Where does evil come from?

[The_vagabond7]

mrstickball said:

The_vagabond7 said:

mrstickball said:

 

As for the last two paragraphs, I would argue that the reason slavery was abolished was due to Christians. Christians were not the reason they were forced into slavery, however. Yes, there were some Christians that were pro-slavery, and I will not argue that, but again, I will point to the issue that the major forces in slavery were not pastors, or clergymen...But in the abolitionist movement, they were. 

Do not forget that when the Puritans came to America, they had no slaves - only servants. The idea of race-based slavery became an issue almost 100 years after the Puritans landed in the US.

I digress though, the OT laws concerning slavery are a.....Questionable. I guess it's a good thing that most Christians accept the NT as the guide for faith and practice, as opposed to the OT which is still the rule of thumb for Judiaisim.

I'll let it go, but your explanation makes little sense. How can you "disciplinary action" your slave to death? When it says the rod, it means the rod, unless you're doing something else to discipline your slave that is harmful enough that you have to see if they live through it or not before deciding whether or not the slave owner will be punished. And yes the bible definitely condones beating kids, hell it condones beating them to death with stones if they disobey their parents or bring shame to them. It's not like the israelites somehow found physical and capital punishment to be distasteful. I'd look up the exact verses, but I assume you know them already.

 

As for selling a woman into slavery it distinctly says that he can add more wives after he marries his slave woman as long as he continue to feed her, and sex her, and that she is not free to go unless she displeases him. Exodus 21:7-11 reads

7“If a man sells his daughter as a servant, she is not to go free as menservants do. 8If she does not please the master who has selected her for himself,^b he must let her be redeemed. He has no right to sell her to foreigners, because he has broken faith with her. 9If he selects her for his son, he must grant her the rights of a daughter. 10If he marries another woman, he must not deprive the first one of her food, clothing and marital rights. 11If he does not provide her with these three things, she is to go free, without any payment of money.

The only way she gets to go free is if the man she is sold too is not pleased with her, then he can get a full refund, but he cannot sell her to foreigners (a generous acomodation by the ultimate law giver.) or if he stops feeding her after he gets a new wife. As long as he marries her or gives her to his son, they can continue to add more women for themselves as long as they continue to feed and clothe and get it on with her. She is sold into servitude permanently.

I don't blame you for the fallback position of "well the OT is screwed up, that's why we christians prefer the NT." Even modern jews don't use the OT in a literal sense because it's so screwed up. You don't see them still stoning disobedient children in modern day Israel. But you can't disown it, Jesus didn't claim that the Law was screwed up, or that the things god commanded his people to do were barbaric or....questionable. He merely came to "fulfill" the law, he still considered it to be the perfect Law of god, and that a single letter of it should never be changed, but in following him you would no longer be bound to the Law. The OT still stands for christians, and is a history of how god deals with humanity. It's just not used as the Law of the land these days because that would look like Iran or other middle eastern theocracies, which is not pretty.

...You can discipline your kids to death too? Its called child abuse, and usually isn't tolerated :-p

I'd say that the law is trying to make a distinction between punishment and abuse - correlate the statement in Exodus 21 with the other statements regarding that even if so much as a tooth is broken on the slave, that he is to go free. Both together should give you a pretty clear picture that if you do serious injury to the slave, that they should be let go. That would lend a stronger argument to it being punishment rather than an attack.

For the other part - concerning adding wives - the NT does argue against that scenario when setting out rules for deacons and elders in the church...Which should mean that the argumen your using is either mis-interpreted (your argument), or that the law indeed changed. Also, do not forget that multiple wives were frowed upon in the book of Samuel, when dealing with the amount of power that kings were to wield if appointed to lead Israel.

The whole point of Christianity is to be 'like Christ'. Did Christ have multiple wives? Did he own slaves? Jesus Christ is our rule for right living, and last I checked...He didn't have any gross moral failures by today's standards. Better yet, did any of the NT apostles have multiple wives, slaves? I can't think of any there, either.

 

 

You're kind of arguing my point, I think you are conflating what I'm saying as an argument against christianity. Rather I am arguing that our morality is not divinely inspired, and that our culture has to do with what we deem good and evil. You can discipline your child to death, and today that isn't tolerated. But in the israelites time, it was very much tolerated, and in fact commanded. The point is that the OT shows that our morality has evolved, it isn't intrinsic, we don't just have a sense of automatic right and wrong. The fact that you find the OT's views on slavery questionable, try to find some room so that permanent servitude and violence towards slaves isn't so bad, and that you resort to using the NT to show that the OT is wrong about polygamy shows that we have come a long way from the genocidal, mysogynistic, barbarians of the OT. It's great that Jesus was nothing like the patriarchs that employed the death penalty for the smallest of offenses, even for children. It's great that he wasn't a polygamist, and it's great that he wasn't demanding the genocide of the romans, and it's great he wasn't telling his disciples to go collect some slaves from neighboring countries. But that's exactly what God commanded his people to do and that's the Law he gave them in the OT. It's great that you think that those are bad things, that's because today's moral zeitgeist frowns upon throwing rocks at a child until he dies as a punishment for his disobedience, or bringing shame to his parents.

My point is that a person can't look at the laws god gave his people and find them questionable, and at the same time say god inspired our morality. If a person can't look at god talking about how he's going to gather the medes together so that they can gang rape mens wives and murder their children while they watch and say "Yeah, that's totally a righteous an appropriate thing to do. It's perfectly loving and just well tempered punishment for the babylonians." then a person can't claim that their morality is divinely inspired by that same god. If a person can't look at the OT's god's views on slavery, capturing foreign women and forcing them to be your wife, executing children by the thousands, and using the most brutal forms of capital punishment for minor crimes,  then they can't in honesty say that such a god is the source of their morality. Like the Buddha , the Christ was a great humanist philosopher, but his views on ethics are in almost direct opposition to the god he claims to be (or be the son of depending on your sect). Which is a very very good thing.