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.
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.
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.
“I made a covenant with my eyes
not to look lustfully at a young woman.
2 For what is our lot from God above,
our heritage from the Almighty on high?
3 Is it not ruin for the wicked,
disaster for those who do wrong?
4 Does he not see my ways
and count my every step?
Job 31:1-4
This is from Job, the man who God calls his blameless servant, and we may add, a man of only one wife.
Jesus uses Job as the example of righteousness going beyond the letter of the Law when he draws on this passage in the Sermon on the Mount.
And note that by the standards of Job’s day, there would be seemingly “nothing wrong” with Job, who was also a King, (King Jobab) taking one of these young girls as a second wife… but Job here affirms such things to be wickedness.
Btw, even through the events of the book his wife does not die, that is not in the Bible. He also gave an inheritance to his daughters.
Age of consent laws were enacted in non-Christian countries as well as in Christian ones, Christian authorities took nearly 1000 years to do so, and the increase you’re referring to was more than 500 years after that.
If Christianity was the impetus for age of consent laws they would have been put in place much earlier, by the Church, and wouldn’t have needed to be a focus of the feminist movement.
That’s not about intercourse with young girls, its about adulterous thoughts in some-one already married.
@Gary_M got a lot of things wrong, but he was spot on when he said this: “Christians will go to the most bizarre lengths to defend their God and their religion’s silence on this issue.”.
Job could have taken multiple wives. Taking multiple young (unmarried, virgin) wives was not “adultery”. So actually what Job is saying here is not about adultery at all. He covers adultery later in the passage. (Job 31:9) The passage is a list of sins Job is avoiding that goes beyond the law (it’s before the law actually) and this section is specifically called out by Jesus.
So no, he’s specifically talking about “young girls” about taking advantage of them, I don’t know how much more clear you need it to be.
Job is a King, he has great power and wealth. All his friends are doing it. So why does he call it wickedness? Because he knows God
Oh really? Tell me, what is the age of consent in China?
Richard Dawkins just called, he said you should really stop being so hysterical about pedophiles. “It’s really not such a big deal” he said.
At the end of the day, we both know this isnt about anything other than trying to attack Christians and deny the existence of God.
But without Christians, we wouldn’t have feminism or age of consent or even science.
And by the way, Roy, the elite adoption of simulation theory is writing on the wall. Physics has spoken and atheism is going out of style.. There won’t be many atheists left in 100 years.
Unfortunately, this is not true. Humanity has rarely been as blind and deaf to God as it is in this era—especially in the West, and especially in Western Europe. We are living in the very depths of the Kali Yuga.
Moreover, the Scriptures tell us that the Great Apostasy will come before the end times. Whether my view—that we are living in its early stages—is correct or not is beside the point. What matters is that the world is clearly not moving toward God, and the closer the Second Coming draws, the more humanity will reject Him.
They did – marriages before puberty were banned for both sexes. At the time that was a huge step, and it was the equivalent of saying that only adults could actually marry. The idea of adulthood beginning later than puberty is a very recent notion that resulted from a shift in economic situations.
Except that silence only exists in a state of deliberate ignorance.
Although some will disagree, there is a societal duty to try to take care of those who have nothing. Even the prophets of the Hebrew bible (OT) spoke about this, those who did not take care of the poor, orphans and widows were rebuked. In fact, that was a key reason why Sodom and Gomorrah were destroyed.
How that is organized is a technical question - there are many ways how this could be done.
The problem usually is that most people are not willing to donate sufficient amounts of funding for this purpose. That leaves only one option: there need to be taxes or tax-like yearly payments that are used for this purpose. In secular states, the government is usually the only authority that has the rights and power to collect taxes. It is another question if the politicians and voters are willing to invest tax money to this purpose.
Those wealthy who are not willing to pay their share to such a purpose are de facto serving mammon and themselves, not God. A strong claim but I think it is based on the teachings in the biblical scriptures.
Edit:
Those who support libertarianism could work for the possibilities that all could have such jobs that give sufficient income for the needs of life. Most unemployed poor would be willing to work if they would be given such work that gives sufficient income. When everybody capable to work would have the opportunity to earn their income, only those poor that are not capable to earn their income would be left to take care through the social wellfare work, private or governmental.
I wrote this as a concession to those who want to minimize the role of the state in all life. There are many who share the libertarian ideology and that is ok as long as they remember their moral societal duties.
Even the finance minister of my country has openly declared that she is a libertarian and has suggested budget cuts and changes in the wellfare system according to her ideology. That has made the label ‘last-resort support’ an emphasized point in the governmental wellfare system: you only get ‘last-resort’ wellfare support if there is no other way how you could get sufficient income or financial support, with the demand that you have to try hard. If someone has savings, an expensive car or something else valuable, those have to be sold and used first - a guaranteed way to keep the unemployed poor as poor. It is a personal opinion how much we like such policies - that goes into the zone of politics and I want to stay within the zone where decisions can be evaluated based on the biblical scriptures and Christian doctrines, and/or science.
