Do people take this shit seriously?
Yes
Torah, Slavery and the Jews
http://www.chabad.org/library/article_cdo/aid/305549/jewish/Torah-Slavery-and-the-Jews.htm
Quote from: Tzvi Freeman
Let's start simple:
Take an agrarian society surrounded by hostile nations. Go in there and forcefully abolish slavery. The result? War, bloodshed, hatred, prejudice, poverty and eventually, a return to slavery until the underlying conditions change. Which is pretty much what happened in the American South when the semi-industrialized North imposed their laws upon the agrarian South. And in Texas when Mexico attempted to abolish slavery among the Anglophones there.
Not a good idea. Better idea: Place humane restrictions upon the institution of indentured servitude. Yes, it's still ugly, but in the meantime, you'll teach people compassion and kindness. Educate. Make workshops... Eventually, things change and slavery becomes an anachronism for such a society.
Which is pretty much what happened to Jewish society. Note this: At a time when Romans had literally thousands of slaves per citizen, even the wealthiest Jews held very modest numbers of servants. And those servants, the Talmud tells us, were treated better by their masters than foreign kings would treat their own subjects.
Torah teaches us how to run a libertarian society--through education and participation. Elsewhere in the world, emperors and aristocracy knew only how to govern a mass of people through oppression.
...
So the "conservative-radical" approach of Torah is this: Work with the status quo to get beyond it. Torah is more about process than about content.
...
Climbing Deeper
Are you satisfied with this answer? I'm not. I'm convinced there's a deeper effect that Torah is looking for. Call it "the participatory effect." A.k.a. nurture.
The Participatory Effect tells us that if you want people to follow rules, you put guns to their heads. But if you want them to learn, grow, internalize those rules and be able to teach them to others, you're going to have to involve them in the process of forming those rules.
School teachers do this when they work with their class on the first day to design rules that everyone will see as reasonable and useful. Parents do this when they allow their child to makes mistakes so that s/he will learn from them. A skilled wife is doing this when she gets her husband to believe that he came up with the idea of re-tiling the kitchen floor.
In general, this strategy comes more naturally to women than to men. Men find it much easier to shove their opinions down other people's throats and, if need be, argue the other into the ground until he surrenders. All variations of the old gun-to-the-head technique. Women are designed to nurture, physically and emotionally, so they take naturally to the participatory technique. To quote Gluckel of Hameln, "She was a true woman of valor. She knew how to control her husband's heart."
...
Getting Real Change
If G‑d would simply and explicitly declare all the rules, precisely as He wants His world to look and what we need to do about it, the Torah would never become real to us. No matter how much we would do and how good we would be, we would remain aliens to the process.
So, too, with slavery (and there are many other examples): In the beginning, the world starts off as a place where oppressing others is a no-qualms, perfectly acceptable practice. It's not just the practice Torah needs to deal with, it's the attitude. So Torah involves us in arriving at that attitude. To the point that we will say, "Even though the Torah lets us, we don't do things that way."
Which means that we've really learnt something. And now, we can teach it to others. Because those things you're just told, those you cannot teach. You can only teach that which you have discovered on your own.
...
The greatest force in the emancipation of slavery in colonial times were the "Society of Friends," also known as the "Quakers."
Take an agrarian society surrounded by hostile nations. Go in there and forcefully abolish slavery. The result? War, bloodshed, hatred, prejudice, poverty and eventually, a return to slavery until the underlying conditions change. Which is pretty much what happened in the American South when the semi-industrialized North imposed their laws upon the agrarian South. And in Texas when Mexico attempted to abolish slavery among the Anglophones there.
Not a good idea. Better idea: Place humane restrictions upon the institution of indentured servitude. Yes, it's still ugly, but in the meantime, you'll teach people compassion and kindness. Educate. Make workshops... Eventually, things change and slavery becomes an anachronism for such a society.
Which is pretty much what happened to Jewish society. Note this: At a time when Romans had literally thousands of slaves per citizen, even the wealthiest Jews held very modest numbers of servants. And those servants, the Talmud tells us, were treated better by their masters than foreign kings would treat their own subjects.
Torah teaches us how to run a libertarian society--through education and participation. Elsewhere in the world, emperors and aristocracy knew only how to govern a mass of people through oppression.
...
So the "conservative-radical" approach of Torah is this: Work with the status quo to get beyond it. Torah is more about process than about content.
...
Climbing Deeper
Are you satisfied with this answer? I'm not. I'm convinced there's a deeper effect that Torah is looking for. Call it "the participatory effect." A.k.a. nurture.
The Participatory Effect tells us that if you want people to follow rules, you put guns to their heads. But if you want them to learn, grow, internalize those rules and be able to teach them to others, you're going to have to involve them in the process of forming those rules.
School teachers do this when they work with their class on the first day to design rules that everyone will see as reasonable and useful. Parents do this when they allow their child to makes mistakes so that s/he will learn from them. A skilled wife is doing this when she gets her husband to believe that he came up with the idea of re-tiling the kitchen floor.
In general, this strategy comes more naturally to women than to men. Men find it much easier to shove their opinions down other people's throats and, if need be, argue the other into the ground until he surrenders. All variations of the old gun-to-the-head technique. Women are designed to nurture, physically and emotionally, so they take naturally to the participatory technique. To quote Gluckel of Hameln, "She was a true woman of valor. She knew how to control her husband's heart."
...
Getting Real Change
If G‑d would simply and explicitly declare all the rules, precisely as He wants His world to look and what we need to do about it, the Torah would never become real to us. No matter how much we would do and how good we would be, we would remain aliens to the process.
So, too, with slavery (and there are many other examples): In the beginning, the world starts off as a place where oppressing others is a no-qualms, perfectly acceptable practice. It's not just the practice Torah needs to deal with, it's the attitude. So Torah involves us in arriving at that attitude. To the point that we will say, "Even though the Torah lets us, we don't do things that way."
Which means that we've really learnt something. And now, we can teach it to others. Because those things you're just told, those you cannot teach. You can only teach that which you have discovered on your own.
...
The greatest force in the emancipation of slavery in colonial times were the "Society of Friends," also known as the "Quakers."
You see god could have stopped them from having slaves in the first place. Of course he didn't because he is stupid. Instead he let them have slaves and then actually gave them rules on how to treat and own slaves. I don't know what you are trying to defend here.
Now that you understand that God exists, understand, also, that God could have done it any way, like you said. The way that He did it was the honorable way, giving people their freedom.
Consider the goals of God:
1. Gain glory for Himself;
2. Do it by making Children who willingly praise Him for His greatness;
3. Give them freedom to praise Him so that the praise is not simply programming;
4. Give them great goodness so that they see the reason to praise Him;
5. If they fail, and send themselves on a road to destruction in their freedom, bring them back, give them the opportunity and enough time to think it through and remake their choice if they want;
6. Maintain the freedom for them so that those who want to praise Him can still do it;
7. Ultimately remove those who don't want to praise Him, because they are unwilling to move themselves into the position that God made them for;
8. Give those who praise Him a new land with far better things (at least double good things) in it than this land - the New Heavens and the New Earth;
9. Destroy those who did not want Him, just to get His power back that He placed in them, but that they rejected.
Think about one little thing. You are what you are. You haven't been built to spread your wings and fly aloft with the birds. You haven't been built with gills to dive to the depths of the ocean with the fish. You haven't been built to be able to change shape like the amoeba. You are what you are. Things are what they are. It is what it is. And we just can't do it any different than God allows.
Yet, God allows us freedom and joy amidst the pain we get ourselves into. You talk like you want a way out. Then accept the way out that God provides, just like you accept the operation of you body and mind like He allows. Your choice. Accept, now, while He holds the choice open for you.
It is what it is.
