Topic: The Bible and Slavery (Read 1068 times)

Freedom is the ability to do what you want, when you want, all the time.

So really... no one on Earth is truly free

No, we don't. We only believe that we have.. Do you know how old is Pythagorean Theorem or Euclid's theory? Doesn't matter how old, And remember we are still burping right?

This progressivism destroy everything. We learned nothing from Nature. Very sad.
Btw, how old is Nature?! I think is outdated by today's standards.

Just think! Still is free!

Let's start simple:

Take an agrarian society surrounded by hostile nations. Go in there and forcefully abolish slavery. The result? War, bloodshed, hatred, prejudice, poverty and eventually, a return to slavery until the underlying conditions change. Which is pretty much what happened in the American South when the semi-industrialized North imposed their laws upon the agrarian South. And in Texas when Mexico attempted to abolish slavery among the Anglophones there.
Not a good idea. Better idea: Place humane restrictions upon the institution of indentured servitude. Yes, it's still ugly, but in the meantime, you'll teach people compassion and kindness. Educate. Make workshops. Go white-water rafting together. (Hey, why didn't Abe Lincoln think of white-water rafting?) Eventually, things change and slavery becomes an anachronism for such a society.

Which is pretty much what happened to Jewish society. Note this: At a time when Romans had literally thousands of slaves per citizen, even the wealthiest Jews held very modest numbers of servants. And those servants, the Talmud tells us, were treated better by their masters than foreign kings would treat their own subjects.
Torah teaches us how to run a libertarian society--through education and participation. Elsewhere in the world, emperors and aristocracy knew only how to govern a mass of people through oppression. Look what happened to Rome.

Getting Real Change

So you can see where I'm getting to with the slavery thing. If G d would simply and explicitly declare all the rules, precisely as He wants His world to look and what we need to do about it, the Torah would never become real to us. No matter how much we would do and how good we would be, we would remain aliens to the process.
So, too, with slavery (and there are many other examples): In the beginning, the world starts off as a place where oppressing others is a no-qualms, perfectly acceptable practice. It's not just the practice Torah needs to deal with, it's the attitude. So Torah involves us in arriving at that attitude. To the point that we will say, "Even though the Torah lets us, we don't do things that way."

Which means that we've really learnt something. And now, we can teach it to others. Because those things you're just told, those you cannot teach. You can only teach that which you have discovered on your own.
History bears this out. Historically, it has been the Oral Torah, rather than the Written Torah, that has had the greatest impact on civilization. As much as Rome ruled over Judea, Jewish values deeply transformed Rome. One of the results was the legal privileges eventually granted to slaves and the gradual recognition of the value of human life.

Do you know how old the bible is??and that's old testament but remember, much of the Bible is outdated by today's standards because we have a much better understanding of the world.

Look. If we eliminated slavery, near 100% of the people would lose their jobs.

Christian ideas and philosophy are mostly not applicable in the modern age anymore. It is now outdated. But it had it's purpose during the Roman era as a movement for activism and non-obedience. It's ironic that this very movement helped establish the Roman Catholic church.

Christian ideas and philosophy are mostly not applicable in the modern age anymore. It is now outdated. But it had it's purpose during the Roman era as a movement for activism and non-obedience. It's ironic that this very movement helped establish the Roman Catholic church.

It is very fashionable among so called “militant atheists” to make false accusations against the christian world view and moral values by taking “slavery” out of biblical context and making irrational arguments and emotional conclusions based on false reasoning. Here’s few real explanations about the biblical “slavery”:

“If there is anything in the Bible that makes modern people nervous, it is its treatment of slavery. Slavery is humanely regulated in the legal portions of the Old Testament, and in the epistles of the New Testament slaveholders are exhorted to show kindness to slaves, but nowhere in the Bible is there anything which can be interpreted as a disapproval of the institution as such. People of our generation, Christians included, tend to have a very hard time with this, because it seems to amount to a tacit approval of the institution, and we balk at the idea that God did not consider the institution itself to be immoral.

Part of the problem is that we have false ideas about what slavery was really like. The life of a slave was not easy, but we get an exaggerated idea of the hardships of slavery from watching movies or reading historical material that is written on a popular level. Here the purpose is usually to dramatize the plight of slaves or to make some point about the evils of slavery in general, (1) but the historical reality was less dramatic. In most cases the life of a slave was not much different from the life of any lower-class worker. Those who have been in the military have experienced something like it — being legally bound to an employer and to a job that one cannot simply “quit” at will, not free to leave without permission, subject to discipline if one disobeys or is grossly negligent — all of this is familiar enough to those of us who have served in the military. And yet we know that the daily life of a good soldier is not especially hard. This is what it was like to be a slave.

Another problem is, when thinking about slavery we tend to have in mind the recent slavery of the black race in America, and so the whole subject of slavery gets mixed up with the issue of racism. But in ancient times, slavery was not associated with any particular race. By condoning slavery the Bible does not approve of racism.

A third reason why modern people have a hard time understanding the Bible’s treatment of slavery is that we often now tend to confuse morality with political values. The modern tendency is to politicize everything, including even the Christian gospel. Moral philosophy or ethics has become so politicized that it seems to be almost a sub-department of political science now, which is why we have seen the rise of an elaborate political correctness in our public life. “Racism,” “sexism,” “homophobia,” and so on, are the really serious sins under this new morality. Although we all know that people are not really equal, the egalitarian ideology of our time is considered to be of such overriding importance that any slight affront to it is considered sinful, while the principles of ordinary old-fashioned morality are downplayed and even denied. This political correctness is not merely a fad, it is the logical and inevitable result of the politicization of morality, the elaboration of an entirely new morality based upon political ideas of right and wrong.”