Really? Twisted? Out of Context? Subterfuge?
Let's review...
Show where and how I twisted what Vicomte13 said.
Show how I applied it out of context to you, in any posts let alone in many posts.
This, from my post #563 bears repeating
By guiding our Nation's laws to abolish slavery, they preferred those secular laws to the biblical laws regarding the buying, selling and treatment of slaves. That, according to Vicomte13, is idolatry (see 1st quote above). If you disagree with him, discuss it with him.
You are twisting what I said into ] fun-house pretzels. Since I seem to have confused you, let me help you unpack this. God's law of slavery was given to the Hebrews in Israel. It did not ESTABLISH slavery - that had long existed (in Hebrew, Greek and Latin, the words "ebed", "doulos" and "servus", respectively, are variously translated in English as "slave" or "servant". WE distinguish between these two things very sharply because of the recent and familiar experience of black slavery, but the ancient world didn't distinguish between them enough for there to even be a different word. Truth is, even in America until the 20th Century, and in Europe too (and in Asia, still today), employers were the masters of their employees, and some beat their employees. We're used to litigation as a recourse, but in most parts of the world today, and even in America before about 1930, masters and commanders did sometimes use physical force on employees. Henry Ford had police armed with clubs go through his employees' house searching for alcohol and other contraband, because he forbid anybody who worked for him, or any member of their household, to drink. And he enforced this by having his private police search their homes.
The difference between a "servant" a "wage slave" and a "slave" seems like a bright, sharp distinction, but that is only because we are used to living in a country whose laws give subordinates rights against their superiors. That has not been true across history.
Now, God did not establish the dominion of men over men. Men asserted that dominance because of wealth, or superior strength, male over female, older over younger, etc. And man made a skein of laws to systematically support the wealthy and strong in their exploitation of the weak.
On the other hand, the strong, the masters, the wealthy - the guys in charge - actually were the brains that kept everybody alive. The head of household in a society of nomadic farmers, or settled farmers living close to the edge in pretty primitive conditions, had the responsibility to allocate resources to keep everybody alive: the family, children, and also the servants.
Even today, truth is that our bosses are the reason we're not homeless and destitute. To live we are also subordinated. They can't BEAT us anymore, but they can still effectively throw us out of our homes and onto welfare. And of course, in the ancient world there was no welfare at all.
Those realities of human economic needs and the natural and of necessity hierarchical structure of nomadic herder and settled farm communities are not the result of laws that God gave to Israel. They are visible everywhere in the world, Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, Bhuddist, Confucian or pagan.
Everybody knows this. You're not going to quibble with any of THOSE facts, are you?
So, that's the background reality of Israel, and the whole world of that era: everybody living close to the margin in hierarchical nomadic or settled agricultural societies, or very sparse societies of hunter-gatherers who were also hierarchical of necessity.
The Hebrews had been the slaves of Egypt, the bottom rung. God wrenched them out of Egypt, and the Egyptian masters did not let them go peacefully or quietly. It took plague and disaster to finally break the resolve of the Egyptian ruler to let the slaves go. But soon enough, the Egyptians changed their minds and sent out their army to recapture the slaves again. This was the occasion for God to part the sea, allowing the Hebrews to pass through, but then closing the sea back on the heads of Pharaoh's army, drowning them all.
One may say "How cruel of God, to drown an entire army and let nobody escape!" Yes, God DID drown the whole army of Egypt, including Pharaoh himself. But remember what that army was DOING. It was pursuing the Hebrews through a veritable hole in the sea made by God. In their zeal to re-establish dominance over slaves, those Egyptian men rode right into an obvious miracle. They deserved to die, all of them, for their arrogance, their violence, and their disregard of God. So God killed them - every last one of them - drowned in the sea. He allowed none to escape.
So the Hebrews knew slavery. They were freed by God, not by their own merit. And they had little merit, actually, for they immediately set about grumbling about God, grumbling at God, grumbling at Moses. God didn't save the Hebrews because they were important. He made a point of finding the most lowly, stupid, disorganized and worthless people in the world, a bunch of slaves that weren't even all related to each other. He freed them himself - the Hebrews did precisely nothing to secure their own liberty other than walk forward. They did not fight - and they COULD NOT fight. God took a nothing people, the refuse of Egypt, and made THOSE his people. That was part of the point: to take people who were not even a people, who had no language of their own, no culture, no history, little education - people who were the poop shovelers and the brickmakers and ditchdiggers of Egypt - slaves, and raise them above all others not because of any merit whatever on their part - they had none - but because God himself chose them and ennobled them by that choice.
Now, one would THINK that a bunch of slaves would not themselves turn around and afflict their fellow men with slavery, but one would be quite wrong. Partly because of those really constrained economic realities of ancient nomadic life and the close margin for survival, and partly because the Hebrews were a particularly perverse and nasty lot of trash, the Hebrews did oppress each other, they did make each other slaves over debts and slights.
And so God made one of his sets of exemplary laws, this time concerning slavery.
He did not simply command everybody to free their slaves. We saw an example of that actually happening in Genesis, and it is instructive to what being "freed" really MEANT in the ancient world. Abraham had a wife, Sarah (her name means princess). Sarah had a slave, an Egyptian woman named Hagar. Sarah was barren, so she had her husband, Abraham, impregnate her slave, Hagar, under the principle that her slave's child was her own.
The concept was apparently normal enough to the people at the time, but human nature is always the same and Hagar, now pregnant with the chief's baby, began to strut her stuff and show little regard for Sarai. Sarai would have none of it, and beat her and mistreated her, so Hagar ran away into the desert. Now she was free. No more master or mistress.
And she was starving and dying of thirst. And of course a woman alone in the desert would most certainly be taken and raped by any passing brigands. Such is the nature of "freedom" in the desert. You don't have to take orders from people...but there's nothing to eat and you die.
God sent an angel to rescue her, and the angel told her to go back and put up with the abuse from Sarai. He told her that her God would make her child the head of many great nations. So Hagar went back.
Episode 2 occurs later, and this time Hagar is allowed to go free, sent away free by her master, Abraham, along with her son, who now was a teenager. And soon enough the legally free Hagar is in precisely the same predicament she was when she ran away: in the desert and dying, along with her son now too. Once again an angel saved them, but angels don't pop up to save most people who were or even today are, "freed" from employment and security. They freeze on the streets or die of thirst in the desert...or more often, they are captured and taken over by others, who use them in various ways.
It is well to rail against "slavery", but if you're God you have to consider the ALTERNATIVE. And in the ancient world, the alternative was simply to slaughter enemy prisoners of war, or to push lousy workers or the injured and sick out into the desert to die. Today we have a social safety net. The ancient world's social safety net was slavery. Those who could not provide for themselves were taken as the possessions of others - who fed them and housed them and clothed them...and who made them work and obey, and had sex with them if they wanted, etc. That was the baseline reality that God was dealing with - and it's not very far from the baseline reality today of the homeless who fall through the cracks. The world is still a relentless place for people who do not have a place in the hierarchy.
So, now look at God's laws.
First, God established a social safety net. The 10% tithe and the first fruits taxes were mandatory, paid to the clergy, and used to feed the clergy and provide poverty relief. Social welfare for the old, the ill, the orphan, the cripple was provided through the Levitical priesthood, and was the primary PURPOSE of the tithing system. The tribe of the Levites was small, less than half of the size of the other tribes. One twenty-fourth of the whole of Israel was allotted one tenth of the produce of the land and also the first-fruits of various things. Part of that was to feed themselves, but more than half of the tax was to feed the poor.
So, God's government and tax structure for Israel was quite unlike the other nations. There was no king and no legislature, only a judiciary. The judiciary were the priestly Levitical class, and they were paid from a general tithe, which also provided the resources for social welfare. God told the Israelites that if they obeyed his law there would be no hunger in Israel, because the Israelites would normally have a farm they inherited, but if they fell out of luck, the tithe provided the assurance that none would ever go hungry. That fact alone removed the driving need for people to sell themselves into slavery if they were poor. The unemployed in Israel were fed by Israel through the tithe and the priests. That was the system God DESIGNED.
So now we turn back to the specific provisions regarding slavery itself, now that we see how God removed the goad of starvation in homeless destitution. The Israelite could always pitch a tent (indeed, God REQUIRED the Hebrews to live in tents, as of old, during the feast of Sukkot), and through the Levites he could always eat. God provided a structure whereby men could not be controlled by their need for food.
But that was not all. God also established some hard, sharp rules.
The first and most important was the prohibition of EVER enslaving another Hebrew. If the man was in debt, he could be required to work off his debt - which meant that the creditor had to provide him a job with pay, and room and board, and he could not beat him or otherwise mistreat him. He had to treat him like the Israelite kinsman he was.
And regardless of the size of the debt, the debts of the poor were written off in the seventh year. Automatically and irrevocably. So, the maximum time that a Hebrew could be an indentured servant (NEVER a slave) was six years - and that at the room and board expense of the boss. In the seventh year he had to be let go free, and he had to be sent off with wages for his work.
That's not slavery.
Who, then, could be a slave? Captives? No! God's law prescribed the death penalty for any man who stole a man or a child and sold him into slavery. No Hebrew could be enslaved at all, but even foreigners could not be captured, like Kunta Kinte in Roots, and dragged away and sold. Any Hebrew who did that did not gain possession of a slave thereby. He earned the death penalty for himself. Hebrews were not permitted by God to be out there capturing slaves.
Where, then COULD Israelites even get slaves? The answer is two ways: by conquest in war, or by purchasing slaves from foreigners.
But the conquest in war had some very important limitations. For starters, Israel was a place around which God placed boundaries. Israel was not permitted to go be an empire. It was a certain territory, and no more.
Secondly, the Canaanites living in that land were under the ban. They were to be completely slaughtered or driven off, not enslaved. That only left the Philistines, some Amorites and some Hittites who were in the fringe areas. When those cities were captured, the people were not under the ban and were not to be slaughtered. They could be enslaved. The other way that slaves could be acquired was through purchase.
Alright, so there were two ways, only, that the Hebrews could get slaves: through the initial conquest of non-Canaanite portions of Israel, and by buying them from other nations.
"Any slavery is still horrible!" Yes, but there's more to God law. Any slave could, under God's law, cease to be a slave whenever he wanted to. No Hebrew could be a slave, and any man or woman could convert to the religion of YHWH. By doing so, he or she became a Hebrew, and an indentured servant. The Hebrews did not respect the law of God in this regard, which is one of the many reasons God destroyed them, but God's law contained within it the mechanism by which any man or woman always had the key to free himself or herself from slavery: by turning to God and worshipping him.
American slavery was mostly the enslavement of black Christians. Under God's law, the instant a slave converted to Christianity, he should have been immediately freed. If he then continued to work as an indentured servant, for room and board, he had to be paid, and he could not be beaten or mistreated.
God's law of slavery contained an automatic release mechanism for ANY slave. All that a bought slave or prisoner of war had to do was turn to God and convert. Do that, and God's law forced the freedom of that man, for no Hebrew could be held as a slave.
But what about the grim pagan who preferred to submit to a master rather than worship God? He too would eventually be released, of right, at the Jubilee.
Finally, a slave who was abused by his master had a third recourse: he could flee to another Hebrew and seek refuge from the bad treatment. God's law in such cases forbade the person to whom the slave fled from returning him to his former master. Instead, the slave would be taken into the new household, and work there.
American slavery was nothing like this.
Now add in Jesus' own commandment of "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you", and what is left of slavery other than a name?
So, you see, when you speak of Americans having resorted to law to overcome "biblical slavery" you simply don't know what you are talking about. America didn't have biblical slavery. We had an utterly savage, demonic system presided over by arrogant, evil men. God's system of slavery in ancient Israel was a conveyor belt by which the most miserable and wretched people of all - conquered enemies, and people captured by barbarians and sold as slaves - could be brought into Israelite homes, live under the principles of God, and then be FREED, of their own volition, once they saw the goodness of God and yearned to follow him.
Had AMERICA had God's law of slavery, all of the slaves would have been instantly freed by 1800, because they were all Christians, and the cardinal rule of God's law of slavery was that the faithful, whether by birth or conversion, cannot be enslaved at all, for any amount of time.
Had the Hebrews actually FOLLOWED God's law of slavery, the net result would have probably been that the whole world would have ended up Jews by now, because God's economic laws (and his blessing) guaranteed prosperity, which then gave the Israelites the ability to buy slaves, who then would be freed through conversion, thereby expanding the ranks of Israel.
Of course the Hebrews didn't OBEY God's law. The Americans didn't even KNOW God's law.
And you're an atheist who doesn't know God's law of slavery either. You never looked at it. You did not know its provisions. You simply hate God, and you hate anything that has to do with God, so you key on the world "slavery" and use that as a club.
God's law of Israelite slavery was intended to free mankind from slavery. LOOK AT IT. Look at that law, how God designed it, how it foresaw all of the abuses of men and provided a corrective, and how it offered a chance for the most beaten down of people to join the people of God - with a social safety net, and a farm within a family (for there was a way by which a slave could join a family and thereafter become part of its inheritance.
God is God. He foresaw it all. He made a nation of slaves, and created a law of slavery for that nation such that, in time, the wealth of Israel would strip all of the surrounding nations of their slaves, and then in turn elevate those slaves into people of God far above the very people who once captured them.
That was the point.
God's law of slavery, like everything else God does, is good.
Slavery isn't good. But God's law of slavery uses slavery as the vehicle to spread the kingdom of God and end slavery.
Of course you don't know that, which is why you did not understand a thing that I wrote before about American slavery and idolatry.
You could really learn something from the above, because it reveals God's mind, how God used this negative thing as a shoehorn to victory for the slaves themselves.
But actually opening your mind and seeing that would affront your atheism, because you would encounter a divine mind that understood the way men work and harnessed that to achieve a goal you would not expect.
I hope I have made you open your eyes, so that you can see what God was really doing, and that might make you think.
God made those laws four thousand years ago, long before our modern sensitivities. But look at what he designed and what its inevitable outcome would be if it were let run. Through Jewish slaves the world would have been set free.
