I was not clear enough. I see that now. The problem is you see, that you will not know anything. Including nothing.
If you knew nothing, you would have an empty set.
So you could put it in a set, and so this set's cardinality would be 1.
So now you have 0 and 1. You can start building the whole numbers, the rationals, etc... you get the whole mathematics step by step for you.
It is enough to know nothing to build up math. Unfortunately after death you will not get that much.

All universes are children of the great Tao.

Tao is often compared to water: clear, colorless, unremarkable and all wet.

Gimmie that ol' time religion.

???

Ultimate empty set.

The ultimate empty set.

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Can any Christians/believers make some sense of this?

Exodus 21:20-21

"If a man beats his male or female slave with a rod and the slave dies as a direct result, he must be punished, 21 but he is not to be punished if the slave gets up after a day or two, since the slave is his property"

Directions on how to treat your slave. Beat them by all means, they're your property to beat, just make sure they don't die straight away.

The commandments contain numerous references to only worshipping god, mention adultery, stealing and murder but not once did god go, "I know, I'll drop one of the numerous mentions of how jealous I am and slip in "Thou shalt not take thou fellow man as your property, this is an abomination in my eyes"".

I've heard, "Yes but slavery was just a part of life back then, at least god tried making things better for the slaves by imposing safeguards". Well adultery and murder were a part of life back then. Most of the biblical characters are documented murderers, yet god saw fit to stipulate don't murder or commit adultery.

Yet nowhere in the bible is slavery condemned or mentioned in a negative light. Jesus never once condemned or taught that slavery and owning another human was wrong despite coming into contact with numerous slaves.

Apparently god was more interested in being worshipped and foreskins than the issue of slavery, an issue that continued to haunt mankind for thousands of years after Old Testament times.

Same reason:

Killing members of your clan or threatening the social order by theft or adultery does significantly reduce your overall biological fitness as a species. So does killing slaves (you're destroying resources there), whereas keeping slaves totally increases your fitness. It makes perfect sense.

That's from an natural selection perspective. How does a believer equate the Christian god, a loving, just, fair god with the same one who I've outlined in my above comment.

Love the slavers, hate the slavery?

That doesn't answer why god through the bible never addressed the issue. Why mention adultery if this is the case, love the adulterer but hate the adultery

He managed to give laws on every minute aspect of life and yet failed to touch on slavery being immoral? It no makey the sense

Because it wasn't immoral back then. It was a part of society. The only flak slave owners received was if they treated their own slaves horribly or if they harmed another man's slaves. Abolitionism didn't even exist until the Enlightenment in the 18th century. Before that, owning slaves was just something people did. It wasn't evil, it wasn't good, it was morally neutral.

And since the Bible was written by men from an era in which slavery was morally neutral, it portrays it as such.

I suppose you could say that it is our point of view that is skewed. We as an "enlightened" society have lived slave-free for a little over a hundred years (well, technically slavery has been illegal for that length of time; it sure as hell hasn't gone away, it's just less noticeable nowadays). We can't see things the way they used to be without our new-and-improved morality getting in the way.

Criminy. I can't answer your question. To my mind, there are two possibilities: (1) Slavery is not immoral, and we've just f**ked up the last hundred years of human society by mistakenly believing that it is. (2) Slavery is immoral. It's in the Bible simply because it existed back then. With (1), the Christian god - if it exists - is not a loving god, and in fact is a bit of a douche. With (2), the Christian god - if it exists - allowed thousands of years of slavery because it fell asleep at the wheel.

The point is that Christians and believers say the bible is god's word.

2 Timothy 3:16 (New Living Translation)

16 All Scripture is inspired by God and is useful to teach us what is true and to make us realize what is wrong in our lives. It corrects us when we are wrong and teaches us to do what is right.


The bible itself claims to be inspired by god in it's entirety.

The very point I was making is that if the bible is gods word then very obviously he wouldn't endorse slavery unless like you say he's a douchebag and immoral.

I don't think anyone in their right mind would argue that owning another human is moral or acceptable.

I don't know a whole lot about the bible, but I think the traditional response here is that the bible was written by man and therefore is mans interpration of the events that allegedly took place. So a believer might go with the argument that it is only because of mans limitations that bulls**t like this made it into the bible.

It does seems pretty hard to believe that man's interpretation could completely change what god said - but we all know that believers don't need much of a straw to grasp onto.

Then my response is why on earth do they trust a damn word the book says?

Because they claim that it's eventually god's will, no matter whether man understands it in the first place or not.
You're running in circles. You won't get a satisfying answer; neither will you get anyone to admit that their book is flawed. They're in the comfortable position of having a recursive argument. Non-believers will inevitably fail at challenging it. It's not worth the effort.

Edit: Probably that's even part of what makes it that compelling and successful. Imagine a club of people who can never be wrong, by definiton. Who wouldn't love to be in there?

Except that this opinion is a fairly new one, and it's not so widespread as one would hope. Humans have owned slaves for thousands of years. The Egyptians used their prisoners of war as forced labor. Ancient Greece and Rome relied on slavery so much that had they freed all slaves in one fell swoop, their civilizations would collapse. Even in the modern world, slavery in its traditional sense is still fairly widespread (Wiki stuff). Hell, if you stretch the definition a little, slavery still exists legally as prison labor and mandatory military service.

The whole notion of human rights, of every human being equal to every other human, is brand-spanking new compared to the age of human civilization. It's a hard concept for a lot of people to accept; a large portion of those people who rightfully condemn slavery as completely immoral and unacceptable still believe that gay marriage is wrong and that all Muslims are out to get us.

Which still doesn't even come close to an answer for you. I can't do much better than this, though; I'm a historian, not a True Believer. I have a hard time believing that the Bible is anything but a collection of myths written and edited solely by man, so I can't see it as anything but a text reflecting the social, political and philosophical ideals of a civilization that existed 2000 years ago.

I don't think there is going to be a good theological answer to your question. I am interested in seeing someone attempt it, though.

But god's morality would be timeless right? His morals would remain unchanged throughout time. The whole point for me is this, either the bible isn't gods word or it is and one has to admit that god is immoral or at the very least has lower morals than humans.

Wrong. You forgot one option. How about saying that although you may not understand it now, it will eventually (even if only in the after-life) turn out right. You can't expect to fully understand a divine being, right? So you can't prove it wrong either. Simple as that.

OMG! Does anyone else see the image of The Virgin Mary???!

:p