Which just shows that you have absorbed the values the Bible actually teaches.
I note that you have demonstrated that you have not bothered to actually read the book by avoiding the question about why the Bible is inimical to slavery.
That you cannot tell the difference between actual biblical morals and unbiblical justifications of slavery demonstrates that you aren’t interested in truth but only in juvenile name-calling and self-righteous posturing.
If you get banned it won’t be because anyone here is defending immorality but because you have not shown the basic decency of actually paying attention to what anyone says but instead crowing about your own correctness (despite failure to actually read what you’re condemning).
I’ll ask again: please demonstrate why the Bible is inimical to slavery. Vinnie did a decent job of showing one reason it is against pedophilia, and I notice you paid no attention to that, either.
BTW, Rebecca was not a child at the time of the marriage but was in her late teens. In that culture she was an adult when Isaac first met her given the description of how she was chosen.
FWIW the statistics show that such cover-up is not even as common as police doing the same and covering it up. Teachers and schools are also on the same level.
Unless things have changed in the last two decades it’s no different than among any other authority-bearing profession that deals with children.
It just reflects the fact that power corrupts. As Terry put it:
I think it’s worth asking the question, as opposed to rushing to defend and rationalize. A similar and related question is “why did God allow for multiple wives”. Another question we may well have asked might be “why did God allow for divorce”, except Jesus answered that one:
He said to them, Because of the hardness (stubbornness and perversity) of your hearts Moses permitted you to dismiss and repudiate and divorce your wives; but from the beginning it has not been so [ordained]. Matthew 19:8
So according to Jesus, the Law of Moses, despite its apparent strictness, contains “concessions” to sinful human nature.
So it wasn’t until Christian women and men of the Social Purity Movement, led by the Spirit and the Golden Rule, as well as biblical themes of love and protecting children… it wasn’t until they bucked millions of years of evolution and hundreds of thousands of years of sinful human traditions… that any human culture enacted an age of consent that allows young women to marry for love and have full redress for sexual exploitation.
Make no mistake this is something only the body of Christ himself could have accomplished.
That is the real answer.
But the wolves are already at the gate. Having normalized divorce and destroyed the family, they are hard at work normalizing polygamy as “polyamory”. I wouldn’t be so sure that the Atheists will offer much resistance should the pendulum swing back towards pedophilia… no, not much at all, if the records of Richard Dawkins and the other atheists in the Epstein files are any indication.
This is key. Mesopotamia has always been a rough neighborhood, which in ancient times credibly included child sacrifice by burning, and the defeated in battle might expect to have their eyes gorged out before being skinned alive. Humanity existed at the whim of power. In this milieu, the mosaic code should be regarded more in terms of the direction of the compass, not as desirable end points. Both in terms of theology and moral teachings, there is progression in the Bible.
Thought not entirely univocal in my view, it it is not hard to show God doesn’t like exploiting the weak/aliens/orphans/widows/ in scripture:
Exodus 22: 1You shall not wrong or oppress a resident alien, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt. 22You shall not abuse any widow or orphan. 23If you do abuse them, when they cry out to me, I will surely heed their cry; 24my wrath will burn, and I will kill you with the sword, and your wives shall become widows and your children orphans.
Deut 10: 17 For the Lord your God is God of gods and Lord of lords, the great God, mighty and awesome, who is not partial and takes no bribe, 18 who executes justice for the orphan and the widow, and who loves the strangers, providing them food and clothing. 19 You shall also love the stranger, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt.
Lev 19: 9 “When you reap the harvest of your land, you shall not reap to the very edges of your field or gather the gleanings of your harvest. 10 You shall not strip your vineyard bare or gather the fallen grapes of your vineyard; you shall leave them for the poor and the alien: I am the Lord your God.
Deut 14:28 “Every third year you shall bring out the full tithe of your produce for that year and store it within your towns; 29 the Levites, because they have no allotment or inheritance with you, as well as the resident aliens, the orphans, and the widows in your towns, may come and eat their fill so that the Lord your God may bless you in all the work that you undertake.
Psalm 68:5Father of orphans and protector of widows is God in his holy habitation.
6 God gives the desolate a home to live in; he leads out the prisoners to prosperity, but the rebellious live in a parched land.
Bottom line is you can find what you want in the Bible and Gary wants to find reasons to hate God and Christianity to justify his rejection of both. This is not an intellectual issue for him. He hates how God made the world and thinks if he were god he could have done better. I’ve been there.
