Morality without god

Making the best of, i.e. providing rules for, an inevitable situation is "condoning" it as the word is defined:

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condone
/kənˈdōn/
Verb
Accept and allow (behavior that is considered morally wrong or offensive) to continue.
Approve or sanction (something), esp. with reluctance.
Synonyms
forgive - pardon - remit - excuse - absolve - overlook

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A while back you argued for absolute morality and here you are congratulating god for his pragmatic stance on relative morality.Care to explain?

It's not snark, Faith - it's a legitimate and honest objection to your arguments. If your deity had wanted to disapprove of slavery, he could have at any time. The 10 Commandments would have been ideal. But instead, he chose not to, and gave specific rules for the handling of slavery including how much a man should be paid if his neighbor's ox gores his slave.That's approval, Faith. There is quite literally no other way to take it.The Christian opposition to slavery stems from the much more morally commendable "love thy neighbor as thyself" commandment...which just goes to show one of the many contradictions in the Bible (since loving my neighbor and owning him are mutually exclusive). Your god doesn;t seem to do that anywhere else - he seems to be all wrathful when it comes to disobedience to his laws.A good deity would have banned slavery. And rape. And a whole host of other terrible crimes not covered in Biblical law. Of course:

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Exodus 21:20-21

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King James Version (KJV)

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20 And if a man smite his servant, or his maid, with a rod, and he die under his hand; he shall be surely punished.

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21 Notwithstanding, if he continue a day or two, he shall not be punished: for he is his money.

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If the slave lives for a day or two after the beating with a rod, then the owner is not to be held accountable. And the "Christian world," if we're identifying "worlds" by their religious majorities. But that's irrelevant to any of this argument - you just wanted to take a potshot at Muslims. Feel free to make a new thread if you want to go off on the travesties of Islam.ABE:Please do take note of the definition of the word "condone" as CS has helpfully provided. Your deity meets the definition of condoning slavery - it's simply incontrovertible, unless you have a different Bible, or you're using your own version of English.Edited by Rahvin, : No reason given.

Sometimes I can't WAIT for Judgment Day.

You know, that's really not an argument. Would you perhaps like to make one? I thought we were debating whether your deity condoned slavery.Or is that your version of a concession?

It's not too much for people nowadays, though, is it? I get by fine without any slaves.And would it really have been too much for, let us say, Abraham? God comes and tells him to sacrifice his Isaac, "your only son, whom you love". "OK," says Abraham, "you're the boss". God tells him to cut the end off his cock without anesthetic. "Sure, no problem, God", says Abraham. So are you going to tell us that God didn't whisper one word to him against slavery because if he'd done that then Abraham would have stood up for slavery and told God Almighty where to shove it?* If so, then what price Abraham as a good man? --- if he would have clung on to slavery even if God himself told him to stop?* If not, then why didn't God tell him to abandon slavery?

You live in entirely different circumstances.The idea was that the people would not be able to give it up. They might try and fail. They go on to fail the other commandments anyway even though most of those were pretty standard for the day. No, he'd most likely have given up his slaves but his descendants would have gone back to the practice.Slavery was a common way for someone to pay off debt for one thing, but for another it's hard to handle herds of animals without help.

Surely your omniscient god knew they would fail.So, now that you've acknowledged that "they'll just fail anyway" was not actually a criteria for handing down the law, what else is there other than approval?I mean, here you're saying "God handed down these laws, and they failed to uphold them."There, you're saying "God wanted to hand down this law, but he couldn't because they'd just fail to uphold it."Those two lines of reasoning are mutually exclusive.

Absolute morality is, by definition, independent of circumstances.

Yes, it was taken for granted but rules were needed. You don't dismantle an entire economy by making a law against one of the pillars that supports it. Since Christians ultimately DID object to slavery it has to be that they believed God to be against it, so the only explanation why it persisted in Israel has to be that it was wiser to leave it along but regulate it at the time. No, it's tolerance and accommodation. That commandment reflects the Ten Commandments according to Jesus, those that address how to deal with one's neighbor, so it existed in Old Testament times as well.Slavery was a way a person could pay off debt. You have no sense of God at all then. If one thing is true of Him it's that He is patient and longsuffering with people who violate His laws, tolerating the Israelites for centuries before sending them into bondage for instance, but also sending prophet after prophet to warn them that punishment is coming if they don't turn back. He's tolerating you right now as He tolerates all sinners giving us time to repent. It will be interesting to hear how God answers you when the time comes. You had made it sound as if God REQUIRED the beating of a slave. Obviously that is not the case. And He DOES require punishment of the owner if he murders a slave, which as I understand it was not considered to be murder anywhere else but in Israel, showing that God's laws ARE more humane. Also there had to be a reason for the beating, some way the slave wasn't working as required, which should count in here somewhere.I don't understand the point about his continuing a day or two. One commentator suggests it means that the owner didn't really mean to kill the slave, and another that his dying would be punishment enough since he would lose the labor. Not that I'm aware of, not condoned by genuine Christians. No, it's just that I'm aware that Muslims take slaves and if other groups also do I'm not aware of it. As I say above, when Christ came Christians began to object to slavery, which means they understood that God is against it, the same God who gave us the Ten Commandments. But asking people to give up their slaves was really asking a great deal as evidenced by Paul's attempt to gently persuade a slave owner to give up his slave in the letter to Philemon, even offering to pay him for whatever loss he had sustained.

If God GIVES a law then it IS absolute and binding. If He does not give a law then it is not. The laws He gave involving slavery were about how to deal with slaves humanely, not about slavery itself.

We may all feel very badly that slavery is one of the 12 ways people can and do manage to get a share of the distribution of services and goods, but it is, always has been, and probably will always be one of those only ways.In America, at the minimum wage of $5.50 in some States, a worker is a virtual slave working for little more than the health and strength gained by food and shelter so he can show up as the dish washer tommorrow.The whole system in India today is by and large a Systemif Slavery for the billion Untounchables.
But for those of us who are immigrnts from Europe, we have escaped to America from a system of Serfdom throughout the whole middle ages which was every bit the slavery we relate to as that of the Blacks in America and the world in 1776.What the Torah seems to have set down was rules for slavery, be that it is part of the human condition, and that was for the first time, too.
It also developed into the 1000 years of Christian Monasticism which collected the workers into a communistic system that eliminated the heirarchy and rank that is inherent in the other 11 Systems of Distribution, and made slaves of them all for Jesus, who they served for a millennium.

Fantastic, so I can, after all, own a Canadian then?

So, is your god a pragmatist or a moral absolutist? He cant be both. If slavery is evil, then it was always evil, and your god was evil to allow it to continue when he could have banned the practice. Hell, in the Biblical narrative, the Israelites had just escaped from slavery themselves. There would have been no easier time in all of history for your god to say "Oh, and that really horrible evil thing that was terrible and I helped you escape from...don't do that to other people. It's wrong, that's why I helped you escape. If it were totally okay, I would have just left you there."God didn;t have Moses say "Be nicer to my people."He had him say "Let my people go."Not after 7 years. Now. All of them. And their wives and children (which god also says remain the property of their owner even after the man is freed, and his only recourse is permanent slavery and a piercing with an awl against a doorway).He's being pretty inconsistent on this whole slavery thing. That's the very definition of the word "condone."Here, I'll repeat what CS quoted:

quote:

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condone
/kənˈdōn/
Verb
Accept and allow (behavior that is considered morally wrong or offensive) to continue.
Approve or sanction (something), esp. with reluctance.
Synonyms
forgive - pardon - remit - excuse - absolve - overlook

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So...you are admitting that your god condoned slavery. Right...an immoral way, because you could get out of debt by selling your daughter.That happens today, too, you know. Even here, in the US. Sexual slavery is a big thing. Check out the Freedom Project for some statistics. Well, that's hardly surprising. I don't think he exists outside of fiction, after all. You probably won't understand, but I find that sentence extremely troubling to the point that all I can do is laugh at the absurdity of a "patient and tolerant" god who then sends an entire nation into slavery. And that's without even bringing up the Flood, or the Hell myths.Good Guy God - totally waits for a few generations before committing crimes against humanity.Good Guy God - totally sends a warning before burning an inhabited city to the ground, or flooding the whole world.It sure will. I'm also eager to ask Darth Vader whether that whole getup was itchy. It's fantastic that you think I'll eventually get to ask fictional characters questions, though. No I didn't. I simply said that, when you beat your slave (with a rod, no less, and that's totally okay), as long as he lives for a day or two, god says you're alright. Youve totally investigated slavery as it's existed everywhere else in the world and absolutely are not just pulling that "understanding" out of thin air, I'm sure.And of course it only counted as "murder" if the victim died on the same day.He could have convulsions and slip into a coma for a couple days and then expire, and then suddenly it's not murder, even though he was beaten with a rod and died of obvious blunt force trauma.Quote please? Because I just went and read all of Exodus 21 again, and it doesn't actually say that. From the actual text, you could just beat your slave with a rod because you felt like it at the time. Just remember to make sure he or she dies slowly....right. I totally beat this guy to death, but I guess it's punishment enough that I'll have to buy another guy to plow my field, until I beat him to death too. As long as they don't die on the same day I beat them! It's ironic, because that's how I feel about people who condone but don't actually practice slavery. That includes you, after all, since you're here making excuses for allowing slavery.

Slavery, by the way, still exists in the Christian world.