Reply to Pete Hegseth's pastor...

Forum Index » Religion

Reply to "Pete Hegseth's pastor..."

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]we think of slavery as the odious and indefensible North Atlantic slave trade, but Abraham had slaves. I mean what was Hagar but a slave?  I can't be bothered to look them up right now, but there are numerous passages in the Bible that condone the practice of slavery.[/quote]

We think of slavery as odious and indefensible because it is. Slavery deprives a human being of free will and self determination. It treats people as property and deprives people of their humanity. Even slavers understand that slavery is dehumanizing because slavers almost never choose to enslave groups with whom they self identify -- throughout history, slavery has been practice imposed on racial and ethnic minorities deemed as less evolved and more animalistic than the ruling majority, in order to justify treating them in this way.

The fact that the Bible frequently condones slavery (or is like "well just treat your slaves nicely, please") is a good reason to be skeptical about strict, originalist interpretations of the Bible, especially the Old Testament. Which has all kinds of crazy practices, including human sacrifice, polygamy, and other things we now reject.[/quote]

+1 and don't forget that the Bible gives explicit instructions on where to buy your slaves, how to trick them into staying with you for life, and most importantly, how to beat them. 
[/quote]

In those days, slaves were needed because labor saving devices (e.g., the fan) had not yet been invented. So, of course the Bible, a human document, condoned slavery.[/quote]

Understand the difference between need and want.  Slaves were not needed, they were wanted.

There is also never an excuse or justification for it.[/quote]

I'm fine with considering the Bible to be marketing but it's kind of depressing how little the people in this thread actually know about the Bible or the basics of Western civilization beyond what they read about it in a blog post.[/quote]

Yeah, you keep saying that, but you provide no evidence of it.  It sounds like everyone here knows the Bible reasonably well.

But you keep hammering away with ad hominem if that’s all ya got.[/quote]

You say you know the Bible, but you’ve somehow missed the “what is Christianity” portion of it.

Christianity’s goal has never been perfect justice on Earth or law and order.  Criticizing it on those terms is an exercise in making irrelevant arguments.[/quote]

This is incorrect, and ridiculous as well. I criticize the bible as an immoral book.  I criticize those that use passages of it to impose what they consider moral on others. What you say is "the goal of Christianity" is both irrelevant to the topic and to me in general. That's the ridiculous part.  This entire thread is about the biblical position on slavery.

What is incorrect is your claim that people here don't know the bible.  They have demonstrated they sure do.[/quote]

Very few actual verses are being discussed here and I suspect the people discussing the verses about slavery have not actually read them beyond the blog post posted earlier.[/quote]

So what? The whole Bible is open to interpretation.   That's one of the reasons that there are so many different Christian religions.[/quote]

So, I was reading the book "Amusing ourselves to death" and something really interesting about that book, which is about the collapse of knowledge in the face of television, and which predicted a lot of what is happening with the internet, social media, etc., is how much the author hated Christian televangelists.  It was so weird that of all the things happening in the 80s Billy Graham and the like were his pet peeve.

And what it came down to is that he saw with this eagle-eyed clarity that when our understanding of everything is so surface level, when [b]Christians don't have an in depth understanding of the Bible, when the population at large has no understanding of history[/b], that creates an opening for people like Trump, like these pastors, to slide in and obtain a bigger and bigger following.  And that includes manipulating atheists, and people who don't have any religion.

If you're going to critique the Bible, at least take a few moments to read the verses about slavery and freedom and engage with them.  There are verses in the Bible about slavery but there are a lot more verses about freedom and what that means.[/quote]

One could argue that most Christians throughout history have never had an in depth understanding of the Bible, nor of history. Hence the reason they continue to revere and believe a fictional story is real. [/quote]

That’s the thesis of the whole book- before the advent of telegraphs, television, etc., you HAD to have a better understanding of place, of history, of theology.  Everything was more in depth because there was no alternative.  There was no such thing as a 30 second sound bite, or a two minute video summary.  [/quote]

Options

	Disable HTML in this message
	Disable BB Code in this message
	Disable smilies in this message

Review message

Search Recent Topics Hottest Topics