Apologist for the Biblical Endorsement for Slavery

Shamelessly quoted from: http://www.samharris.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=5717&start=568

"Yes, God allowed slavery - allowed people to live in the presence of what they had created. But in the grand scheme of things that is akin to getting a skinned knee as a child.(boggle!) I fully realize that this may offend you. But for a moment imagine eternity - forever in the presence of the absolute God. Look at it from God's perspective. We endure "light affliction" now, but in the process we learn the consequences of our actions, and more importantly, learn to trust, commune with, and obey God (whose commands are not grievous). Even the horrors of the Holocaust (light affliction!?!?) would fade from memory in the eternal presence of God. Our own questioning of his goodness will seem ridiculous. Before you get offended at this thought, just use the powers of imagination that your creator gave you and consider eternity with an infinitely wise, powerful and good God."

So, a "benevolent omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent being" (BOOOB) allowed (and through divinely inspired biblical behavioural instruction, endorsed) slavery. We're talking generationally inherited "property-status" for living, breathing, thinking, caring people, (yup - the complete removal of personal autonomy) with instructions that beating them near unto death (but not to death - Exodus 20:21) is a-ok with the big-kahuna in the clouds.

Lets take this fellow at his word. Lets pretend for a moment that spending eternity (a difficult concept) at the side of the BOOOB will make all suffering trivial in comparison. How does this change the ethical and moral implications that the BOOOB turned a blind-eye to the suffering of uncountable people? How can any sane person create a plausible justification for this social personal cruelty contained within the OT?

(With an intellectual nod that this "justified" conceptualization all falls apart if the veracity of the BOOOB is not reasonably demonstrated.)

Further, if the BOOOB is simply a construct, then there is absolutely no ethical or moral justification for slavery - whether it have biblical endorsement or not.

Does this "justification" function as a compartment into which the aforementioned suffering (Slavery, Holocaust - quoted above) gets shoved into a shoebox in the back of the mind's closet and forgotten until rapture(tm)?

St. Augustine - Smart Person for a 5th Century Religious Figure

Quote 1:
We must be on our guard against giving interpretations which are hazardous or opposed to science, and so exposing the word of God to the ridicule of unbelievers. --Saint Augustine, De genesi ad litteram libri duodecim (The Literal Meaning of Genesis) (415), I, nos. 19, 21, 39

Quote 2:
Usually, even a non-Christian knows something about the earth, the heavens, and the other elements of this world, about the motion and orbit of the stars and even their size and relative positions, about the predictable eclipses of the sun and moon, the cycles of the years and the seasons, about the kinds of animals, shrubs, stones, and so forth, and this knowledge he hold to as being certain from reason and experience. Now, it is a disgraceful and dangerous thing for an infidel to hear a Christian, presumably giving the meaning of Holy Scripture, talking nonsense on these topics; and we should take all means to prevent such an embarrassing situation, in which people show up vast ignorance in a Christian and laugh it to scorn. ... Reckless and incompetent expounders of Holy Scripture bring untold trouble and sorrow on their wiser brethren when they are caught in one of their mischievous false opinions and are taken to task by those who are not bound by the authority of our sacred books. For then, to defend their utterly foolish and obviously untrue statements, they will try to call upon Holy Scripture for proof and even recite from memory many passages which they think support their position, although they understand neither what they say nor the things about which they make assertion. [1 Timothy 1:7] --Saint Augustine, De genesi ad litteram libri duodecim (The Literal Meaning of Genesis) (415), from J. H. Taylor, transl., Ancient Christian Writers, Newman Press, 1982, volume 41.

I can't count how many times I've witnessed Deists fall into the traps Augustine of Hippo outlines in the above quotations. Pretty savvy prediction for a berber.

Mourning Kurt Wise's Mind

American Geologist Kurt Wise:
To Quote Richard Dawkins (and Kurt Wise) from The God Delusion (p 284-285, in hardcover):

"He took a bible and went right through it , literally cutting out every verse that would have to go if the scientific world-view were true. At the end of this ruthlessly honest and labour-intensive exercise, there was so little left of his bible that,

‘…try as I might, and even with the benefit of intact margins throughout the pages of Scripture, I found it impossible to pick up the Bible without it being rent in two. I had to make a decision between evolution and Scripture. Either the Scripture was true and evolution was wrong or evolution was true and I must toss out the Bible...It was there that night that I accepted the Word of God and rejected all that would ever counter it, including evolution. With that, in great sorrow, I tossed into the fire all my dreams and hopes in science.’ "

So here we have a person who spends literally years and tens of thousands of dollars getting what could be argued as amongst the finest of educations available in the modern world…and when faced with what he perceives as a fundamental incompatibility between the tenets of his fundamental Christian upbringing, and his science education, he is compelled to abandon…..reason in exchange for faith.

Its sad. But is it unexpected. Humanity is a species of story tellers. We tell stories to entertain ourselves. We tell stories to explain the mysteries of the universe. We tell stories constantly and infinitum. Is it a surprise that we could adopt a dogmatic belief in our stories and pass these back on to further generations…resulting in the sad situation faced by Kurt Wise?

Is this an example of credulity of thought? Is it an example of inflexibility of mind? Is it simply an example of faith prevailing over reason? What really rankles me is that this man abandoned a fine education in science for faith, and that in some circles this act would be viewed as laudable rather than laughable.

When will we stop believing in our self-created bed-time stories and abandon this irrational need for a protector sky-daddy to keep away the bogey-men of the universe?