Comment Re:It amazes me that books like these are censored (Score 0) 229
heya,
Every time this comes up, all these people come out of the woodwork, trying to wave about their "knowledge" of the bible.
Please cite your references for any of the previous wild claims. I'd be quite curious to see where you gathered any of this knowledge. Cereal boxes? Overheard at the hairdresses? In the latest copy of E! Weekly?
The bible doesn't "support" slavery, not in the sense that it says slavery is a good thing. Slavery was a common feature of most cultures in the ancient world (Egyptian, Babylonian, Assyrian, Greek, Roman etc.) and a integral part of commerce, taxation and how people interacted. The Bible set strict controls around it (e.g. slaves were to be treated like extended family, they were not to be harmed, slaves were automatically freed after 7 years), but it didn't actually outright tell people to ignore the slavery that was around them.
The NT likewise set controls on slavery, and Christian owners were encouraged to free their servants. However, the Bible didn't tell people to order Christians to go demand non-Christians free their slaves. Ultimately, the Bible regarded regarded as all the same - "There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus" (Galatians 3:28), in the sense that everybody was an equal brother in Christ.
So within Christian circles, slavery was pushed away, but they didn't go so far as to outright tell people to go against society and try to free people outside Christian circles.
This isn't that out of line with the rest of the NT - for example, when a Jew asks Jesus if he really had to pay taxes to Caesar (the Jews obviously weren't happy about being subjugated under the Romans), Jesus tells the Jew to give to Caesar what is his (the coins were stamped with Caesars likeness), and to give to God what was God's.
In the grand scheme of things, things like taxes weren't important, but what mattered was how you served God - since ultimately, for a Christian, this would all come to pass, and what really counted was your spiritual life.
And this is all ignoring the Christian inspiration behind the abolitionists of the 1800's, like William Wilberforce, who used the verses above as well as others to try to push people around them to all abolish slavery.
Regarding the daughters thing, I'm not sure what your source for this, but it sounds like some cute soundbyte trotted out by atheists to justify why they haven't seriously considered spiritual things.
Finally, the wearing two fabrics - off the top of my head, that sounds like Deuteronomy. God set down controls for his people within a specific context - to set his people apart. It sounds strange, but it was part of God's grand plan (don't ask me, lol, God asked for a lot of weird things in those days, which ultimately actually ended up being quite smart).
Also, you won't see any Christians these days refer to these clothes? Ever wonder why? =). You should ask them.
Cheers,
Victor