Stoney,

Before I respond to your specific Bible verses, let me ask you a question.

It seems like your basic premise is:

Jesus says you must believe in him or you will be tortured forever.
This is slavery.
I find this morally reprehensible.

Would this correctly summarize your beliefs on this subject?

Stoney,

There is a common theme in all of your Biblical quotes which you use to support your "morally reprehensible" argument: they are all taken out of context. It's very difficult in a book as voluminous as the Bible to take a single verse and use it to draw a huge conclusion like the Bible supports child murder, etc.. You have to take into account time period, audience, speaker, setting, etc. to understand what truly is being communicated.

Let me give you an example. I don't know if you are familiar with the Lord of the Rings books, but they are voluminous as well. I could open to a page in the books and find a sentence where our hero Frodo has a knife to the throat of his best friend.

Would reading that one sentence out of the context of the story, accurately encapsulate the hero and what he was all about? I dare say not. You have to look at the entire situation, not just a sentence or two.

I'm not saying "context" in the sense that slavery, genocide, etc. were right 2000 years ago.

I'm saying "context" in that I don't think the Bible is supporting it at all and by reading just one sentence, you draw a conclusion that was not consistent with what was communicated.

Let me give you another example. There is a parable Jesus told about a King giving a wedding feast. I'll skip to the end where one of the guests shows up in his regular clothes and the King punishes him severly, sending him away to be punished in a place where there's nashing of teeth.

Doesn't this sound pretty harsh? Can we conclude that the King is just cruel? Killing someone for wearing the wrong clothes? Surely this is plain cruelity.

Well, if you look at the "context" in which this parable is written, you come to find out that in the culture and time period of that day, the wedding host provided formal wedding attire to all his guests. This guest refused to wear his wedding attire, and was thumbing his nose at the King's authority.

It takes context to undestand that that parable is talking about punishing a lack of respect for authority and not dress code.

It is not out of context. I've read the whole book you know. Slavery, genocide, child-murder and the death penalty for crimes such as adultery, homosexuality and blasphemy are very clearly supported and encouraged. Among other things.

It also makes scientific statements that are blatantly false. The world is not flat, the sun does not circle the earth, diseases and natural disasters are not caused by lack of faith, bats are not birds etc etc.

It also makes historical statements that seem extremely unlikely. If Herod had killed all babies age 2 or younger, I think other sources would have mentioned it. No mention of Dinosaurs in Noas ark, which also seems like a thing that should have been mentioned elsewhere had it been even theoretically possible. Etc etc.


Now if this book is fiction, assembled a few hundreds of years after the events took place (which is what the evidence indicates), and depicting the current scientific, moral and historical beliefs... it would make sense.

To me, that explanation seems more reasonable compared to the idea that it was breathed by a magic undetectable all-mighty being who happened to take a very specific interest in a few desert tribes in the middle east. This entity although being all-mighty and all-knowing, missing out on some pretty big stuff (like that earth is round or there were dinosaurs) and instead reflecting the morals, science and history of its time. Kind of like if Man had invented it.