Posted on 12/11/2002 6:28:08 AM PST by A2J
Conversation is over. I won't confuse you with any more facts.
You, on the other hand, have conducted a one-man war against everyone on this thread who disagrees with you.
I have only one point of conflict with you, and that is your insistence, against all evidence, that the moral revulsion against slavery is rather recent, and is not made explicit in the Bible. (The Bible can certainly be explicit when it wants to, so there is no need to call up an army of scholars.)
But you have failed to provide a single quotation from either the Old or New Testaments that declares, without equivocation, that slavery is evil and morally unacceptable. You tried to say that chattel slavery didn't exist in Biblical times, but were unable to reconcile that wtih the clear and unambigous words of the Bible, which state that non-Hebrew slaves can be passed to children as property.
Do you really believe that ownership of human beings is a side issue, of lesser importance than lying or stealing?
Typo: should read:
I have only one point of conflict with you, and that is my insistence that the moral revulsion against slavery is rather recent, and is not made explicit in the Bible.
That reflection being composed of what? Marshmallow treats?
js1138 has supplied you with direct passages from the bible that are totally unambiguous, including totally unambiguous instructions about how to treat slaves. Tell me, do you think it makes a great deal of difference to a slave beaten to death in keeping with God's dictates whether he is a chattel bondservant or not? I have to say that this is about the most longwindedly ungraceful display from someone utterly flagrantly caught with his philosophical mitts in the cookie jar, as I've yet witnessed here at FR.
I explained what the mutational clock was to you in great detail, including charts and graphs and funny little stick figures. Apparently it washed off like water from a duck's back. Whatever it is you are trying to refute has little to do with the mutational clock. So, as usual, it isn't that your right, it isn't that you're wrong. It is that you don't do enough homework to be usefully admitted to class.
You give the appearances of a 13th century cleric trying to explain a jet engine test cell. Here, lets do another: All you have to look at the 99% of the cases is just a contraption made of glass and steel tubing. You have no proof that the images being displayed aren't produced by tiny microscope demons.
This is just another in your endless parade of rejections of induction, as practiced by modern science. You could end up being right occasionally, since induction is far from foolproof. Your disappointments will be many, since you are treading a road already picked pretty clean by micro-biologists, but your rewards will be all the sweeter for it, I'm sure.
But the natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God: for they are foolishness unto him: neither can he know [them], because they are spiritually discerned.
I'm curious because I stared at it until I was blue in the face, and nothing about slavery leaped out at me. I assume your reference to Romans is equally a smokescreen, since you didn't quote a verse, and I scanned it quickly without finding anything regarding "chattel" slavery or "bondservant" slavery or plain old vanilla slavery.
Here, by the way, is a fairly comprehensive list of the Old Testament verses that support slavery. Here's from the New. Notice the explicit use of the word "slavery" in the KJV. Also notice some of the more delicate injunctions the lord lays on his chosen people regarding these "bondsmen" and "maidservants" as you so delicately put it. Like legalized rape, and forced circumcision, or the titheing of virgin Midianite slaves captured in war and reserved for the priesthood.
One can dig up a bone. It is a bone or fossil that is direct. It may weigh 50 KG. It may be "white". Those are direct "measurements". Saying that it is the ancestor of your poodle is not a direct measurement. However you wish to characterize your sensations is of no interest to me. However, normally people consider evidence of the senses as direct. It may be erroneous, but it is nonetheless direct.
If you cannot touch, taste, feel, or see it, it is infered, your hopeful use of the word "direct" to cover up the sin of inference notwithstanding.
As you know but are reluctant to put tongue to, we do not feel or see in units of quanta--what we detect is, for ought we can differentiate, continuous streams of light. I point out that it was not until the Black Body experiments that anyone even had the notion as more than a pipedream, and a Black Body experiment is a very far inferencial remove indeed from your eyeballs.
It is, I return to avering, quite lame to reject the steps in reasoning that makes us think dino bones must mean dinos, but accept that black body phenomena means quanta. Of the two, dino bones are by far the easier to comprehend and accept.
http://www.christian-thinktank.com/qnoslavent.html
It wants to make a case that roman slavery was sort of an idyllic extended vacation in the bahamas, and the some of the examples had me rolling on the floor. Perhaps if Barabbas had read it, he would have mended his ways.
Spartacus, not Barabbas, sorry.
As far as the website goes, it does not make roman slavery akin to a vacation in the bahamas. That is a dishonest mischaracterization. But that is not surprising coming from an intellectually dishonest person like you.
Posting bible verses about slavery is woefully insufficient to satisfy the burden of proof that is on you. Since context is everything and you have zero understanding of the context, and since you have made a judgment on the matter before you have the facts about OT/NT slavery, you are only succeeding in demonstrating your unmitigated bias.
You do not understand the application of 1Cor 2:14 for the precise reason that the verse itself gives - you are a natural man who has no capability of understanding truths that are spiritually discerned. Actually, that verse excludes the possibility of your understanding scripture in your present heart state. It's ironic isn't it that you can't even understand the verse that explains why you can't understand it.
Unambiguous but out of context. Do you understand the word "context"? There is no truth in your world - people assign their own meaning to words in your world. You have proven nothing other than you can post scriptures from the bible. Now that you have posted the scriptures, I'm sure you won't mind explaining them in detail in view of hebrew culture in 1000 BC and roman culture in 50 AD. Your simplistic approach to scripture (post a verse, then make a claim as if it were fact) is stereotypical of biased skeptics. If you can't do that then your statements will never go past the "unsupported assertion" stage.
I will say again, you have zero understanding of biblical slavery. You are driven by your bias and your assertions are unsupported through contextual examination.
Well at least you have discovered where exmarine got his degree in history. I'm certainly relieved to find that the treatment of Roman slaves was "varied". I'm sure it was under Caligula.
I continue to wonder, however, why God thought it was necessary to spend chapters and chapters of His Book dealing with the intricacies of dietary taboos, and neglected to mention that treating people as property is wrong.
I exmarine would concede this point, I would be willing to concede that Christianity invented a new paradigm for morality and was eventually responsible for the abolition of slavery. But I would insist that moral ideas evolve and change with the times, and that many of our current ideas (equality under the law) are actually new, and have no counterparts in Biblical morality.
If we strictly followed Biblical teaching, this website would not exist, because it forbids us to criticize our rulers.
Of course we do not "feel" quanta, feeling (except for heat) is a mechanical interaction. We "see" quanta. It is not "inferred", lest we wash down all senses into an inferred world. You would not have us smelling molecules but some other thing. What do you propose we see? It is certainly not units of bone.
We all understand prefectly that a "natural" person is one who disagrees with you, and is therefore doomed to hell for eternity.
I'm still waiting for a discussion of the difference between chattel and something that can be willed to children.
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