Berlin Bear wrote:Slavery has been around about as long as mankind has been around. If I had to guess I would say that when God confused the languages at the tower of Babel is went it started. The stronger forced the weaker to perform their chores. And indeed throughout the Bible we read of Nations being forced into slavery for other stronger Nations. In fact I remember a story from the Old Testament that said if a man had served out his slavery time and chose to remain a slave that the owner was to drive a stake through his ear into the doorframe of the house and thus he would remain a slave forever.
You're correct, slavery has been around a long time. But so has homosexuality, in fact in nature it's been around longer.
However as time has gone by and men have become more civilized through invention, the need of slaves to perform the work decreases. Fact remains that in the Biblical times as well as today in some places, certain people that we classify as slaves prefer catering to another’s wishes and being there by provided for. In other words some people would rather do the job and let some one else worry about making sure the product is sold, the seed is purchased, the cost of operations are met, etc. etc. If the owner gets the big bucks and they only get enough to live on, so long as the worry isn’t there everything is OK.
I don't even know where to begin with this. I some how doubt that if you could get into your handy dandy time machine and asked a black man who was captured and stripped from his family in the African wilderness then subsequentially auctioned to a slave trader only to be placed in the cargo hold of a ship for a 4 month journey to the US. Finally arriving only yet to be sold again to a plantation owner to perform the most difficult of manual labor for the remainder of his life. No sane person would 'choose' to be provided for in such a manner. Any black person who read your reply to such a claim would be offended!
The possession of slaves was not rebuked in the Bible this is true, homosexuality is rebuked in the Bible and that also is true.
Slaves were needed and used to insure the survival of Nations and/or wealthy landowners, who were either incapable or unwilling to do the work themselves.
As stated earlier if one believes in the inerrancy of the bible then one must accept the fact that an omnipotent and omniscient God would KNOW THAT ENSLAVING PEOPLE IS WRONG. He would be able to look into the future and beyond linear time and understand that practice of slavery was barbaric and would have told his Apostles to outlaw it.
When it comes to a sexual relationship I cannot believe that there was a shortage of either sex and the practice of same sex relationships was the norm. If it had been normal every day events, acceptable to those all around, why has it been “kept in the closet” until the recent past?
Because it wasn't until the Catholic Church was able to exert such enormous power over society from the day that Rome became officially Christian to modern times that religious insitutions were able to push their values into secular life.