Slavery

[midori]

You see we’ve become enlightened enough to not demand physical punishments for financial losses. And God, all knowing and all seeing, would have had a chance to see that enlightenment for himself. There is no excuse for God (if he were to exist) to not lay out a society that the Church sees as good now.

But where do you get this idea that we’re enlightened? We’re not. We’re the same selfish, self-centered people we’ve always been. We’re still very much the strong vs the weak. But the difference is in God and his relationship with us.

If all Jesus had to do was die for our sins, why not just let Herod kill him when he was a little baby, and be done with it? But instead, what did he do? He spent three years preaching about The Kingdom of God, and giving us a clearer picture about our relationship with God, God’s relationship with us, and our relationships with each other. That’s the whole point of why slavery pretty much vanished from Christian society-- because you can’t feel comfortable “owning” someone you believe is your brother in Christ. And it’s also why slavery still is firmly entrenched in other parts of the world-- the Middle East, Indonesia, etc.

It’s easy to grant total strangers the concept of things like “human dignity” and stuff like that. But when their choices, and how they choose to run their lives, personally affects you— yeah, it gets a whole lot harder. The next shining example from the rogues’ gallery—

She was a 30-something yo from New England. She had a bad-news boyfriend, but wanted to “start over”. I had enough experience to know that in reality, no matter how good her intentions, they’d probably reconcile, and he’d probably end up moving in. But I didn’t have any solid reason to reject her-- she screened on paper-- and so I figured I’d at least give her the chance.

We went to sign and pay move-in funds. Oh, wait. She didn’t have full move-in funds. Normally, that’s where I would pack up my papers and say, “Thanks for your time. Let me know when your financials are in order, and we can talk.” But I knew she had three little kids, and the place she was coming from was the local slumlord, and I knew what kind of condition his houses were in…

Of course, she never paid those missing funds. She moved in trashy boyfriend before two weeks passed. She never paid the next month’s rent. Trashy friends came and broke down the steel door ($200 + install costs) trying to retrieve some stolen property, which I discovered when I came to give her notice that she needed to go. She explained how her 18-yo kid was coming to join her from New England, and he was going to get a job, and they were going to pool their resources… I’m like, “Pay everything by [date], and we’ll be cool.” “What if I can’t get everything paid?” I know what it looks like when someone is “working with” me, and I know what it looks like when someone is not “working with” me. “Do your best, and we’ll see how things look.” Of course, she didn’t pay a penny…

She ends up abandoning everything in her house and flying back to New England on her 18yo’s dime, leaving her 18yo in possession of the house. She dumps her other kids on various people. I should kick out the 18yo, who isn’t on the lease, and never would have passed screening, but he seems to be making a good try at it, so I give him a chance and mentor him as best I can. He’s a former gang member just fresh from lockup, and has been very much a case of the mind being willing, but the flesh being weak… Guess how much he owes me by this point, but I think we’re making progress in the right direction…

I realize Mom’s problems extended to being a meth addict. The sewers are backing up. I roto-root them… they’re full of flushed condoms and stuff. $80, plus $70 for a yard faucet that they broke. The toilet still gives problems. I get the plumber to use the commode rod. $40. The toilet still gives problems. We pull it and scope it. Flushed needles. $150 for a new toilet.

Mom comes back from New England within a month. She sells her $650 iPhone7 for meth and then claims to have been mugged for it. The phone bill is in 18yo’s name, so guess who gets to pay that off for the next 4 or 5 years? And the phone itself gets turned into a brick— because it’s been reported as stolen. I tell her, “I’ve evicted you. You’re not living here.” And so she takes all her furniture (which she had abandoned, along with her kid) and leaves her kid with nothing— no couch, no bed, no nothing— and moves in with trashy boyfriend.

 

[midori]

Where is her dignity? Her dignity as a mother— oops, she shoved her kids off on other people because she couldn’t take care of them. And the older one, she cut loose, and did everything possible to hamstring his future as a possibly-useful ordinary Joe-Blo. She doesn’t honor her contracts-- she lies to me about money, she lies to the police and the phone company about the phone, she doesn’t have a scrap of honor left. Meth is more important to her than having a family, having a home, having food, having electricity, and having water.

Me? I don’t like her. I don’t respect her. But I recognize that (a) she’s a child of God, just as much as I am, and (b) Jesus died to redeem her just as much as Jesus died to redeem me. And just as much as she separates herself from humanity by her abysmally poor life choices, I separate myself from God in just the same way with my own brand of selfishness. And so I see myself reflected in her, and I try to do better in my own way. And-- keeping in mind the parable above-- I regulate my disdain and feeling of “you owe me $x,xxx”, which are perfectly normal reactions to have when people owe you large sums of dinero. If I didn’t have the worldview from Christianity that gives me the perspective of (a) and (b), why would I not be justified in viewing her as having somewhat less intrinsic dignity than a horse or a cow, which at least are useful occupiers of space?

But if this were another time, another place, another culture-- you bet I-- or someone else-- would totally own her by this point, too. And her kids. And they’d probably be better off with me— actually having food in the fridge and in their stomachs, instead of spending it on meth! and having electricity and water, instead of getting it shut off for nonpayment! and having rent, because obviously, left to her own devices, she’s one of those let’s-cram-three-generations-into-a-two-room-shack kind of lifestyle.

But hey. She has her poverty, but at least she has her scraps o’ freedom, right?

But we all have our scraps o’ freedom. And how do we use it? We each have our own things we choose to squander it on. We might not enslave ourselves to meth-- but we all enslave ourselves to something. And that’s sort of the point that God makes-- God isn’t as much concerned with the details of here-and-now, as much as he is in how the here-and-now affects the bigger picture of eternity. As one saint put it, “In light of heaven, the worst suffering on earth will be seen to be no more serious than one night in an inconvenient hotel.”

 

[e_c]

We could say the same about other topics like polygamy and the submission of wives to husbands

Exactly. Another example of “god says one thing and evolved human morality says another.”

Every day we hear some Christian talk about marriage being “one man and one woman” but in scripture I see supposedly godly men with many wives and concubines! Which is it? How can masturbation be sinful while having a dozen women to have sex with but not marry is fine for David, Solomon, etc.?

My point is that people claim they get morality from god, or scripture, but they clearly (and thankfully!) do not.

You want to have all the answers at once, when in fact searching out these topics takes much time and effort in study, which you don’t seem to care to do. Do you know there are levels or degrees of the natural law (read St. Thomas on polygamy)? Can you really draw no distinction between polygamy and self abuse (think office vs. faculty)? And you have not even put forth a single verse for examination.

I don’t think I will be contributing further to this thread.

 

[Mike_from_NJ]

Who says he’s serving his six years without his wife and children?

I didn’t say that he wasn’t with his family during those six years. I said that after those six years the male Hebrew slave would then have to make the choice of either leaving on his own or submit to blackmail and stay a slave forever with his family. This is the best plan God could conceive. .

 

[Mike_from_NJ]

midori, I’m sorry for what happened to you; but I in no way said that we had reach the apex of human dignity. We are more enlightened on the topic of slavery than the God character is in the Bible.

Just because we still have a great way to go until we are truly enlightened, your story is completely unrelated to why God would look to increase misery and evil in the world. An all-loving God would in no way endorse the practice.

 

[Dodge_pursuit]

e-c said:

*** And you have not even put forth a single verse for examination.

---

Actually, I put five precise scripture verses in the start of this topic. And I made reference to many others without quoting them. And you know quite well (if you have read the book) what verses apply to the more general ideas and points being made here by me and others. Don’t pretend answers are not forthcoming because those asking are not being clear.

It’s just excuses, excuses, rationalizations, accusations… the usual.

I’m unsubscribing. It’s silly.

 

[midori]

I didn’t say that he wasn’t with his family during those six years. I said that after those six years the male Hebrew slave would then have to make the choice of either leaving on his own or submit to blackmail and stay a slave forever with his family. This is the best plan God could conceive. .

But you keep missing the part where it says, “Your female slave, also, you shall treat in the same way.” There’s no gender differences in how servitude is structured for male or female slaves amongst the Hebrew people. There are, however, nationality differences between Israelite and foreigner.

In the ancient world, if you had freedom, you could lose it so easily. Take Ancient Egypt, for example. Permanent slaves included things like war captives. Or people would sell themselves and their families to wipe out their debt. Or, if a person wasn’t able to provide sufficient food or shelter for himself, he was allowed to sell himself into slavery-- and he would gain those things in exchange for giving up his freedom.

But with the Hebrews, God puts limits on it. Rather than wiping it out all at once, he says, “Remember, you were once slaves in Egypt. So because of that memory, we’re going from generational slavery to a form of indentured servitude. Let’s emphasize the virtue of charity here, by being charitable to your neighbor, and to the poor, and the widowed, and the orphan.” Once we get that lesson down, we’re able to progress to the next concept of “whatsoever you do to the least of my people, so you do unto me”.

If you remember the story of the Rape of Dinah, what happened? Her brothers ended up murdering however many men, sacking the city, carrying off their livestock, looting their houses, and carrying off the wives and children of the men they murdered. By guiding the Israelites towards a policy of “an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth”, you realize that it sets limits on vengefulness, by keeping things proportionate. And then later on, after that lesson has sunk in, we’re able to graduate to concepts like “turn the other cheek”.

The reality of history is that, until you get to the Industrial Revolution, there was precious little middle-class. Either you were part of the elite, or you were part of the vast struggling underclass. There weren’t any jobs as greeters at Wal-mart, or “do you want fries with that”, or welfare checks, or disability checks. If a woman’s husband died, and her sons weren’t old enough to make a living— whether or not she had any extended family to rely upon probably made the difference between life and death.

The point I’m trying to make with my anecdotes is that vulnerable people like that still exist. They might have unlimited data— but they don’t have food in the fridge. They might be linking themselves to a trashy boyfriend they don’t really like— because at least he provides security. These vulnerable people are so concerned with getting through today, or at least to the next paycheck, they have precious little thought of what happens next month, let alone next year, or five years from now. And when you’re in survival mode, your perception of what accounts for “evil” or “misery” is very different from that of someone with a full stomach, a comfy chair, all their bills paid, and some savings in the bank.

I’m not arguing that generational slavery isn’t ugly. Generational slavery is very, very, very, very ugly. I’m talking about economic slavery/servitude, which is what you specifically run into with the Israelite master and Israelite slave. And that’s also what my anecdotes are trying to illustrate-- these are the sorts of situations where someone’s independence would be traded to compensate for some Wrong which they are financially incapable of correcting.

I usually have decent screening, and I usually end up with tenants who happily run their lives, take care of the house, pay their rent, and pursue their pursuits, and everything’s hunky-dory. But occasionally, some real doozies slip through, and I have to figure out what I can learn from the situation, so I don’t have to repeat the class. Before I started landlording, I thought everyone kind of thought roughly the same way, and held mostly the same values, and would make the same decisions and life choices in roughly the same way. Lesson #1 was that, boy, I was wrong, and many people are like aliens from another planet. If I didn’t have that basic concept of “we’re all created in the image and likeness of God”, it would be incredibly easy to be dismissive towards so many-- who choose drugs over their children, or who run away rather than taking responsibility. “They’ve forfeited their rights, and now these are my rights under the law…,” which is what you get from a very non-Christian “rights come from the government, and rights can be taken away by the government” stance. Instead, that grounding in a distinctly Christian philosophy has taught me to be disdainful towards the weakness (and to be conscious that I have my own flaws), but not disdainful towards the human being beneath it all.

But you’re kind of taking a modern Christian perspective, which we’ve only been able to really extensively legislate since the 19th century, and are saying, “God doesn’t exist, because an all-loving God would have given us a perfect Constitution, a fully developed Statutory Code of Law, a complete Catechism, and a genius IQ and good looks for everyone.”

 

[e_c]

e-c said:

*** And you have not even put forth a single verse for examination.

---

Actually, I put five precise scripture verses in the start of this topic. And I made reference to many others without quoting them. And you know quite well (if you have read the book) what verses apply to the more general ideas and points being made here by me and others. Don’t pretend answers are not forthcoming because those asking are not being clear.

It’s just excuses, excuses, rationalizations, accusations… the usual.

I’m unsubscribing. It’s silly.

Yes… You put forth five… And then did not choose one to look at when asked.

You are not a sincere student and are, frankly, bordering on Marcionsm.

I wish you well.

Peace,
-e_c

 

[mkoopman]

I find the enormity of the lack of charity in this thread exemplary of why slavery both exists and continues in most cultures. The false construct of the greater morality of the modern man is the same excuse that allowed the children of the Exodus to take slaves. God told them to act with charity toward the orphan and alien as they were formerly aliens themselves. It takes no great bible scholar, especially as I would never be able to claim such an accolade, to see what scripture emphasizes and who the “rules” were written to help in “crowd control.” Identifying the modern social activist as Pharisees comes out very fittingly. Add to it the Leninism of progressivism that is so keen to improve morality and the “cure” of Downes Syndromes in Iceland becomes the new slate on greater morals of the modern barbarian.

The law is and was written on our hearts but The Incarnation allows us to direct the grace we receive to complete the redemption that God has always had in store for us. The law on our hearts is what Jesus made explicit in what the prophets informed us. Love your neighbor and love even your enemy. Slavery remains an analogy to our attachment to worldly and especially the worldly thinking such as that which dominates this thread. True freedom is found in the soul as many enslaved persons came to know of necessity, perhaps we could even include Saint Patrick and Saint Bahkita among that number? God is calling us home to Him not to a false paradise of those bogus angel like persons of the grand outcome of Communism. This is the modernist greater moral goodness that is new world slavery.

I hope this helps you understand those rules God put forth to the corrupt leaders of His chosen people. Should he have struck them all down like the corrupt sons of the high priest? As soon as the drug lords of today stop human trafficking; don’t hold your breath for it but do continue to blame God for our sin and evil.

 

[exnihilo]

I don’t understand. God never said “slavery is wrong,” when he was giving commandments. Some say, “well that was the culture at the time so God allowed it.”

But why didn’t Jesus or the apostles say “Stop owning people,” or words to that effect, if God did not approve of it? They mentioned many less important things, such as eating meats, giving to the collection plate, women speaking in church, speaking in tongues, gossip, etc…

The southern states quoted the bible when defending slavery in the pre civil war United States. Which is correct, the bible or the catechism?

I think given the historical support of slavery by the Church and in Holy Scripture it is impossible to say slavery is intrinsically wrong. But first we have to understand what we mean by slavery. I would say slavery is having ownership in labor from another. With this definition almost everyone accepts as legitimate various forms of slavery including at least: labor from our children, conscription, and labor as punishment for some crime.

What is generally rejected is private ownership of people in whom we have a right to their labor. However this has never been condemned by Scripture or even the Church until recently. Even priests, bishops, cardinals and popes owned slaves.

What was generally condemned was bad treatment of slaves. Of course the treatment of everyone in the not too distant past was harsh. For instance a penalty for disobedience in the US Army was whipping. This was true long after slavery ended. A penalty for desertion in the US Army, which I believe is still a penalty, is execution.

The Christian was always called to treat others well in whatever condition they were. If a master he was admonished to treat his slaves well or literally as he would want to be treated if he were a slave.

Slavery, even when just, is far from an ideal institution. But it is impossible to condemn it entirely and say this has been a constant teaching. So if it is not a constant teaching it is a novel teaching. However that would in no way be an endorsement of any particular forms or of particular treatments.

What was condemned was manstealing or forcing people into slavery. Thus in the more recent Western experience of slavery what would be clearly wrong is the slavers who sought out and captured people to put them in slavery.

The fact that God gives his people the green light to purchase slaves from neighboring nations; the fact that he said slaves could be raped, manslaughtered, and blackmailed; the fact that God multiple times calls slaves property, these facts should dispel the fiction of chattel slavery versus Biblical slavery. Slavery is cruel in the Bible and outside of it.

I’ll agree that attempts to defend history by drawing some great distinction between ‘chattel’ slavery and other forms including ‘Biblical’ slavery fail. Biblical slavery would include Roman slavery which was chattel slavery and quite cruel. Roman masters could kill their slaves with impunity.

 

[exnihilo]

According to the Bible children can be born into slavery. According to the Bible people can be purchased and remain in slavery forever. The difference is that we put prisoners to work as a punishment for their deeds. Many of the different people God allows to become slaves have commited no crime whatsoever.

What is the difference in being born into slavery and being born into a state? The state can demand labor from you. This labor demand could be mediated through money, but labor is required to get money. But it can also demand pure servile labor as in when it drafts you or otherwise compels you to work.

Also all are born into families. A parent can demand work from children.

So, if being born into forced labor is wrong then is the state and parenthood also wrong?

 

[exnihilo]

Even if slaves were considered property it was obvously generally understoood they were people.

This is an important point. In making arguments against slavery people often assert slaves weren’t people but mere property. This is absurd. It isn’t an either or. In fact the wedding vows ‘to have and to hold’ are property terms. Looks at your property deed and you’ll likely find those words.

There was a court case in North Carolina. It involved a slave accused of killing his master. You can’t have court cases against mere property. Interestingly the slave was found not guilty due to self defense. His master was cruelly beating him for dancing. So he responded to the beatings by fighting back. This was of course and all White male jury.

I mention that not to say that cruelty against slaves wasn’t real. Whether it was common or not is debatable. I mention this not to say it was common that slaves won court cases or got away with justly killing his master. I mention it only because it shows slavery, even recent slavery, was far more complex and nuanced then most people are willing to admit. The discussion therefore tends to be rather pointless as people aren’t interested in a real analysis.

 

[Bradski]

What is the difference in being born into slavery and being born into a state? The state can demand labor from you. This labor demand could be mediated through money, but labor is required to get money. But it can also demand pure servile labor as in when it drafts you or otherwise compels you to work.

Also all are born into families. A parent can demand work from children.

So, if being born into forced labor is wrong then is the state and parenthood also wrong?

Far from trying to justify comments in the bible regarding slavery, your post is an attempt to justify slavery itself. To paraphrase:

If slavery is wrong then so is working for a living and sweeping the yard. Obviously those are not wrong, therefore…

Therefore what?

 

[exnihilo]

Far from trying to justify comments in the bible regarding slavery, your post is an attempt to justify slavery itself. To paraphrase:

If slavery is wrong then so is working for a living and sweeping the yard. Obviously those are not wrong, therefore…

Therefore what?

Your paraphrase does injustice to what I said. What I said is if forced labor is wrong forced labor is wrong. The particular form of it hardly matters as it would be essentially wrong.

 

[mkoopman]

If separating the slave from family is a great offense of biblical slavery, this blackmailing of the seventh year and new earmuffs, what has modernism developed?

Laboratory artificial methods of fertilization upheld as creating new freedoms is separating children from natural parents even before a new person is formed. Then this “property” is forced to integrate to a false mother into whom this new life is kidnapped from a true mother. What is chattel slavery in relation to this abomination and forced slavery before even the visible characteristics of individuality are fomed?

Modernism is the cruelest of masters that has ever lorded over mankind.

 

[Bradski]

Your paraphrase does injustice to what I said. What I said is if forced labor is wrong forced labor is wrong. The particular form of it hardly matters as it would be essentially wrong.

Bulldust. If you think that keeping your family fed and housed by earning a wage is in any way equivalent to slavery then you are…well, let’s just say wrong and leave it at that.

And if you think that a parent expecting a child to do some chores to help out is also akin to slavery, then…I’m at a loss for words. Which doesn’t happen very often.

Actually, to tell you the truth, I have quite a few words available, but I like posting here and I’d rather not get banned.

 

[exnihilo]

Bulldust. If you think that keeping your family fed and housed by earning a wage is in any way equivalent to slavery then you are…well, let’s just say wrong and leave it at that.

And if you think that a parent expecting a child to do some chores to help out is also akin to slavery, then…I’m at a loss for words. Which doesn’t happen very often.

Actually, to tell you the truth, I have quite a few words available, but I like posting here and I’d rather not get banned.

Well it is akin in so far as both are forced labor. In other ways they may differ. Now, you may think one is justified and the other not, but it can’t be based on forced labor. Of course you don’t have to focus on child labor. You could address conscription, or punishment for crime, or even alimony. All involve forcing people to perform work and one deadly work. And all are generally agreed upon by society as being good.

 

[Mike_from_NJ]

But you keep missing the part where it says, “Your female slave, also, you shall treat in the same way.” There’s no gender differences in how servitude is structured for male or female slaves amongst the Hebrew people. There are, however, nationality differences between Israelite and foreigner.

I’m not ignoring it. Female slaves could be beaten to death with zero punishment just as a male slave could be.

But why this disparity between foreigner and Israelite, between awful and slightly-less-awful? Did God not make the foreigners? Did he not shine his sun on them as well as his chosen people?

In the ancient world, if you had freedom, you could lose it so easily. Take Ancient Egypt, for example. Permanent slaves included things like war captives. Or people would sell themselves and their families to wipe out their debt. Or, if a person wasn’t able to provide sufficient food or shelter for himself, he was allowed to sell himself into slavery-- and he would gain those things in exchange for giving up his freedom.

But with the Hebrews, God puts limits on it. Rather than wiping it out all at once, he says, “Remember, you were once slaves in Egypt. So because of that memory, we’re going from generational slavery to a form of indentured servitude. Let’s emphasize the virtue of charity here, by being charitable to your neighbor, and to the poor, and the widowed, and the orphan.” Once we get that lesson down, we’re able to progress to the next concept of “whatsoever you do to the least of my people, so you do unto me”.

I’ve said it earlier and I’ll say it again: Apologists are the first to denounce moral relativism and the first to employ it in an argument,

If you remember the story of the Rape of Dinah, what happened? Her brothers ended up murdering however many men, sacking the city, carrying off their livestock, looting their houses, and carrying off the wives and children of the men they murdered. By guiding the Israelites towards a policy of “an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth”, you realize that it sets limits on vengefulness, by keeping things proportionate. And then later on, after that lesson has sunk in, we’re able to graduate to concepts like “turn the other cheek”.

The difference there as opposed to slavery is that eventually God said to turn the other cheek. We never get that from the God. We only got that from the Church thousands of years after Exodus and nearly 2000 years after its creation.

Also, at least with an eye for an eye things are proportional (if not merciful). Where God starts and ends with slavery is to use and abuse people who have committed no crime. Even the ones who sold themselves could be beaten and killed and could lose their families – all of which are highly disproportionate to any debts they owed.

The reality of history is that, until you get to the Industrial Revolution, there was precious little middle-class. Either you were part of the elite, or you were part of the vast struggling underclass. There weren’t any jobs as greeters at Wal-mart, or “do you want fries with that”, or welfare checks, or disability checks. If a woman’s husband died, and her sons weren’t old enough to make a living— whether or not she had any extended family to rely upon probably made the difference between life and death.

The point I’m trying to make with my anecdotes is that vulnerable people like that still exist. They might have unlimited data— but they don’t have food in the fridge. They might be linking themselves to a trashy boyfriend they don’t really like— because at least he provides security. These vulnerable people are so concerned with getting through today, or at least to the next paycheck, they have precious little thought of what happens next month, let alone next year, or five years from now. And when you’re in survival mode, your perception of what accounts for “evil” or “misery” is very different from that of someone with a full stomach, a comfy chair, all their bills paid, and some savings in the bank.

Just because there are people in dire straits doesn’t mean that the elimination of the rights and dignity (and sometimes life) of people via slavery is in any way good. Yes, sometimes people will trade whatever they have to make it to the next day; but we’re not talking about them. We’re talking about the people with the means in how they should not exploit those desperate people. We’re talking about a deity who is supposed to lead, to be a light when everything else is darkness, and to tell those with means how to rightly treat those without means. Vague platitudes about being nice to foreigners doesn’t negate God saying they can be bought and sold like a sack of grain, or beaten so devestatingly that he or she barely hangs on for a day hoping for death until then. Today, we don’t let the poorest of the poor make such trades. We have methods (which an all-seeing God would know about) to help protect them. In the same way, pro-slavery Christians should not trade their integrity to justify their particular deity.

 

[Mike_from_NJ]

I’m not arguing that generational slavery isn’t ugly. Generational slavery is very, very, very, very ugly. I’m talking about economic slavery/servitude, which is what you specifically run into with the Israelite master and Israelite slave. And that’s also what my anecdotes are trying to illustrate-- these are the sorts of situations where someone’s independence would be traded to compensate for some Wrong which they are financially incapable of correcting.

I usually have decent screening, and I usually end up with tenants who happily run their lives, take care of the house, pay their rent, and pursue their pursuits, and everything’s hunky-dory. But occasionally, some real doozies slip through, and I have to figure out what I can learn from the situation, so I don’t have to repeat the class. Before I started landlording, I thought everyone kind of thought roughly the same way, and held mostly the same values, and would make the same decisions and life choices in roughly the same way. Lesson #1 was that, boy, I was wrong, and many people are like aliens from another planet. If I didn’t have that basic concept of “we’re all created in the image and likeness of God”, it would be incredibly easy to be dismissive towards so many-- who choose drugs over their children, or who run away rather than taking responsibility. “They’ve forfeited their rights, and now these are my rights under the law…,” which is what you get from a very non-Christian “rights come from the government, and rights can be taken away by the government” stance. Instead, that grounding in a distinctly Christian philosophy has taught me to be disdainful towards the weakness (and to be conscious that I have my own flaws), but not disdainful towards the human being beneath it all.

I don’t think we get our most basic human rights from government or a god (we are born with them), but in comparing the two at least most governments have said no to slavery. I’m still waiting for God to say anything similar.

But you’re kind of taking a modern Christian perspective, which we’ve only been able to really extensively legislate since the 19th century, and are saying, “God doesn’t exist, because an all-loving God would have given us a perfect Constitution, a fully developed Statutory Code of Law, a complete Catechism, and a genius IQ and good looks for everyone.”

I’m glad you said modern Christian perspective, since for the vast majority of Christianity’s existence it has participated in and been for slavery. And while I’m not looking at worshippers who bask in God’s importence to speak out against slavery as a way to say he doesn’t exist, but I am saying if he does exist then he can’t be all-good or all-knowing if he endorses slavery.

 

[Mike_from_NJ]

I find the enormity of the lack of charity in this thread exemplary of why slavery both exists and continues in most cultures.

Are you saying that the positions of people like myself and others on the thread who state that slavery is purely bad is the same position that allows slavery to exist today? I would think it’s the position of those who say slavery has been ok at times is more in line with the people who practice slavery.

The false construct of the greater morality of the modern man is the same excuse that allowed the children of the Exodus to take slaves.

On the topic of slavery modern man is leaps and bounds more moral than the God of the Bible. There’s not even a question about that.

God told them to act with charity toward the orphan and alien as they were formerly aliens themselves.

God twice calls slavers property. Perhaps he’s not counting them among the orphan and alien to be charitable toward since they are property and not people.

But either way, we know in great detail how God said to obtain and treat slaves, it runs contrary to the notion of charity.

It takes no great bible scholar, especially as I would never be able to claim such an accolade, to see what scripture emphasizes and who the “rules” were written to help in “crowd control.”

Would you say that in terms of “crowd control” that these steps by the Hebrews from God were their solution? Would you go so far as to say it was their final solution?

Identifying the modern social activist as Pharisees comes out very fittingly. Add to it the Leninism of progressivism that is so keen to improve morality and the “cure” of Downes Syndromes in Iceland becomes the new slate on greater morals of the modern barbarian.

People can be moral in some things and not in others. God is allegedly completely moral; yet despite having the knowledge of ways to build a sociery without slavery, the ability to tell his people how to shape that sociery, the power to threaten eternal punishment for those who engaged in it, and (allegedly) the desire to want people to be good to each he does none of that.

The law is and was written on our hearts but The Incarnation allows us to direct the grace we receive to complete the redemption that God has always had in store for us. The law on our hearts is what Jesus made explicit in what the prophets informed us. Love your neighbor and love even your enemy. Slavery remains an analogy to our attachment to worldly and especially the worldly thinking such as that which dominates this thread. True freedom is found in the soul as many enslaved persons came to know of necessity, perhaps we could even include Saint Patrick and Saint Bahkita among that number? God is calling us home to Him not to a false paradise of those bogus angel like persons of the grand outcome of Communism. This is the modernist greater moral goodness that is new world slavery.

This defense (such as it is) is commonly used to answer The Problem of Evil. But there is a great gap between allowing evil in the world and encouraging the spread of evil. And while (if Christianity is true) the material world and the suffering in it is relatively fleeting, one’s actions in the material world are vitally important since it’s what people are judged on when deciding if they will suffer eternal punishment. Not only does it spread the use of cruel acts unnecessarily, but it also spreads a mental cruelness as well. It tells the non-slaves that it’s ok to dehumanize people, that dignity of others is of no consideration (despite this supposedly being the same god who said “Do unto others…”). It makes people believe that there is no problem in considering other people only in how they can be used.

The idea of a possible paradise post-death isn’t an answer to The Problem of Evil, and it’s little more than a tasteless joke in terms of trying to defend slavery.

I hope this helps you understand those rules God put forth to the corrupt leaders of His chosen people. Should he have struck them all down like the corrupt sons of the high priest? As soon as the drug lords of today stop human trafficking; don’t hold your breath for it but do continue to blame God for our sin and evil.

I’m not asking that God intercede in an additional supernatural way, just that when he did speak to his people that he didn’t encourage them to commit terrible, cruel acts. He called evil good – and never recanted. It’s that reason that pro-slavery Christians have to do backflips to try and defend him.