Slavery in the Bible

The fact that the Bible talks about the people of Israel owning slaves is so utterly undeniable that basically no Christian dares to even try to deny it. However, the majority of them often go to incredible lengths to try to justify, whitewash and rationalize it.

The typical whitewashing goes something like this:

"Slavery" in the Bible should not be confused with what we commonly understand as slavery, ie. the kind of slavery that was prevalent for example in the southern United States in the past. In the United States slaves were basically like animals, often even less. They were regularly mistreated, abused, tortured and even killed, and of course they were slaves for life. "Slaves" in the Bible, however, were more like servants. They were well cared for, they could own property, and they could even buy their freedom. God's law imposed severe punishment on those who mistreated or killed their slaves. Slaves were also freed as a matter of course each seven years.

This kind of whitewashing sounds good and grandiose to those believers desperate to have slavery in the Bible explained to them, and why it's not a bad thing there. With rationalizations like this they can shut the nagging voice in their head that casts doubts on this particular aspect of the Bible (which should otherwise be perfect.)

However, this rationalization (which is extremely common) ignores several facts, all of them found directly from the Bible itself. (There are also many other facts that we know from history.)

Firstly, this kind of rationalization glosses over the fact that many of said slaves were spoils of war. There are numerous examples in the Bible where, very directly and unambiguously, it is told how the people of Israel invaded an enemy city, killed all of its men, and took its women and children as spoil of war.

Most apologists dare to object to this by claiming that this was actually an act of mercy. So let's get this straight: Enemy combatants invade your city, kill your husband, father, brothers and other male family members, possibly before your very eyes, and then take you and your sisters and children against your will as slaves to a foreign country. And this is supposed to be an act of mercy? In which universe?

Most importantly though, regardless of how "well treated" these slaves might have been (which in itself is a suspect claim,) it's undeniable even from the Bible itself that they were considered property (which is directly stated as such,) and that they were not free to do whatever they wanted and leave as they wanted.

Owning other people as property is an abomination, and nowhere does the Bible forbid this practice. If the Bible were truly perfect and the word of a benevolent God, most certainly there would be clear prohibitions against this, along the lines of "you shall not own other people as your property, for that is an abomination in the eyes of your Lord."

Moreover, not only does the bible not forbid owning people as property, it actually does not forbid mistreating them either, unlike the typical rationalization claims. There is an infamous commandment in the old testament that if you hit your slave and he dies immediately, you must be punished, but if he dies a few days after, then no punishment. Curiously, and quite inexplicably, apologists take this very passage to demonstrate how God forbids mistreating of slaves, and how killing them is deserving of punishment. (They argue that the exception in that law exists because if the slave dies a few days later, it's not possible to tell if he died because of being hit or because of something else.)

These apologists are missing the main problem with this, and that's that the passage doesn't actually forbid hitting your slaves. It only forbids hitting them so hard that they will immediately die. In other words, according to the Bible, it's allowed to hit your slaves.

(By the way, it's quite incredible and outright amusing how much some apologists and Christians read between the lines and add their own embellishments to this particular passage in order to whitewash it. One of the worst ones I have seen claimed that it's actually talking about a soft rod used to discipline unruly children, and slaves, and that you were only allowed to hit once... because you know, the passage talks about hitting once, therefore we can deduce that hitting the slave twice is forbidden. It doesn't matter that nowhere does it say anything like this. But we can read it between the lines, of course.)

From history we know that there were several types of slaves in Israel; and in fact there are references to this in the Bible itself as well. The two major types of slaves were, as already said, foreigners taken as spoils of war, as well as indebted Israelites who paid their debts in the form of involuntary servitude. If we examine the passages talking about slaves buying their freedom, and being freed each seven years, it becomes quite clear that these passages are, in fact, talking about the indebted people who are paying their debts with servitude, not the ones taken as spoil of war.

The New Testament does nothing to correct any of this. The status of slavery is taken as a matter of fact, as a fact of life. Instructions are given in several passages to slaves (for example to be subservient to their masters.) Nowhere is it declared as an abhorrent practice nor prohibited.

As far as the Bible is concerned, slavery could well be practiced today without it being against any commandment or teaching in the Bible. Yet, curiously, no Christian endorses this. (And quite ironically, no Christian ever thinks where this new moral code came from. It most certainly did not come from the Bible.)

Argument from fossil forgeries

Many creationists keep repeating the half dozen most famous fossil forgeries (and at least one misinterpretation of events) over and over like parrots, as if that had anything to do with whether the theory of evolution is true or not, completely ignoring the facts.

People create forgeries of all kinds of things, usually for money or fame. Forgeries of historical and archaeological artifacts are being made all the time. Sometimes forgeries of fossils are made. This is something that just happens, and there's nothing that can be done to avoid it, other than study carefully all alleged findings that are of potential importance to determine their authenticity.

And that's the main point: How exactly do we know that those fossil forgeries are indeed forgeries? Because the people who have the necessary expertise, the scientists, are examining those fossils and determining whether they are genuine or not. In other words, the same people who creationists claim are trying to fool us into believing a false theory.

So why, exactly, would the "evolutionists" (as creationists call them) expose their own forgeries, if their intent is to deceive us into believing that they are genuine and to promote the theory of evolution?

Moreover, the claim is that "evolutionists" are trying to fool us with all kinds of fossil forgeries, and the half dozen famous examples are cited. Never are any names or actual examples presented of this happening in the present. If you ask them "who exactly is trying to pass these forgeries as genuine?" they never answer the question.

What's really happening is that individual persons are creating forgeries for profit or fame, and the scientific community are exposing them, as they should. This is exactly what one should expect to happen. It's unfortunate that some individuals are trying to make money from this, but it's inevitable. The important thing is that these forgeries are studied and exposed as such.

One thing that these creationists never acknowledge is that hundreds and hundreds of forgeries of biblical artifacts have been created during the history of humanity. By their own logic that should mean that the biblical stories are likewise false. But no, this is somehow different, even though they cannot explain why.

Why should I be more "open-minded"?

An extremely common adage said by people who believe in the supernatural to skeptics is that they should be "more open-minded."

I have a question to them: Why, exactly?

And I'm asking this in all seriousness. I'm not debating what exactly they mean by "open-mindedness" (even though that's an interesting question in itself.) I'm going fully with theirdefinition of the concept. So, why exactly should I be more "open-minded"? What exactly would I benefit from being more "open-minded"?

They talk about "open-mindedness" like it were a positive, desirable thing, a good quality for a person, something that brings them something better. What, exactly?

In fact, these people usually don't actually have a clear and unambiguous definition of what "open-mindedness" means, but often it has something to do with accepting things as at least possible rather than rejecting them outright.

So my question is: Ok, if I start just accepting things as at least possible, how exactly do I benefit from that? What possible advantage or gain would I receive from doing that? How would my life become better?

Even the most hard-core believer ought to admit that at least some of those things will most probably be false explanations. So what exactly do I gain from "being open-minded" and considering them as plausible? The only thing I would end up doing is believing in falsities, sometimes even for my own detriment, and for what? What possible gain is there to be had from all this?

I find it interesting that the suggestion is always phrased as "you should be more open-minded" (or some variation of it.) Why should I?

The different degrees of taking credit

As I have written in a previous blog post, many religions, especially Christianity and Islam, really love to take credit for things that they did not invent (such as morals or scientific discoveries.)

These claims can actually be roughly divided into degrees by severity. The mildest possible degree is when someone does agree that there are seeming contradictions between what the religion's holy book says and what we can observe in nature, but it's not a question of the book being erroneous, it's simply a question of interpretation (eg. it's just metaphorical text, or we are misunderstanding what the text actually means.) A higher degree is when someone outright claims that there is no contradiction whatsoever between science and the religion's holy book. (Usually a rather wild amount of handwaving goes to try to explain the contradictions away. Or alternatively to redefine what's meant by "science.")

However, the highest degree of taking credit, the most obnoxious one, is when someone claims that not only are there no contradictions, but in fact their holy book actually spawned scientific research and knowledge, and that said book contains advanced scientific facts that were only corroborated centuries later.

For some reason many muslims are fond of making this curious claim. They actually outright say that modern science originated from Islam's holy book. Some go even so far as to completely ignore history and claim that before said book humanity lived mostly in chaos and self-indulgence, and had little to no curiosity about how the universe works, and that it wasn't until the koran was written that actual scientific progress started.

I just finished watching a "documentary" that made incredibly obnoxious claims like that. It claims that before the koran there was little to no scientific curiosity, and that the koran spawned most branches of science. It says things like:

When we look at the verses, we find indications of all the main branches of science in the Koran. For example, in the Koran God encourages the science of astronomy like this: "He Who created the seven heavens in layers. You will not find any flaw in the creation of the All-Merciful. Look again - do you see any gaps?"

This "documentary" is full of laughable claims like this. (Come on, "the seven heavens in layers"? What's that supposed to mean?)

In general, in these types of claims there's willful ignorance of history. Scientific curiosity and discoveries have existed for over a thousand years before the koran. Moreover, science has always thrived the most when it has been independent of any religion.

Most importantly, though, Islam didn't spawn science, but on the contrary, it killed it. Two millenia ago Greece was basically the world capital of science, but the Roman politics and wars, and especially the Roman church, killed it. After that science moved mostly to Arabic countries. In those countries science thrived in spite of religion, not because of it. For a time scientific progress and Islam co-existed, but at some point islamic imams decided that mathematics and science are evil and banished the practice, which basically killed scientific research from Arabic countries.

For centuries the world lived in the dark ages, scientifically speaking. In Europe the Roman church, later the Catholic church, stifled science almost completely. In Arabic countries Islam did the same. It was not until the so-called Age of Enlightenment, when a new counter-culture raised with the ideology that science should be separate and independent of religion, that science thrived once again.

No religion has ever promoted or encouraged science, but the exact opposite. Science has always advanced when religion has not been killing it, when scientists have had the opportunity to make research and discoveries without religion meddling in their work. I can only imagine how advanced we would today be if neither Christianity nor Islam, or any other like religion, had ever existed.

No scientific discovery of any importance has ever been produced by either Christianity or Islam. The major difference between those two religions is, however, that Christianity has (mostly) stopped meddling with science, education and progress, thus allowing for giant leaps in scientific progress, while Islam still wants to live in the 7th century.

(Just as a testament of this, count how many Nobel prizes have been awarded to arabic people, and how many have been awarded to non-arabs. And we are not talking about the useless peace prize here. This is not a question of racism or anything like that. This is because high education and scientific research is not promoted nor encouraged in the vast majority of arab countries, purely for religious reasons; thus is it any wonder that no important scientific discoveries are ever made there?)

One problem with the argument from design

Apologists and creationists love the argument from design: Since the universe has been "clearly" designed, there must have been an intelligent designer that made it.

I'm not going to scrutinize the major fallacies in that argument, but instead I'm going to concentrate on one detail that I just noticed: They always talk about a designer. In singular. Always, and without fail. But why?

Let's take a typical form of the argument from design: If you find a device, like a new kind of computer, and you examine it and study how it works, you come up with the conclusion that it was designed. By the apologists' logic there must have been a designer. In singular. One intelligence that designed and built it.

But we know that's not true. Modern computers are the product of several hundreds of years of work made by thousands and thousands of people, each contributing a tiny part to the whole pool of knowledge required to build a modern computer. There is no one single person who designed and built a modern computer from scratch, with no previous knowledge nor expertise. As the adage goes, "we stand on the shoulders of giants," meaning that all the knowledge we have today is based on the work of thousands and thousand of people from the past, each contributing to this pool of knowledge with their research and experiments.

In other words, a modern computer can be classified as the design of thousands and thousands of people.

So why, exactly, is the alleged design of our universe always attributed by apologists to one intelligent being?

In fact, any argument that they could give for this could also be applied to reasoning why a modern computer has been completely designed and built by one single person (with no previous knowledge of anything that's required.) For example, if they appeal to Occam's Razor, ie. that it's simpler to assume that one mind designed the universe, the exact same argument could be applied to the design of a computer: In other words, that it's "simpler" to assume that one single person designed and built the modern computer. (And, in fact, when we do this, we immediately spot one flaw with this argument: The alleged "simplicity" of assuming one individual designer is a flawed concept. It's a misapplication of the Occam's Razor principle. One single designer is actually less believable than multiple designers. The proper application of Occam's Razor would be to assume thousands of designers. One single designer would require a lot more evidence.)

Creationists don't even know what a dinosaur is

Creationists are often way too eager to showcase their ignorance on the vast majority of scientific subjects, most prominently the theory of evolution (the vast majority of creationists both don't know even 10% of what the theory actually says, and also attribute to it a large amount of things that it doesn't deal with at all) but also other branches of science such as astronomy, geology and paleontology.

One extremely common (and often overlooked) funny detail that most creationists always get wrong is that they don't even know what a dinosaur is. To a creationist "dinosaur" means, approximately, "any largish reptile that's (allegedly) extinct" (small extinct reptiles are also included if they look like their larger counterparts.)

Most typically this mistake can be seen by them referring to plesiosaurs and pterosaurs as "dinosaurs," even though they aren't classified as that. (Curiously, and rather ironically because of this inclusiveness, they strongly oppose classifying birds as dinosaurs, even though in this case that would be correct according to cladistics. So their ignorance goes both ways: Including wrong clades, and excluding clades that are, in fact, classified as dinosaurs.)

At a superficial level this is just a smallish mistake, and can be categorized as mainly amusing. However, at a more profound level this demonstrates how little research creationists actually do on the very subjects that they are criticizing. This is extremely typical of creationists: Come up with objections and critique, but don't do even the slightest amount of research to get their facts straight.

Argument from human creative capacity

There's an argument sometimes presented by some creationists that appeals to the current capacity of human science and technology of replicating what appears in nature. The most common form currently is some variant of "humans cannot create a living cell even if they had all of its components." Another variant of this argument is the amount of information stored in something, and comparing it to (of course) computers. The argument takes typically the form of "a single DNA molecule contains more information than can be stored in (a completely arbitrary and made-up amount of computers)."

This specific argument seems a very shaky and stupid one given how fast technology advances. Two hundred years ago you could make a similar argument like "man is incapable of producing a machine that can fly, yet birds fly, which clearly shows that birds were created by something much more intelligent than man." (And, as far as I know, some people did present an argument similar to this back in the day.) Yet nowadays not many creationists would use this argument (at least not in this exact form) because, obviously, we can make things fly (even very small things that are bird-sized.)

The argument requires constantly moving the goalposts as technology advances. If one day science is capable of creating a living cell out of its constituent components, the argument will move to either "but man can't create a multicellular organism" or "but man can't produce those constituent components" (or probably both.) And if technology advances enough that those become possible, the goalposts will be moved again (to something like "but man can't create a living being that's intelligent" and so on and so forth.)

Physical laws acting on energy and matter for billions of years producing, via emergent behavior, constructs that are more complicated than what humans can produce thanks to a whopping 200 years or so of technological advance is nothing extraordinary. It's in fact expected. We are still learning how the universe works, and it's not something that can be discovered overnight. At a very fast pace especially in the last century, but still learning. The argument is just silly.

(And by the way, the argument that "thing X in nature contains more information than can be stored in Y computers" is completely irrelevant. Just a simple rock contains more "information" than can be accurately stored in a humongous amount of computers. If you tried to store the precise composition and location of every single molecule and atom in the rock, it would take an enormous amount of storage space. However, that's nothing extraordinary. There's nothing in that particular arrangement of atoms that's somehow special and would tell us that it has been somehow "designed" and couldn't have formed on its own, due to simple physical laws.)