Ark said: “Your god isn’t good. He sanctioned slavery and committed and commanded genocide in the bible…”
Every time slavery comes up I’m astonished at the atheists’ wilful ignorance of the Biblical depiction of slavery. All they can get in their minds is the image of the kind of slavery we’re familiar with from the African slave trade. Of course some slavery was like that in the Bible and it was not condoned in the Bible. However, what IS condoned in the Bible is the kind of voluntary servitude that people who had come upon hard times were able to resort to. It was a temporary thing which they could free themselves from in various ways. There was no state assistance and the Biblical system was the tried and tested method of avoiding poverty and starvation. Come now, Ark, you can do better than that!
And as for God’s ‘genocide’, have you checked for God’s reasons?
God’s reasons for genocide!
He is actually justifying such actions!
Of course, normal people don’t believe a word of this crap, but how many people who committed vile, heinous acts have cited their god as the reason for doing them?
Do we have to continually remind demented individuals such as Cumbriasmithy that those responsible for 9/11 did so with the absolute conviction they were acting out the will of God?
That the bible was cited for justifying slavery and Apartheid.
Having previously responded to a similar comment from this bloke by directing him to John Zs excellent Gaza Post, to which he responded in what I considered a fairly positive manner, he soon climbed back inside his Fundamentalist Box and fired off this piece of utter garbage.
As my responses have been deleted it is worth re-blogging such wanton stupidity, if only to make you Never-Were- Christians shake your heads in disgust, thus further reinforcing the conviction that such mind numbing rot must never be indoctrinated into our kids.
Ark
Big hug Ark. Watch your blood pressure and never flinch. 🙂
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Oh, I never was a believer, other than in a cultural sense. My bp is super duper, trust me!
However it is important to ensure we are aware that idiots such as these are still out there.
However, like us all, they will eventually die!
Hugs back.
Did you watch the Geminids?
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Alas, my telescope gathers dust, it’s raining buckets and all I can say for myself is I worked 140 hours in the past 2 weeks, Sigh.
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I can understand why even sellotape would not keep your eyes open.
I saw a few but the clouds were determined to gang up on Ems and I . She took a short video on her phone and caught one!
Just a blip, but it’s cool that we saw it.
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I’m truly jealous and equally buoyed by the fact you saw one with Em.
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Then again, it could have been one of those mischievous little aliens on Rigel with a flashlight?
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Damn those sneaky Rigel riff-raff.
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Thinking along similar lines :
”Oh, well, there goes the neighbourhood!”
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Yeah, that’s “voluntary servitude.”
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How does one address people like this?
Are they seriously so blind-ignorant or are they really lying their arses off?
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Ark, they don’t really know their Bibles
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Oh, but they think they do!
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Yes. They do think so. I thought so as well. Have the Strong’s concordance and Greek and Hebrew lexicons still on my shelf
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Exactly.
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Ark, these are American evangelicals. Outside ISIS, they are the very worst people presently on the planet. They lie, which is why they love Trump.
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Well let me give a shout out to the lying Canadian evangelicals too. 😉
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I wasn’t lying Ark. It was only through actually studying the Bible over many years. Working in youth ministry and also having my own children brought it to the forefront. A slow process and much regret that I didn’t get there sooner.
And it’s not so much “blind-ignorance” as it is, trusting that the people who are telling you “what the Bible really says/means” know what they are talking about. Is there such a thing as trusting ignorance? 🙂
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I accept this. But were you even aware of the Settlement Period?
Were the likes of Finkelstein and Dever know to you?
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Compartmentalise their what-passes-for minds.
We can all do it, but some have black belts from early indoctrinationhood. I say again that napalm and a merciful omnipotent are a blatant contradiction ….
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And yet, we’re supposed to be idiots for not seeing things THEIR way. It is a mental illness these people suffer from. How the f**k can you read THAT passage and NOT see that the bible condones, hell, encourages, slavery. Sickening.
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And (as you know) there are even better bits, far more disgusting, but I just couldn’t be bothered going to find them.
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Mind boggling, isn’t it, Jeff?
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It truly is.
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Islam not only encourages … but still we import them in droves. Can western civilisation be likened to those cute wee ratty things and herd themselves over cliffs?
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The only true faith in God’s sight is Islam.
Quran 3:19
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See . . . they had free will. God said, “Go make them an offer they can’t refuse.”
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And they did just that ….
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Re: JZ’s sharing the word of the Lord. I have heard believers say, “But they were WARNED!”. Yahweh is always right, you see. :(. It makes no mistakes.
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But also according to the law, that servitude is only 6 years, and on the seventh year, the year of release, all slaves were to be free and provided with provision to go their way and all debts cancelled. Have the Jews ever practiced this? Hah!!
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Exodus 21:2-6, that’s just for Hebrew slaves. Slaves from surrounding countries could be kept as property forever (Leviticus 25:44-46).
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My bad. True. The parts about charity were also for “those within thy gates” or other Hebrews. I guess the morality on outreach to your neighbors hadn’t been revealed yet. Tribalism = intolerant scripture = god.
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LOL. So, I guess, US evengelicals are actually right in tear gasing and killing S. American asylum seekers.
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“But here’s the thing about that, is that if the Bible condones slavery, then I condone slavery. Because the Bible’s always right about every subject…”
-Pastor Steven Anderson, Faithful Word Baptist Church in Tempe AZ
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At least he’s honest. Branyan’s daughter said the same thing. She’s pro-slavery because the bible is pro-slavery. She wants to murder gays because the bible wants to murder gays. Again, at least they’re honest.
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Not very often and only when pushed into a corner
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That’s it in unequivocal terms. Ya gotta admire someone like that …
… why, I have no idea; but we are told we gotta.
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This is what they are saying in their own minds but most Christians are afraid to say in public and in the open.
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My favorite, above all else, is when the Lord commands his faithful to lay waste to a city (love how Mr. Cranky gets his minions to do his work for him), he often then commands them to wipe out the males, confiscate the wimmin and livestock, and after devastating the entire city, salt the earth to make it unusable. Or just kill ’em all, take the livestock, and burn the place to the ground.
I call that a poor excuse for bad behavior. Since you get to point fingers at your god and say he commanded you to do it. Right.
And by the way, forced labor is slavery. Given the choice of death, rape, or eternal forced labor, I don’t see a great deal of happy choice anywhere in there.
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Then come over to Christ, ya dummock!
Only then will all be revealed unto thee, and sweetness and light. Until thee become one of ’em, thou art in the nunsights …
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If it was so benign, why did all of the Bible translators use the word “servant” instead of slave? There was no occupation of “servant.” One’s children waited upon one’s parents and, if wealthy, one had slaves. Every use of the word servant, as far as I can tell, actually refers to a slave. So, as far as I am concerned, the Bible translators are/were deliberately downplaying how many slaves were involved in the societies described. Granted, this was not chattel slavery, children born to slaves were not slaves themselves, but there wasn’t much difference. Slaves had no choice as to what they did, they got no pay, they could be beaten for having a bad attitude, they were barely protected by The Law(tm), etc.
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I just got back from walking the dog and the whole way this was bugging me, specifically “And as for God’s ‘genocide’, have you checked for God’s reasons?” One of the massacres (the Amorites? I can’t remember) involved the wiping out of every dog, pet, goat, man, woman, child, etc. because of this village doing the Israelites some kind of dirt … before they were exiles to Egypt! According to the narrative this was 400+ years earlier meaning no one then alive was involved on either side.
Now, keeping in mind these are made up stories (aka fictional) somebody thought it was a good idea to paint their god as being petty, unforgiving, unconvincing, and vicious. I am sure that made old Yahweh a much more attractive god to potential worshipers. One of the reasons for the exterminations was that the Israelites would have been polluted by the religion of the Canaanites if they remained alive … so much for Yahweh being a really convincing deity. When you realize that the Israelites were Canaanites, just of one religion, it becomes even more heinous.
Religion, not golf, results in a good walk spoiled.
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Reminds me of the Hatfields and McCoys, keeping the feud going for generations. Or the Scots, feuding with each other over some nearly forgotten wrong done 500 years before. And about as senseless.
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Why do I get the feeling that other than a few verses here and there cumbriasmithy hasn’t really read the bible or is being dishonest
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Remember: These people ”read” the Old T through the ”lens” of Jesus.
Ergo: Jesus believed, so therefore it must all be fact and all perfectly okay.
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