Jamzmania wrote:Anywhere Else But Here wrote:If God can't stand up for these principles, who can?* Why worship a god so unwilling to condemn that which should never go uncondemned that he'd make Neville Chamberlain say "For God's sake (heh), grow a backbone, man!" Is this god so impotent, so cowardly, that he would go along with the savage actions of a group of primitives rather than tell them they're wrong, simply because doing so might be difficult?
I would have no respect for a human who witnessed slavery and did not at least condemn it, unless they were so utterly terrified for their own safety that they did not dare speak up. I don't think it's unreasonable to hold a supposedly all-powerful, all-loving being to that minimum standard.
*Us, as it turns out, though thousands upon thousands might suffer in the millennia it takes us to get round to it
On a side-note, did the Israelites have slaves immediately after their escape from Egypt? Were there tiers of slavery in Egypt, with slaves owning slaves? I would have thought it was quite easy to convince a group of people who'd just experienced first hand the cruelty of slavery, and who didn't actually have a meaningful society and economy to be altered, not to keep slaves.
I don't pretend to know why God tolerated certain things. I would never be able to comprehend an eternal, all-powerful being's thought processes. I do know, however, that He did condemn slavery and that it was His followers who put an end to it, at least in my country.
Where did he condemn it? Are we talking about that half-hearted effort of Paul's again?