RickD wrote:I have to apologize. I made a mistake on my last post. In my analogy, I said, "If my brother owed me money that he couldn't repay, then he'd offer himself as my slave to work off the debt. If my brother became lazy, and stopped working to pay off what he owed me, and the punishment that the law required was a physical beating, then that's the punishment."
I don't know where I got that from. A physical beating wasn't a required punishment for slaves. So I took outlaw's bad analogy, and made my own bad analogy.
Let's get back to the verses that outlaw originally had a problem with.
Exodus 21:20-21
20 “If a man strikes his male or female slave with a rod and he dies [a]at his hand, he shall be punished. 21 If, however, he [c]survives a day or two, no vengeance shall be taken; for he is his [d]property.
First off, these verses are not condoning the beating of slaves. They just lay out the required punishment if a slave is beaten and dies. For someone to say God condones slavery or beating of slaves from these verses, just shows your bias, outlaw.
Verse 20 is fairly simple to understand. If a slaveowner kills a slave in cold blood, the slaveowner needs to die as punishment.
Now let me try to explain verse 21 in a modern context.
A man owes a debt of $200,000. Outlaw, being a wealthy man, agrees to pay off the man's debt, if the man agrees to be outlaw's worker for 6 years, then he will go free with the debt paid. The man agrees.
One day outlaw and the hired worker (slave) get into an argument. In the heat of the argument, outlaw hits the man with a baseball bat. The worker dies. Outlaw must be put to death for murder. But if the man lives, he's sent to the hospital.
Then outlaw and the man appear in court for the incident. The judge sees the man's injuries, pain, and suffering. The judge requires outlaw to pay the man $200,000 in damages. Then outlaw tells the judge that the man agreed to work for him to pay off $200,000 in debt that the man owed. But since the man owed outlaw $200,000 as compensation for the debt, it's a wash.
Keep in mind, these verses lay out the punishment for the crime. They don't condone the crime. Only someone such as outlaw, with his anti-God, anti-bible bias, reads something into these verses that isn't there, to fit his agenda. And since he has been told this multiple times, and still continues to use these verses to say God condones slavery and beating slaves, it's pretty obvious that outlaw has no desire to learn.
For anyone else reading this thread who wants to understand the verses in question, this is where I got my analogy from.
http://www.revelation.co/2013/06/09/bib ... s-2120-21/
Of course if you want to believe that the god that gave these rules is loving and just then you have to sugar coat these verses in order to hold those views, you have to find a way to explain away the harshness of these verses and I've gotta say you've done it exceptionally, I just don't buy it and it's not because I want to continue to think god isn't just, it's just because to me a god who doesn't tolerate sin and a god who is said to be loving would of made rules against keeping slaves in the first place not allowed it but made rules for slave keepers.
It would be like me instead of making a rule that my kids aren't allowed to fight, instead I let them fight but make rules about how much they can hurt each other then punish them if they go too far, it's a ridiculous way of going about attempting to protect one of my children.
