Jesus, slavery and multiple choice

ranunculus said:

I'm very much aware that the bible is a collection of books by multiple authors but that collection of very old texts is also claimed to be divinely inspired. I'd expect a divinely inspired document to come up with a little more than just an exercise in multiple choice. I guess my expectations are too high.

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But then I guess that depends on what you mean by divinely inspired. The way I look at it is that the authors were either complete liars, dillusional, or at least some were genuinely affected by a common metaphysical experience. That's up for you to decide, but the latter case would seem to constitute divine inspiration without the assumption that the hand of god is responsible for every word of the texts.

ranunculus said:

So is it a misconception that Jesus supported slavery?

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My own personal belief is that nearly every line of the Bible is counter-intuitive to what we would expect and that's because it's an extreme, fictional, highly dramatic narrative. It has an 'Alice in Wonderland' aspect to it in that a lot of it doesn't make sense in the real world but you can see how those things would exist in a fantasy world or fairy tale that is perhaps allegorical or something. Recently, just for fun I've been trying to account for why this would be so if a real deity actually had something to do with the Bible and came up with the following. I thought it would be relevant because I mentioned slavery in it. I haven't figured out however why a benevolent deity would write a book like this:

Here's an idea:

If God exists or the universe has a consciousness and if this consciousness did actually inspire the biblical authors in some way, by whatever means, and if there was conclusive scientific evidence for this, I still wouldn't believe that any of the content of the Bible ever literally happened. This is why:

1. If a deity is all powerful it should be able to do whatever it wants in any way it wants. It should not have to send it's son to the planet for any reason, as a response to an idea like 'sin' (which I suppose is only a narrative device) or anything else. This would mean that the sacrifice on the cross would be allegorical by it's very nature even if it literally happened.

2. The Adam and Eve and Noah's Ark stories have been proven to be nonliteral conclusively enough for me and my reasoning is that "if the stories in the Bible that we can scientifically investigate prove fictional, why should we assume other scientifically unverifiable stories are literal?".

3. From this I would conclude that the book written by the consciousness through human authors is complete fiction from beginning to end and only meant to convey some cryptic message but nothing literal. In this case, the Bible would be a fictional novel written by a real deity or a 'conscious universe' with its anthropomorphic caricature 'God' and his son Jesus being fictional characters within that novel.

4. Supporting evidence would include the God of the Bible condoning or commanding things like murder, slavery, rape, sexism, genocide, mutilation etc. and demanding the death of his own son because of something that Adam did, which doesn't make sense. It doesn't seem like the type of behavior we would expect from an actual benevolent deity but rather an extreme, fictional one in a dramatic, allegorical novel.

-I have an update to this. Click the arrow to the right of my screen name below.

nebulaJP said:

link above

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nebulaJP said:

1. If a deity is all powerful it should be able to do whatever it wants in any way it wants. It should not have to send it's son to the planet for any reason, as a response to an idea like 'sin' (which I suppose is only a narrative device) or anything else. This would mean that the sacrifice on the cross would be allegorical by it's very nature even if it literally happened.

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So He might have chosen it.

2. The Adam and Eve and Noah's Ark stories have been proven to be nonliteral conclusively enough for me and my reasoning is that "if the stories in the Bible that we can scientifically investigate prove fictional, why should we assume other scientifically unverifiable stories are literal?".

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They should not be, unless you have personally talked them over with the God.

3. From this I would conclude that the book written by the consciousness through human authors is complete fiction from beginning to end and only meant to convey some cryptic message but nothing literal. In this case, the Bible would be a fictional novel written by a real deity or a 'conscious universe' with its anthropomorphic caricature 'God' and his son Jesus being fictional characters within that novel.

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That doesn't seem necessary.

4. Supporting evidence would include the God of the Bible condoning or commanding things like murder, slavery, rape, sexism, genocide, mutilation etc. and demanding the death of his own son because of something that Adam did, which doesn't make sense. It doesn't seem like the type of behavior we would expect from an actual benevolent deity but rather an extreme, fictional one in a dramatic, allegorical novel.

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Unless he meant for them to be learned later.

Jesus lived in the world at a time when slavery was accepted as being normal. It is we, today, who lack understand here. In those days being a slave did not necessarily mean one was oppressed or mistreated. It did mean a man could be bought or sold but that in itself is of little consequence considering the time of the world and how various societies were organized.

To infer that Jesus supported slavery smacks of current day politics wherein that sort of claim is made regarding someone who we don't like anyway and are trying to bad mouth. Jesus did not come to earth to free slaves. He came to free men. But this freedom was not temporal. "My Fathers Kingdom is not of this earth". Slavery then whether benign or brutal had nothing to do with the role of the Messiah to the Jews. It is so very easy to exist in 2011 and extrapolate a set of conditions from another world in time. When we do this we immediately see that slavery is terrible. Yes. It is now.