What is you point? That the Bible allows for slaves
That.
I'm telling you that the entire discussion only makes sense in a frame work which follows the Bible in its entirety.
You keep saying that, and you are missing the point.
The thing is: Many Christians consider the Bible in its entirety to be the absolutely perfect moral ground upon which we should base our lives and behavior. However, they do not understand or outright ignore the very valid objections to this notion, as there are parts of the Bible that appear to be in drastic contradiction to what is universally considered the most basic human rights, even by these Christians themselves. In other words, these Christians say one thing but do another (with respect to which parts of this biblical moral code they actually enact in their lives, or even would enact in theory if they were confronted with such situation).
When confronted with this dilemma, the reactions vary. Some simply ignore it and pretend that it doesn't exist, others try to make up excuses (which actually don't work, when scrutinized(*)) and, if I dare say it, the worst of the bunch actually artificially change their own moral standards to agree with what those laws say (even though they would still not enact them personally, making them even more hypocritical), or at least they say they do (which would be doubly hypocritical). It's no wonder why there's the saying that it takes religion to make good people do bad things. (I'm sorry, but it's absolutely horrendous to me to see anybody say that they would stone their friend or family member, or anybody for that matter, to death for breaking the sabbath. Anybody who says that has something wrong in the head. Sorry if I offend you.)
You seem to use one form of rationalization: That the laws are good, but only if all of them (as well as the entirety of the biblical principles) are held at once. You don't seem to realize that doesn't change anything. Giving the death penalty to someone for breaking the sabbath or owning people as property (and many other such laws) are morally questionable regardless of what other standards the society additionally upholds. It's not dependent on them. You'll most probably disagree with this, but then we just have to agree to do so.
(*) As one example (of many) of an excuse that many Christians give for the more uncomfortable laws is that the Old Testament laws have been superseded when Jesus died and don't have to be upheld anymore. What these people do not understand is that what they are effectively implying is that the laws are indeed immoral, and that God gave immoral laws, and that they were then removed later. Did God deliberately give immoral laws to the Hebrews? This excuse raises more moral questions than it answers. (Also, ironically and hypocritically, these exact same people don't have any problem in condoning the ten commandments, even though they can't explain why they are an exception.)
This post once again demonstrates why this feature would be useful. I suppose that by now there are no plans to actually implement this (or upgrade to a version of phpbb that might support this; I don't know if newer versions do)?
Damn! Nintendo's world domination plans have been revealed!
@feos: I wonder how many times that particular video has been posted already. (I remember seeing that video even before YouTube existed.)
Have you actually studied how slaves were treated in ancient Israel?
Ok, I don't have any other option left than to give up. I don't know how many times I have to repeat "that's not the point" before it comes across, but seemingly no amount is enough.
It doesn't help that you seem to ignore everything I have written previously (in this case that I know perfectly well the arguments on the alleged differences between slavery in Israel and everywhere else), you only seem to concentrate on the last thing I have written and make deductions based on that alone. (I'm honestly wondering if you are subconsciously using this tactic in order to avoid actually considering the issues that have been raised. If you only concentrate on the narrow section of the conversation which you are most comfortable with, you don't have to think about the more troubling parts, and pretend that your apologetics work on those too.)
As the verse only indicates indemnification for a single strike with a simple rod that one normally uses for educating children, there is no reason to suggest indemnification against a more serious attack.
The most common apologetic tactic: Read between the lines and add things that aren't there. Try to soften things up bit by bit, until it appears more innocuous and conforms more to the modern notions of secular morals and human rights, and is more palatable. Now the rod is "a simple rod that one normally uses for educating children". Right. It says it right there, between the lines. (And since the verse doesn't explicitly mention hitting many times, that must mean hitting only one time and, by implication, that hitting many times is punishable. Never mind that no passage says the latter. But it can be read between the lines, of course.)
Anyways, discussing the type of rod and how many times the slave was hit is egregiously missing the point. Probably on purpose, to draw attention away from the actual issue: That owning other people as property and beating them is allowed (completely regardless of how many times and with what).
One also has to bear in mind that this book "Exodus" was given to a people who were all slaves. A people who understand how a slave feels and would not want to be mistreated. The way they would treat "slaves" is drastically different how anyone else would treat slaves.
And the fix to this problem was for God to command the Hebrews to take slaves as spoils of war against their will from neighboring nations? (I already covered that apologetic tactic you are using here, and why it just doesn't work.)
If the Hebrew people were once slaves and suffered greatly as such, and God wants to correct this injustice, more the reason for God to abolish slavery completely and declare it a horrendous and despicable atrocity that must not exist.
Why do you think that? I only have one animated GIF out of all my mood avatars, and I made it myself from screenshots I took from the game it's from, trying to make it nice to look at. There are other animated GIFs besides mine that are easy to look at and don't bother anyone, so why should they all be banned?
Ok, only annoyingly animated avatars should be banned (but I'm assuming the forum rules probably already say something along those lines). It's just that disabling animated gifs outright makes this significantly easier for everybody. No need for people to complain about someone's annoying animated avatar (hmm, that's a cool acronym, Annoying Animated Avatar, AAA), no need for the culprit to change it, no need for admins to step in if he doesn't comply...
I'm still of the opinion that animated gifs should be banned as avatar images. (Simply removing support for gif files as avatars would suffice. Pngs compress better anyways, so nobody loses anything.)
Still you work with these graphics and sounds and make them into something other than a title screen.
What you are saying is kinda like: Well all the tools and shaders in photoshop belong to Adobe, so everything created with it belongs them, too. Every picture, every painting, every celebraty picture...
Nope. It's like taking pictures from the net, completely disregarding their copyright, and creating a collage of them. It breaks the copyright of those original pictures.
You can use a tool (such as a text editor or an image manipulation program) to create your own work. However, you can't take someone else's graphics/music, rearrange things a bit, and claim that it's your own. That's the most basic and clear copyright infringements in existence.
Now a TAS also uses your input, your creativity. Without your input the game would do nothing. It would just sit on the start screen.
So the TAS is actually mostly your work, not the game makers.
The keypress file may be yours, not the graphics and music of the game.
Under a fair system of law, the prosecution of people who distribute illegal material would probably barely occur at all because the industry has never been able to prove it actually suffers as a result.
Personally I do not oppose the concept of intellectual property nor outlawing its distribution without permission. However, what I do oppose is excessive punishment for breaking these laws. Punishment should always be proportional to the seriousness of the crime.
If you get a parking ticket, you get a fine of a few tens of euros/dollars. This is fair.
If you get a speeding ticket, the fine will be higher, probably in the hundreds of euros/dollars (or, as in some countries, it depends on your income). This is also fair, as speeding is more dangerous than parking where you shouldn't, but the fine is not blown out of proportion.
If you republish, for example, a newspaper article in your website without permission, in most countries if the newspaper decides to pursue legal action, they will demand royalties and some modest amount of money as compensation (which might be in the few hundreds of euros/dollars, depending on the magnitude of the article). Usually this is relatively fair.
However, if you copy a few songs in the US you might get a fine of millions of dollars and/or years of jailtime. This is not proportionate punishment. This is extortion.
I said that you could defend this guy on technical legal grounds. That is what you are doing. But I want to re-emphasize, what he did was immoral.
We don't put people in jail because they did something immoral. We put them in jail if they break a law severe enough to deserve it. And that's how it should be. In many cases what is immoral coincides with the law, but in many cases it doesn't, and it shouldn't.
If I lie to you, that could be considered immoral. However, I should not deserve jailtime for that. (Even in the rare cases where lying results in severe emotional trauma deserving compensation, the punishment should still be proportional to the severity of the crime. Jailtime is still out of question.)
This wasn't a social media site or forum where people happened to submit links to pirated material, this was a central hub for finding illegally distributed TV shows and movies.
The law is a blunt instrument. If you give the lawyers permission to prosecute high-profile linkers, they will abuse that power to prosecute low-profile ones too. Thinking that such laws will only be used to prosecute the big-time pirates is naive and utopistic.
The only time we don't kill him is if he hit him with the rod once, and the slave continued walking around and then died a few days later, and then we suspect he died from that hit a few days earlier.
Where did you get the "once" from? Not from the quoted passage. And inferring that it has to be a rod or else he is punished is stretching it quite a lot, given that nowhere it says that. But anyways, that's not really the main point. It's this:
The text tells us since he is his property he has a right to discipline, but he has no right to overdo it.
And you honestly have no problems with any of that? People owning other people as property, and having the right to beat them with a rod?
Warp wrote:
2) You break the Sabbath, you get the death penalty by stoning.
You intentionally break the Sabbath after being told not to, and are insubordinate to your king and ungrateful to your savior.
By that logic all transgressions should carry the death penalty. They don't.
For example, eating pork is forbidden. The punishment? Nothing, except that you are unclean until the evening (and you have to wash yourself etc). That sounds more like a proportionate punishment (if we assume that eating pork would somehow be a theologically rational transgression), but it contrasts greatly with other transgressions where the punishment is way out of proportion.
In this case, however, the guy was distributing pirated material. When you are a distributor, you have to know you're playing with fire.
No, he wasn't. He was linking to copyrighted material, not distributing it. Read the damn article.
Wikipedia wrote:
In February 2010 charges for fraud and copyright infringement in relation to the website TV-Links were dismissed by a UK court which ruled that linking alone did not amount to copyright infringement.
Prosecuting people for linking to other websites is irrational. No wonder it's not illegal in most countries (including the UK). It's those other websites that should be prosecuted for distributing illegal material, not people linking to them.
Criminalizing linking creates tons of problems:
- What if you link to a website that contains illegal material, but you don't know that? (For example the illegal material might be in a subpage you haven't visited. Are you required to browse the entirety of a web site and assess its legality before you can legally link to it? How would you even know if some material is illegal?)
- What if you link to a website that contains no illegal material, but afterwards illegal material is added to it? Can you be prosecuted retrospectively?
- What if instead of a direct link to the illegal material, you give a link to a page containing links to illegal material? Should that be illegal as well? What if you add one more step (give a link to a page having a link to a page having a link to illegal material)? How many indirection steps are necessary before it becomes legal? There has to be some physical limit because else every single link in the internet would be illegal.
- What if instead of a link, you provide textual instructions on how to get to the page where the illegal material is hosted? (For example "write this and this into google and click the link that says that and that".) How obscure must these instructions be before they become legal?
Those are just some of the problems with criminalizing linking.
Nevertheless, even if linking to illegal material was stupidly criminalized, the punishment should be proportionate to the severity of the crime. Simply linking should not be as punishable as directly distributing the material using your own hardware and network resources.
I checked your reference and I find your defense of this guy ludicrous. While you may be able to defend him on technical legal grounds, I think what he was doing was clearly immoral.
You don't understand. It's not a question of whether it's technically illegal or not. It's a question of disproportionate punishment.
If someone is fined 2 million dollars for copying 24 songs, or demanded to be extradited to a foreign country to be put in jail for up to 10 years for linking to other websites, that's what I call disproportionate punishment and immoral. (Especially since there have been cases where corporate executives have committed fraud worth of hundreds of millions of dollars, and got laughably small sentences for it.)
What neither of you have really answered is the question of why anyone should accept the idea that such a disproportionate punishment for such a seemingly minor infraction would be the moral standard and ideal that we should all uphold.
To put things in perspective, let's compare two laws:
1) You can own people as your property(*) and you can beat them. If you beat such a person and he/she dies in a couple of days from his wounds, you get no punishment.
2) You break the Sabbath, you get the death penalty by stoning.
The sense of proportional punishment is completely backwards. Why exactly should anybody accept this kind of moral laws?
(*) Yes, I know all the arguments about why slavery in the Old Testament was "not that bad". I have used all the arguments myself. The argument goes something like:
"The so-called 'slavery' in the Old Testament has nothing to do with the slavery that happened eg. in the United States before the abolition, or the slavery in the neighboring countries of the time. Slaves in Israel were more like servants. They were treated well, they lived in the same house as their masters, they could buy their freedom, and each seventh year all slaves were freed by law, if they wanted to leave."
This argument, however, ignores many of the other details of slavery in the OT. For instance, most slaves were captured from neighboring countries with which Israel was at war, against their will. (Again, apologists will argue that it was for their own good because their husbands and fathers had been killed. Yet, they again ignore that they were captured by force, not offered the "job" as a gesture of charity. They were always spoils of war.) Slaves are explicitly called "property" in the Bible, and they were not free to go whenever they liked (which is what literally makes them slaves). Clearly slaves could be roughened up and mistreated with impunity, as the law does not explicitly forbid this, and on the contrary explicitly mentions the thing about a slave dying of their wounds after having been beaten. (In other words, the beating itself was not punishable, only if the slave died immediately after.)
The most basic moral objection to all this is the very idea of being able to own other people as property. It doesn't matter how well protected and well treated this "property" (explicitly named as such in the Bible) might be, the fact that it's property, often captured against their own will and unable to leave whenever they like, and forced to work, is the objection. (This is completely different from servants and paid workers. They take the job on their own free will, they are not property, they can leave whenever they want, and if they are beaten by their employers, punishments are harsh and strict.)
Note that copyright holders in the US are getting more and more egregious by the year.
For example, there's this citizen of the UK who administers a website that provides links to copyrighted material. Note that he doesn't distribute any copyright material, only provides links to it in his website. Neither he nor the server itself are in the US. Also note that just linking to copyrighted material is not illegal in the UK.
Now the copyright holders are trying to make the UK extradite this guy to the US so that he can be put in jail (in the US) for up to 10 years. That's right, copyright holders are now demanding foreign countries to extradite foreign citizens to the US so that they can be put in jail for 10 years in there. And not for distributing copyrighted material, just for linking, which isn't illegal in that foreign country.
(Reference.)
IMO God killed the dinosaurs because they started to show homosexual tendencies.
The Bible actually has a reference to just that, Genesis 6:12 "And God saw the earth, and, behold, it was corrupt; for all flesh had corrupted their way upon the earth." This is followed by the great flood which destroys all the old life.
In fact any video that shows identifiable content from any game, however brief, technically violates copyright.
Not always. In most countries using short segments of a work of art for the purpose of review, commentary or parody is fully allowed. Of course what is "short enough" is not completely clear and usually up to the courts to decide in cases of dispute.
For some reason (that is still unclear to me), though, music seems to be an exception to this. Pictures and short segments of film and text are ok for the purposes I mentioned above, but not music. I don't really understand how the music industry got an exemption for this.
You asked me hypothetically if I had a friend who believed the law applies to them, do I think it should be applied:
That's not what I asked. I asked that if a friend or family member of yours (or anybody, really) clearly and unambiguously breaks the sabbath, would you advocate capital punishment for this person? What that person thinks or believes is inconsequential. (Obviously nobody in their right mind would advocate capital punishment for themselves, unless they are suicidal or highly delusional.)
I can't give an opinion though as to how laws of the Bible should be upheld outside of a Bible centric framework which your question suggested, the idea is illogical to me.
Now I'm extremely confused. You accentuated that you never said that the Bible should be held as the moral standard by which we should live, and then you are saying something like the laws and standards given in the Bible should apply only for people who believe in them and live according to them, but not to anybody else, and you would not advocate the punishments given in the Bible for people who do not believe in them. So is the Bible the ultimate moral standard or not? Are some of the punishments disproportionate or not?
