Friar Yid doesn’t understand how God can’t explain the proper way to own a slave while rejecting the notion of human property:
It’s all well and good if people want to maintain that slavery is bad and stewardship is good. But Vox’s claim that the God of the Bible doesn’t believe in personal property and “could never endorse” human slavery seems downright bogus, particularly given various Old Testament endorsements of the practice.
It’s not as if there aren’t Biblical examples of precisely what I’m describing. The Bible is very clear on God hating divorce. But, because He knows humanity and knows we’re a bunch of hard-hearted idiots, He says that if you’re going to get a divorce in spite of what He wants, then do it this way. And I note that He wasn’t particularly keen on the idea of kings either, but allowed Israel to have one anyhow.
Given God’s total disrespect of human notions of property and ownership, it seems obvious that His rules regarding the positive treatment of slaves should be regarded the same way. Slavery is, like war, poverty and government, simply an aspect of the fallen human condition. It is foolish to pretend that slavery is not common today, or that humanity has somehow evolved past it.
And from the Biblical description of God’s perspective, we are all slaves, either to sin or to righteousness, and “he who is both their Master and yours is in heaven, and there is no favoritism with him.”