The Bible is OK with slavery

As requested by my opponent in the comments, I will now refer to Con as "he". I want to start by addressing my opponent's conclusion, precisely the paragraph where he accuses me of starting with two false premises. (1) The first one is the belief that the Bible is the word of God. This is pretty easy to refute: I'm an atheist, so obviously I do NOT believe that the Bible is actually the word of God. What my opponent might have been trying to say is that I started with the assumption that HE believed the Bible to be the word of God, which, while that is true, is not something I based my argument on. What I based part of my argument on was the fact that the people who WROTE the Bible thought they were writing God's words. This is obviously heavily supported by, well, the entire Bible. (2) The second premise that my opponent attacks is the idea that banning something is required in order to show disapproval. This is not entirely accurate. I do not believe that a ban is a NECESSARY component of disapproval (although it obviously would help), I'm arguing that the owning of other human beings is never depicted as a bad thing, which IS necessary to support the idea that these people were against it. Matters of law and morality are not necessarily intertwined; the Bible could very well have criticized slavery without outright banning it, which would have been a form of disapproval. Of course, once you grant that these people THOUGHT that they had God behind them, then the notion that they would not use this authority to impose their moral views is. .. strange. == Debate theory == I find it really peculiar that my opponent feels so comfortable speaking about the "common understanding" of the Bible when he disbelieves in the thing that is arguably one of the most CENTRAL tenets of his religion, namely the existence of God. Four days ago, I would have confidently said that all Christians believe in God, I would have been wrong. The point I was making when I said that people disagree on so many issues is that agreement is NOT a relevant issue regarding what the Bible actually says. This issue becomes obvious when we look at how much Christians actually know about what is in the Bible, which is to say not a lot. Most of them simply take as true what they are being told by their pastors. The argument that "all Christians agree on this or that" is both extremely weak and mostly false. "You should prefer my interpretive model for the Bible -- that the OT laws are not binding parts of the Bible -- because otherwise you"d have to believe that all Christians go to Hell for not keeping kosher, so my opponent"s interpretive model leads to an absurdity. " Once again, the appeal to consequences. This time though, my opponent claims that this is an absurdity and THEREFORE should not be believed. The huge problem with this is, while absurdity might be a good indication of falseness in REALITY, it is by no means a good indication in LITERATURE. There are plenty of books that contain absurdities, and the Bible is among their number (especially if you do not believe that it is the word of God). Moreover, since his interpretation of the Bible does not a include a God, it surely does not include a Hell either, since it's a separation from God. "The only way to explain inconsistencies in the laws in the OT and NT is to decide that NT laws are not a binding part of the Bible. " I will assume that the second NT was meant to be an OT. This argument is completely ridiculous; the most obvious explanation for the inconsistencies in the Bible is that the Bible is an inconsistent book. Plain and simple. This argument is entirely based on the unsupported premise that the Bible is in fact consistent. By the way, only the Hebrew slaves had to be freed after 6 years; the other slaves were your property for ever and you could pass them down to your children (Leviticus 25:44-46). == Definitions ==In the first paragraph of this section, my opponent is objecting to my argument based on his assumption of what my assumptions were. Now that I have clarified what they really are, I will wait for an actual answer to my point (which I will unfortunately not be able to answer). My opponent lists some negative aspects of banning slavery, which do not really fit with history. Regarding the analogy of abortion, my opponent is repeating his point that failing to advocate a ban does not necessarily mean that you approve of it, which I already granted. The difference between my opponent's view on abortion and the Bible's view on slavery is the straightforwardness. My opponent is clear: "I'm not "okay" with abortion. ", there is no way anyone could interpret this as "this person is ok with abortion". The Bible, on the other hand, does not even approach this level of clarity. The Bible's "Slaves, obey your masters" would be the equivalent of my opponent saying "mothers, abort your child if you want", which is contrary to his actual position. == Rebuttal ==R1) Leviticus and ExodusMy opponent says that non-textualist approaches are valid interpretive models, and I agree. Saying that my opponent's particular approach is absolutely irrelevant is not in any way a commentary on every non-textualist approaches, it is simply a rejection of the one my opponent is actually using. My opponent's whole non-textualist argument is based on a fallacious argument from analogy; he basically claims that since we read the Constitution according to it's spirit, we should do the same with the Bible. Even if I were to grant this, my opponent is misunderstanding what "the spirit of the Constitution" is. When we follow the spirit of the Constitution, we are simply including the Founding Father's initial intentions inside our own interpretation of the law in order to assess situations that are either not clear or downright never addressed within the Constitution itself. This could be done given the huge amount of things they wrote OUTSIDE of the Constitution regarding their personal beliefs. This can NOT be done with the Bible since the only thing we have regarding the authors' beliefs are found within the Bible. R2) Matthew 5:17-20My opponent is once again trying to separate the ten commandments from the rest of the commandments, despite quoting a passage that specifically talks about "the least" of the commandments. My opponent then tries to interpret the word least as "not very respected", which is an interpretation I completely reject, in favor of my own (which I gave in my previous round). My opponent then brings up Colossians 2:14, saying that the sacrifice of Jesus got rid of the laws of the OT. There are two problems with this passage. First, this passage is referring to original sin, not the law (look up other translations for clarification). Second, Colossians 2:12 clearly says that God is the one doing this, so how can the law no longer apply if my opponent does not believe that God exists? Here my opponent is arguing that whether an interpretation leads to absurdity is a relevant issue, but as I have already said earlier, this is only true if you start with the assumption that the Bible is a consistent book, which I would argue it isn't. It is entirely possible (and is often the case) for a work of fiction to lead to absurdities when analyzed in such details. The reason why the Supreme Court uses this method is because their analysis of the law has an actual impact on society. To my opponent's credit, it does seem that the Bible draws a distinction between the Kingdom of Heaven and actual Heaven, so I will grant this point to my opponent. However, I do not grant that, according to my interpretation of the Bible, all Christians go to Hell. John 3:16, John 14:6, Ephesians 2:8-9 clearly claim that entrance is Heaven is solely based on faith in Christ. R3) 1 Timothy 1My opponent claims that I dropped his argument regarding the meaning of menstealers. Here my opponent may be referring to two different things, either the MEN vs. WOMEN aspect or the SLAVERS vs. KIDNAPPERS. If the case is the former, then here's what I said in round 3:"My opponent then quotes 1 Timothy 1:8-11, where someone (NOT Jesus) condemns MENSTEALERS, not slave traders. This is condemning the action of kidnapping a men and then selling him as a slave. "Now, I understand that it is possible to interpret this the way my opponent did, seeing as I failed to put a visual emphasis on KIDNAPPING. But if I proceed to explain how my opponent misunderstood my argument and gave a clear explanation of how it SHOULD be interpreted. .. "My opponent then completely misinterprets my argument regarding menstealers as if my focus was on the MEN aspect, when in fact it was on the STEALERS aspect. ". .. then I fail to see why he would decide NOT to answer my ACTUAL argument. If the case was actually the latter, then I would direct my opponent to the many translations that I gave which supported MY interpretation of the word "menstealer". My opponent argues that menstealing means enslaving a free person. How he supports this, I do not know (apart from the translations, which I trumped). My interpretation comes from Exodus 21:16 and the obvious etymology of the word. My opponent tries to defend the passage "slaves, obey your masters". I think a direct quote from my opponent is going to be rebuttal enough: "slaves can do "good works" by being good slaves and can thus get into Heaven". If this is not a clear endorsement of slavery, then I don't know what it is. Regarding Colossians 4:1, I will direct the audience to Round 3 where I clearly answer this point. In conclusion, it seems rather obvious that the authors of the Bible were okay with the idea that human being could own another human being as property, which is the definition of slavery. They were, apparently, against the idea that these possessions should be physically abused, but the mere fact of owning them was clearly okay in their mind.