I'll repost what i posted in P&S in a few minutes.

The short answer, is that your examples (snippets from Leviticus 25 and Exodus 21) are not examples of chattel slavery when the context of those chapters are taken into account.

I don't do Bible Studies with unbelievers, so you can do your own homework to figure out the context.

Reposted from P&S

Isn't what you posted "Bible Study"?

Hi, BF.

No, a Bible Study is a collaborative endeavour.

For people not just interested in deceptive propaganda from gotquestionswehavebadanswers.org, the answer to the question here is yes. The Bible clearly condones slavery, including slavery of the victims of genocide carried out by the Hebrews,

The purpose of the Old Testament law is very clearly to reform society, and as part of this it includes instructions on the proper way to get and keep slaves. For instance, for victims of war, the recommendation is to murder the men and keep the women and children as slaves:

Unless of course they are some close neighbors, in which case:

just kill them all.

Another way to acquire slaves is to have your slaves bear children - they also are slaves, especially useful as leverage to keep your male slaves in bondage for life:

You can also acquire slaves by buying them from foreigners or inheriting them from your father:

So contrary to falseanswers.org, slavery in the Old Testament is ethnically based, with different rules for Hebrews and non-Hebrews, and different rules for specific ethnic groups (total vs. partial genocide recommended). Gotmilk?.org points out that the Bible does allow debt-based slavery - true, but it also allows chattel slavery, for instance if your parents are slaves, or if the city you live in is conquered by Hebrew soldiers.

"MY GOD'S KILLINGS ARE RIGHTER THAN YOUR GOD'S KILLINGS EVEN WHEN IT'S EVERY CHILD AND FETUS ON EARTH HE IS KILLING. I BELIEVE IT AND YOU CAN'T MAKE ME NOT BELIEVE IT!! I HAVE TOTAL FAITH IN IT WHICH MAKES ME MORAL." (GTFOOH)

The very nature of propaganda is to be deceptive. I would have hoped that someone as learned as you would have known that, but my bad.
I'm sorry, but I think your provided link is broken. Please verify that there is such a website. Thanks in advance.

Okay, time to get a bit serious:

Your take on the above various Bible verses ranges from spot-on to totally wrong (in my opinion). Your analysis (or summaries) lacks the context in which your quoted verses occur. (I made the same mistake when I "correctly" quoted Professor Gould about the fossil record in another thread, but since at the time I was unaware of the context of what I quoted, I drew a false conclusion about what he meant.)

Whole books have been written on the subject of "Slavery in the Old Testament". I won't try to tackle the subject too much here, but I will provide some resources for anyone interested.

I will say that various forms of slavery are practiced and endorsed by every civilized society today. For example, probably every country incarcerates criminals. So, in America right now there are thousands of people who will spend the rest of the lives in a state of involuntary servitude, and very few have a problem with that. Understanding the socio-economic conditions in a given place and time are often important in determining the "rightness" or "wrongness" of a given policy, that, if placed in another context, might be viewed differently.

As always, thanks for your typically carefully-crafted post. I'll say a bit more later.

What is this context, because nothing you have posted so far explains, supports, or even addresses your claim that a plain reading of the following, for example, is not the actual meaning:

What is the context that changes its meaning from "you may..." to "you may not..."? Aren't these instructions signed "I am the Lord your God"?

If you prefer to answer re: Exodus passage instead (that children of slaves are not really born as slaves, despite what the Lord your God said), that would be equally interesting.

Oh heck ya. Scrolling back the old man's posts. He never did explain this one to me.

I would encourage you to purchase or borrow Halley's Bible Handbook. It gives a good, concise overview of each book of the Bible. It includes chaper-by-chapter summaries within each book.

Do you recommend beginners to read the Bible directly or to start with a handbook like this? If it's the Bible, do you recommend a certain way in reading it?

I would recommend that beginner's read the New Testament first. A guide like Halley's Bible Handbook has short chapters on things like history during Bible times to help provide a context for what the reader is reading. It also defines some terms that mIght be new to the reader. A lot of useful helps. Can be found cheap on Amazon or in a used book store.

Thanks for the recommendation. Does it contain a section like "The context that Lagtight believes changes the meaning of God's words"? If so, perhaps you could do me a favour and summarise it here.

But if not, I'll ask you once again if you'll at least try to justify your own claims (just in case it's not clear: I don't think you can reasonably do so).

Sorry, you'll have to find someone else to do your homework.

Somewhere in this Forum I gave 37 reasons why the Bible can be trusted as the Word of God. I will post them again in this thread.

I will happily engage you AFTER you refute all 37 points.

Have fun!

https://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/s...&postcount=396

I remember the context. I don't think you do.

You gave your list of reasons instead of justifying a premise that Original Position was asking you repeatedly to justify. Sound familiar? You just deflected again, this time by linking to another thread where you were deflecting from justifying yourself. This could be called Fractal Deflection, lol.



Original Position already, and very generously, responded to your entire list in the immediate replies. I described your list as "My First Book of Apologetics". Do you remember that?

For the sake of argument, I accept the entire list of 37 points.

Now, your turn.



Except we all know this is going nowhere.



Eta: Do you think you might have spent too much time in Politics, because your posts in RGT are now basically trolling. All you are being asked is how do you justify this specific position.

Given that " we all know this is going nowhere", it would be a waste of your time and my time for us to engage each other any further.

Even so I have spent WAY too much time in both this Forum and in P&S.

I've already announced in P&S that I am done there, and ill hopefully be done with RGT in about a week.

Hopefully later today I can say more about OP's take on OT slavery.

I have big plans for personal evangelism, and dealing with anonymous internet folks on side-issues takes away time and energy that I could spend elsewhere. I am poor at budgeting my time, energy and resources.

I certainly have no regrets about posting in this Forum for several years.

Ill let Alter2ego to hold the fort for a while.

Have a great day!

I think an eternal creative force trumps a flukey universe. I mean, that's just where it all takes me. I try getting the atheistic approach and i'm just left believing there is meaning to things. I some times go atheist when I'm emotional, mad at the idea of God, etc.. but at the end of the day, an eternal creative force trumps what atheists are saying. I'll take meaning over fluke every day of the week.

Me too. Meaning and teleology over fluke. The meaning and creative force is nature itself. You don't get to manufacture and ship in a god ... or a thousand different ones ... and say it's real. The quantum field is a creator, the creator.

Man obviously created god in his own image, over and over and over. But he did not create nature or the quantum field. And here we see the devious deception of religion. Knowing they are creating a god in their image, they profess just the opposite and make it a key tenet. The thing is a shell game. Open your eyes ... or keep them closed. To each his or her own.

Why the New Testament?

The New Testament starts at Matthew?

It is better to skip over Genesis (Old Testament?) and start with Matthew and maybe come back to it later? I am a total Beginner but asking in good faith.

Cool.

That's up to you, but maybe you should leave the slavery topic alone, after getting so publically owned.

*rimshot*


Strange that you'd pass the torch to someone who, as I understand as a JW, doesn't believe that Jesus is God. A minor detail I guess...


Good luck I suppose. I hope you'll benefit from what the kids today call "touching grass" - i.e. going outside and experiencing the outside world.

Peace.

Are you going back into your mother's womb naked, like this scripture says, or not? And why did you get a worthless garbage philosophy degree and then teach it to others? Inquiring minds want to know before you run away from your abominations of apologetics.

Don't be afraid, or ashamed or embarrassed to change your position on things. It's a sign of increased wisdom ... many have noted. That way you don't end up as ignorant and superstitious as people 2000 years ago, because you think morality consists of believing what they did.

True Believerism is about a colossal stubborness, which of course is anti-mind. Mind is about assessing and reassessing, analyzing, weighing, thinking ... as opposed to having a side and then saying anything under the sun to defend it.

Religion is to spirituality as astrology is to astronomy/cosmology. One is based on science, the other is in contradiction with that being fanciful, fictional, fantastic, mythological. One corresponds to reality and nature, the other is about beliefs, wishes, indoctrination.

Religions are basically attempts to explain what is not understood, but when it comes to the point that you have to dismiss understanding and knowledge to maintain the belief ... not so cool.

Nothing is sacrosanct or written in stone unless you just blindly insist that an omniscient god, whose book is anything but omniscient, handed it to you. And that's the trick: just declare that you got it from an omniscient god, whichever one it is, and then you never have to change or think or analyze or assess or individuate from it.