: Well, I'm opposed to slavery, I guess, but I'm REALLY opposed to shellfish. So, I'll let 'em get slaves, beat slaves, inherit slaves, buy and sell slaves, and the like. I'll give 'em all sorts of rules for their slave ownership, but if they eat a shrimp? It's the outskirts of town and the stone pile!

post tenebras lux

Um, but the workers who built the pyramids were not slaves.

BBC linkie.

Also, please note that the labourers were all Egyptian, with no foreigners involved .... So, the Israelites were not involved, whether as slaves or as free men.

mdarus

I think you are right when you say it is about priorities. You are also right that God's priorities in the time of Moses are very different than our priorities today. God/Us. Then/Now. Big differences. If I were God, I would do a lot differently. Didn't they make a movie about that?

There are some discussions where it is hard to think of a value more important than the freedom of the individual. It is also hard to imagine that it is taking so long to get this thing right. What is so important about growing cantelopes in Mexico that thousands of indiginous Mexicans are trapped in squalid migrant worker camps? What was so bad about their life in the jungles of southern Mexico that made this look like a good option? How could slavery ever be a better than any possible alternative? What cold be worse than to be a slave?

mdarus

It's hard to know what to believe on the internet.

Were too.

Please don't read too much seriousness into this response.

Angrillori

The trouble is, that kind of hand waving doesn't eliminate the facts that:

God took a hard line stance against the fundamental evil of wearing clothing made of two materials.
God took a hard line stance against touching women while menstruating.

But when it came to slavery?

Yeah, god explicitly permits it, going so far as to even suggest double-standards of behaviour for slaves of different nationalities, and going so far as to explicitly condone beatings near unto death.

We have people here, online, saying that god has always opposed slavery. Apparently just, you know, sometimes not as much as he opposed wearing cloth of two materials. Even if this god existed, I seriously can't understand why people would consider it remotely worship-able.

Then again, people are trying to compare credit card debt to bronze-age conquest chattel slavery, so maybe I shouldn't be so surprised.

BTW: An obscure reference to one of Jim Carrey's poorer movies is hardly a compelling argument against the case that the god described in the bible is pretty much a fuck up.

As has been said before:
It's a good sign your god's made up when he hates the same people you do.
(Attribution unknown.)

steamer

I'm disgusted with those that try to defend slavery for whatever reason they do it. The simplest of evils cannot be recognized by these people, yet they will tell us they know what the ultimate good is.

NOGO

You are in the wrong century.

Khufu's pyramid (2680 BC) was built way before the time of Exodus. Over a 1000 years before. So it is not hard to believe that Israelites were not involved.

Egyptians stopped building pyramids before the time of Exodus.
King Tut (1350 BC), for example, was buried underground and not in a pyramid.

bajan

I find it incredible that people could continue to be guided by the bible to seek justification in this day & age for slavery. Does this mean that we have learned nothing from the last 2000 years of history? The transatlantic slave trade from C17 to C19 is today recognised as being one of the worst inhumanities humankind has ever commited and yet, at the time, it was condoned by every Christian church with but one or two exceptions.

When are people going to wake up to the fact that scripture may be fine for the moment but that, in this and many other cases, it was not written for today's world. We have moved on.